Category Archives: Suitcase Theatre

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.

Dragons come to Wigan! – Shadow Puppets In Schools & a secret theatre project

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hi everyone.  Apologies if anyone had got the impression that I’ve dropped off the map for the last 3 weeks.

My excuse is the usual one – I’ve been really busy!

I’ve had a couple of shadow puppet workshops in schools.  The first one was a little performance of “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” by me as well as a little lecture demo. about different kinds of puppets.  This was followed by the kids making their own shadow puppets using Prokofiev’s “Peter & the Wolf” as a theme.

chinese dragon shadow puppet

This one was made by me as an example

The second was with Nursery & Reception classes at a school in Wigan where they were having a “Geography Week” and their group was looking at Asia & China and therefore wanted to do shadow puppets.  So they had a performance from me of “Jabberwocky!” as well as looking at different places in the world shadow puppets come from.  Then we made some Chinese dragon puppets to a design that I’m rather proud of and we did a bit of a dragon dance round the room with the puppets and some music.  The kids were very sweet and gave me many compliments on my show and seemed to enjoy their puppets and the dragon procession a lot.

In between these Tim did Rough Magic Theatre’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party walkabout for an Art & Literature festival in Stretford, Manchester which I went along to as well.

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I have also been doing a secret shadow puppetry project with another theatre company.  I’ve been asked to keep it under wraps as they want it to be a big surprise for the audience but I will be able to tell you all about it soon.

I’m also doing a Christmas Event in Lancaster coming up soon – which I will put up on the “Where You Can See Me” page as soon as I’ve got more details for you.