Category Archives: Shadow Puppets

Clueless & Wuffles Go to Glastonbury!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Wuffles Poster3Our New Show “Clueless & Wuffles – The Case of the Missing Jewels” will be appearing at Glastonbury Festival from the 25th-29th of June.  Click HERE for more details.

This is Rough Magic Theatre’s first outing to Glastonbury so it is all very exciting!

We were asked if we had a puppet show for Panic Circus’s Bigtop Puppet Venue in the Kidz Field.  We were in the middle of developing a new show with our lovely full size Alsatian dog puppet, (regular readers may recognise it :)) and thought this would be perfect for Glastonbury.

I was a big fan of the Pink Panther films and of the TV cartoon series Inspector Gadget when I was growing up.  So the idea of creating a comedy detective show of our own has irresistable appeal, particularly when one of the detectives is a dog.  This is another idea with a great PEDIGREE (pun intended) and I am also a fan of The Famous Five by Enid Blyton and of course Scooby-Doo.

Our show will hopefully encapsulate the best of these but have its own charm, character and quality of its own.  But most importantly it should be great fun and very VERY silly.  We have the basic plot, the costumes, Wuffles the dog and a fantastic song already, (if I do say so myself).  The next job is to create our dastardly crow hand puppets!

If you come to see the show, come prepared to sing along and join in.

If you take a look at my WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME page then you’ll notice that I am also going to Morecambe Variety Festival on the 3rd and 4th of May with my Shadow Suitcase Theatre Shows.  This is also very exciting as I’ve been looking forward to this festival for a couple of years!  I was provisionally booked last year but unfortunately they did not get the funding they were hoping for.  So it is fantastic that this year they have got the funding and this marvellous event will be going ahead.  Click HERE for their Facebook page with more information.

In the evening there is an Around the World in 80 Days Cabaret Spectacular on the Saturday and Tim Austin and I are both going to go along, (not to perform but to see everybody else).  We have not really been to anything quite like this before so we’re very much looking forward to it.

“The Interrupted Wedding” Shadow Show goes to Ladybarn Primary School

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello again everybody.  Sorry to have gone a bit quiet for a while. This January I have been mostly attending lots of networking meetings, making plans for the year etc.  So I thought I’d wait till I had something a bit more exciting to blog about.

Last week though I visited Ladybarn Primary School in Manchester.  The Year 2s were doing a project called Puppets & Magic.  The teachers planned to make hand puppets out of felt with the children and wanted them to be inspired by seeing some professionally made puppets. So I performed our Shadow Puppet Show “The Interrupted Wedding” and did a bit of a lecture demonstration looking at different types of puppet from around the world and some of the history etc.  Then I showed the children some performance techniques and then the children played with different types of puppets themselves. “The Interrupted Wedding” is performed using an umbrella for a shadow screen and is a show we use for parties as well as in schools. The show went down extremely well with the children who really enjoyed the story.  This story is an original one written by Rough Magic Theatre’s own Tim Austin.  It is always nice when children tell you they have enjoyed something without being prompted.  In my experience children give very honest reactions compared to adults who might want to be polite and spare your feelings. They also seemed to particularly enjoy seeing some of the puppets from other Rough Magic Theatre productions that I brought in for them to see.  There were 2 rod puppets from our version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, (Stephano and Caliban), the “Pig/Baby” double ended “mouth” puppet  from Alice in Wonderland and the Bunraku style Alice puppet with real hair, (which came off my own head).  The Alice puppet is fun to show how she works as you can see all her insides by lifting up her dress, (kids always find that kind of thing funny) and then of course her head can be removed to show the hand control.  Seeing the Alice puppet’s body without its head is also something children appreciate a lot! The next school we are visiting is in Keighley where we will be doing our “Hansel & Gretel” show and doing a shoe-box toy theatre workshop.  You can read about this workshop in an earlier blog post HERE. If you are interested in booking any of the above shows or workshops please get in contact.  Click HERE to get in touch.