Category Archives: Skipton Puppet Festival

Fun at Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

Since going to Upfront for Jack and the Beanstalk; I also took them to Skipton Puppetry Festival as well. Miranda and Anthony were both very taken with the Punch & Judy show by Clive Chandler. They kept talking about Mr. Punch and asking where he is and what was he doing? I decided to get them a set of soft children’s Punch & Judy puppets which they have been having great fun with ever since. They have Punch, Judy, a Policeman and a Crocodile in the set and they have not fought over them, as I feared they might, but have played very nicely with them and they get up to all sorts of things. Sadly, the crocodile does not have a mouth that opens and the sausages are attached to Mr. Punch’s hand but they manage to do a lot with them despite the physical limitations, (imagination is a wonderful thing).

  • Clive keeps the crowd entertained before the start of the main show…

They also saw Noisy Oyster again performing their shows “Dangerous Dave”(which Anthony did find a bit traumatic) and the “Da Silva Circus” which was, (of course) excellent and we were very kindly given a behind the scenes tour by Nik Palmer and Sarah Rowland-Barker. They remembered me from my performance at Beverley Puppet Festival (which was lovely considering that’s quite a few years back now). It was also lovely to see Liz Lempen (and her equally talented sister) again though as we were all masked up at the time we didn’t see quite as much of each other as usual!

There is more puppetry at Skipton this weekend so do check it out: “A November Day” by Thingumajig Theatre at 8pm and “Woodland Tales with Grandad” by Pickled Image at 11am and 2pm.

A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.1of 2 – Lancashire Encounter & Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

Hello everyone – I have been quiet for ages for the pleasant reason that I have been super busy.  I’ve been so super busy that I can’t tell you about everything in one go so tune in next week for more puppetty adventures!

First of all “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future” show trotted off to Preston on the 26th & 27th of September for a “Lancashire Encounter”!  “Lancashire Encounter” is a festival that is new this year and hopefully could turn into an annual event to fill in the space between the Preston Guild Celebration years.

We had a fantastic time encouraging the locals and visitors to try our fabulous pedal powered vehicle from the future.  What made the event even nicer was that the organisers had thoughtfully put the puppetry people next to each other so our next door neighbour was Mark Whitaker from Horse + Bamboo with his wonderful Chinese glove puppet show “Festival”.  We had seen Mark perform this fabulous show at Skipton Puppet Festival previously.

CLICK HERE to see photo’s from the “Lancashire Encounter” Facebook page.

 

And speaking of Skipton Puppet Festival – This was on the following week (2nd-4th October) and Mark was doing “Festival” again when we visited Skipton to check out all the shows.

Having seen him perform it about 20 million times the week before we decided to concentrate on enjoying the other shows that were on offer at Skipton.  You can see some of the things we enjoyed in the photo’s above.

We also took the opportunity to go and see Indigo Moon perform their “Jungle Book” show which was absolutely fabulous and used a lot of clever, modern shadow puppetry techniques.  I was particularly interested to watch the techniques Anna Ingleby uses because she is a solo puppeteer in their shows.  Haviel Perdana does all the sound and lighting etc. but only Anna does the puppeteering.  It is tempting to think that less can be done in a show if one has less puppeteers but Anna certainly does not leave the audience short-changed in their performances.  There was enough going on to keep an audience of both young and old enthralled for a whole hour and everyone was invited to see the puppets and scenery afterwards and ask questions too.

We also visited Indigo Moon’s “Minster Monster” shadow puppet installation which was very interesting and used “monsters” from Beverley Minster as inspiration.  What was especially impressive was that the display was still in good working condition despite being left for people to play with unsupervised for extended periods of time!

I was also particularly pleased to have the opportunity to see “Kabaret de Poche” having seen their website including videos of the show and a fun origami mouth instruction video!

My next post shall tell you all about our trip to Lincolnshire to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show at Wolds Words Festival, our visit to London to teach shadow puppetry to 1st year puppetry students at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a visit to a primary school in Middlesbrough to make hand and string puppets!

In the meantime if you are needing some last minute Christmas entertainment please CLICK HERE to check out our Christmas Shows! 🙂