Category Archives: Skipton Puppet Festival

Suitcase Theatre to Pram Theatre?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
2
Christmas Entertainment for "Santa's Late Night Shopping Evening", outside the "Coach House", High Bentham

Christmas Entertainment for “Santa’s Late Night Shopping Evening”, outside the “Coach House”, High Bentham

The Shadow Suitcase Theatre that I created way back in 2004/2005 proved extremely popular, pretty much, from the word go.  It is unusual and quirky and has the advantage of enabling the performer (me) to go and find an audience rather than the other way round.

The one-man-band aspect of singing and stamping, with jingle bells attached to my leg, also seemed to be very popular with audiences too.

The first show I created for it, “Jabberwocky!”, also proved to be a happy choice as it is a great favourite for a lot of people.  One of the obvious advantages of the poem/story is that it’s fairly short and, as such, would not clutter up the interior of the suitcase with more puppets than could be managed at once.

After a while, it became obvious that I needed a new show to go in the theatre so that I’d have something fresh to offer to festivals who might want to invite me back.  I created this second show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”, shortly after starting this blog, so you can see the details of my thought processes for creating this show if you search in my earlier posts.

My good blog readers kindly helped me to indentify that another musical poem would be preferable to a spoken version because less people have singing in their puppet shows.

There were far more characters, & therefore puppets, in “The NewVestments” (the Edward Lear poem of choice for the show) and I was still stuck with a suitcase of exactly the same size to store the puppets in.  Luckily, I came up with the idea of fitting the puppets between a concertina of card to help keep them in order whilst performing.

I had come up with a number of ideas for this show that wouldn’t have worked with this suitcase theatre because the suitcase was too deep (or my arms too short).  Thus, I have had in the back of my mind the idea of creating an all new, all singing, all dancing, super-duper suitcase shadow theatre using a more conventionally shaped suitcase, with a “landscape” or “wide screen TV” style shadow screen.

A number of audience members have also, over the years, told me that they would have liked to watch something slightly longer as they were enjoying it so much.  I always saw that as a plus because it is better for an audience to want more than to be bored.  Last year, I had comments from the “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” audiences saying they would have liked to see the puppets on the screen for longer or that they would have liked them to be bigger so that they could take in all of the detail.  I think the children had no problems as they can take things in very quickly and have good eyes for small detail (it tended to be adults that would make these remarks).

As I said earlier, if I made the puppets and the screen larger so that the audience could see them better I would immediately encounter a practical problem with how to store big puppets in a small space, (a space that I have to carry strapped to my body – so weight is also an issue).  If the theatre is made large enough to store large puppets then it would no longer be possible to use it in the way my current theatre is, (strapped on like an ice-cream vendors tray).

This led me to thinking; I’d not have to worry about carrying all the weight around if I were to swap to something like a trolley on wheels or some kind of pram-base.  I could store my mini P.A. system in the shopping tray in the bottom.  I could also try to work out something  more rain-proof than my current set-up.  If it was actually an old style pram, they come with rain hoods already on them – I could perhaps use the original fittings to shower-proof my shows.  The interior of a pram would also contain more room to store bigger puppets.

Thinking of ideal case scenarios as I was perusing vintage prams on Ebay, I noticed that a lot of them had a removable carry cot with handles.  What would stop me from having not only a new, slightly larger, shower proof shadow theatre, but also a portable toy theatre that could be attached or slotted into the pram base as well?

So this is my latest project idea: to create a new portable shadow/toy theatre using a pram base that will enable me to make the puppets slightly larger and, theoretically, to make the shows slightly longer if I want to.  It will also mean that it will be slightly less hard work for me (wheeling something rather than carrying something strapped to my body).

I do have a pram base already as they are so useful in street theatre for large processional puppets, lanterns and percussion rigs etc.  I will have a look at that first to see what potential it has.  Also, on March the 16th in Bentham, there will be the B.E.S.T.(Bentham Environmentally Sustainable Town) annual “Give & Take Day” which is extremely popular and a good way of reducing waste going to landfill. I shall be keeping an eagle eye out there for unwanted prams too.

Currently, I am just investigating possibilities.  I am, as yet, unclear whether I want the theatre to actually look like a vintage pram or whether it’s just the practicalities of the pram that will be useful and not its appearance.  If any of my lovely readers have any ideas about good places to look for unwanted prams (bearing in mind our High Bentham location) or ideas for adapting prams into theatres that they’d like to share, please leave a comment.

Rough Magic Theatre Returns to Buxton Puppet Festival!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

You may remember last year I did I shoe-box toy theatre workshop at Buxton Puppet Festival 2011, (click HERE to see last year’s post).  After doing the workshop in the morning, I had a great time watching Sim-Sim puppets free street performance and pottering round the Pavilion Gardens in the sunshine.

Well it did not seem likely that there would be a single moment spare for pottering, rest and relaxation this year as we had been booked to do 2 performances of our “Alice in Wonderland” show in the afternoon and a shadow puppet workshop in the morning.  Luckily my new van has a tiny bit more space than the old one, which was crammed to bursting when we loaded it with our “Alice” show.

Previously when we had done Buxton Puppet Festival it had been a Sunday and I arrived in plenty of time for the workshop.  This year we were there on a Tuesday and as a result the half an hour extra time I allowed in order for us to arrive at 9.00am, (an hour early for the workshop) turned out not to be enough as we got severely delayed by traffic.  Despite this we arrived in time for the start of the workshop, but with no time to prepare in advance.  The large number of helpers meant that the workshop materials were soon unloaded and I simply organised the workshop slightly differently, so that people were not left hanging around while I set up.

The children and their accompanying adults were soon happily working away and everyone had time to make one or in some cases two puppets and were able to try out their puppets on the Sari shadow screen we brought for the occasion.

Because I thought we would have a range of ages and abilities I had more than one technique for making the puppets.  I was conscious that smaller children do not have the same ability to cut out complicated silhouettes, so I did some example butterfly and dragonfly puppets using strips of thin corrugated cardboard to form simple shapes like circles and tear-drops and they could then have the fun of attaching bubble wrap or doilies to create interesting textures.

Everyone, (including the adults) seemed to have a great time and be very proud of what they’d made and went away with the knowledge and skills to make more puppets and make their own shadow theatre at home (all you need is a puppet, a light source and a screen of some kind to project onto).  We also went through some of the basic manipulation skills and techniques.

The time disappeared remarkably quickly and then we had the mad dash to pack up, drive across the road to the Pavilion Arts Centre, unload the props etc. for “Alice”, then back across the road to park.  After that we set up the show, went backstage to change and were back up to perform without a single spare moment.

It turned out that James Morgan was the techy assigned to us and was an old school friend of my fellow performer Tim Austin from Norfolk.  He was extremely helpful and efficient, even producing a big piece of wood, a saw and some other tools to fix our wooden expanding maiden.  It is what we use to hang various costumes and other paraphenalia during the performance and it had cracked through on one of the joints.  If James hadn’t swiftly and effeicently done an excellent temporary repair job it could have proved very awkward indeed during the performances.

We had two audiences of around 30 people in the end, which considering the beautiful sunshine outside was quite a lot.  The weather has a huge impact on audience numbers, in my experience, and in sunny weather you can have quite poor attendance as everyone decides to enjoy themselves in the sun for free rather than go indoors and spend money on puppet theatre (however excellent).  Street theatre of course is virtually the opposite.

The first audience were quietly appreciative.  I was close enough to see their smiles and laughs but Tim would have preferred a louder audience who needed a little less encouragement for the audience participation.  The second audience gave him what he wanted, though I don’t know how much that was down to the people and how much down to us ramping up our performance to try and get a bigger response.

In any case, in my opinion both audiences had a really great time.  I think perhaps the first audience were totally absorbed, as when we came to the end they seemed to need a few moments to come back to reality and leave the theatre.  I think, because we know it so well and have performed the show so often, we can forget what a big effect all the surprises and tricks in the show can have on people.  Normally, I do like to have a chat with the audience after and let them have photos if they wish, but there was no time for that on this occasion.

As soon as the second show finished at about 4.10pm we had to get our things out by 5pm so the people doing the evening show could get in.

Even taking into account the fact that we had extra hands to carry things out to the van for us, I think we did the fastest striking of the set that we had ever done, (about 45min).  It is no simple thing, as we have to dismantle and pack things away carefully so they are not damaged and then take everything out to the van in the right order and position everything in exactly the same way each time so that everything will fit.

It turned out that the show after mine was Rouge 28’s “Urashima Taro” that we had been so impressed with at Skipton Puppet Festival.  Since then, I had been in touch with Aya, the performer by email and on Facebook and had planned to meet her and see her in “The Twittering Machine” at the Boo at Christmas.  Disappointingly we did not make it, as I did not fancy risking the black ice that there were severe weather warnings about at the time.

So I was delighted to get a chance to meet Aya in the flesh, (however briefly) when they arrived to set up their show.

As we had not stopped since the moment we set off in the morning for the supposedly 2hr 10min drive, we went back to the dressing room for a cup of tea after the van was loaded up and parked again.  Amazingly enough, after that there was some time to show the lovely Pavilion Gardens that I had enjoyed so much on my last visit to Tim.

It was a lovely end to a tiring but enjoyable day to sit and eat our sandwiches in the sunshine.

On the way back, as we were passing and needed to eat, we actually popped into the Trafford Centre for the evening meal, which was particularly nice as Tim had never been before and had yummy curry and a drink for a surprisingly reasonable price.

Now in the previous Buxton post, I had great difficulty getting the blog to display two separate lots of photographs – one of the Toy theatres the kids made and another of the views around Buxton and I discovered after that the pictures of Buxton had disappeared from the post.  So I have displayed pictures from Buxton, both last year and this year and some from the Shadow puppet workshop with captions to show which is which.  I hope you enjoy them.  If anyone has any experiences from Buxton Puppet Festival they would like to share, please leave a message in the comment box at the bottom of the post 🙂

Not long till the Masquepony Festival in Cartmel, where I’ll be performing “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” on August the 18th.  See the “Where You Can See Me” page for more details.  I understand that the majority of the entertainment is free or “pay what you like” so why not come along and bring a picnic for the banquet in the evening.