Category Archives: Skipton Puppet Festival

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

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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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! 🙂

Skipton Puppet Festival 2013!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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The weekend before last I had the lovely experience of attending Skipton Puppet Festival as a visitor rather than a performer.  As I had performed at the previous 2 Skipton Puppet Festivals Liz Lempen thought (quite rightly) that it was time to give some other people a go.

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Automaton of “Shakeys Grand Day Out” by Keith Newstead in Skipton Museum where the PUK AGM was held – Click to see “making of” Blog entries by Keith

DSC00335I also attended the Puppeteers UK AGM at the Town Hall on the Friday.  If you are not aware of this wonderful group, it is a collection of different puppetry groups such as BrUNIMA, B.P.M.T.G. Punch & Judy Fellowship etc. and has various useful benefits such as a directory of members and an extremely useful weekly newsletter which pools up to the minute puppetry info. in one place.  Members even flag up job opportunities to each other as well as being an opportunity to advertise performances that you are doing currently.  I have found it very useful indeed becoming a member and would recommend it to anyone.

I got the opportunity to finally meet the editor of the newsletter Peter Macdonald with whom I have had many email discussions over the 2 years I’ve been a member.  I also got to put a face to the name of Pauline Venables a lady from Doncaster who is very active in the toy theatre scene.

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Via Via

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Via Via

Tim and I saw two excellent shows “Via Via” by a Dutch gentleman and “Do Fish Drink Tea?” by Garlic Theatre.

“Via Via” was very excellent physical theatre and clowning combined with very skilful, intelligent and funny puppet manipulation, but not really one for the kids as a lot of the nuances would go over their heads.  Though the more obvious slapstick elements would obviously appeal to anyone.

"Do Fish Drink Tea?"

“Do Fish Drink Tea?”

"Do Fish Drink Tea?"

“Do Fish Drink Tea?”

“Do Fish Drink Tea?” was very professional and skilfully performed.  I particularly liked the live music and sound effects.  It did not have a strong narrative but was very surreal, fun and playful.

I returned on Saturday with some friends and family and made a point of seeing Ronnie Le Drew’s bag show.  I had missed this when he did it in the LSP tent 2 years ago and had been very disappointed.  I was not disappointed this year.  Among a host of charming puppet characters the highlight had to be seeing 2 of the original Sooty and Sweep puppets that Ronnie had inherited from Matthew Corbett.  Matthew was the host of the Sooty and Sweep show that I watched as a child.

Other highlights of the day included the Pulcinella show which was a slapstick masterpiece and it was fabulous to see the Italian roots of our British Punch & Judy tradition.  The Italian language was no barrier at all to understanding what was going on.

I also finally got to see “Plain Bob” by Noisy Oyster.  I have been at numerous puppet festivals where this show was on and didn’t have time to watch because I was performing!  It was absolutely charming and I still do not know how Bob managed to move on his own without the puppeteer laying a finger on him while he was sat on his little chair.  There was something extremely clever going on there all right!

Below are some videos of the festival that I have found made by Melvyn Rawlinson and Andrew of Puppet Vision fame.