Category Archives: Technical/Making

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

Posted on by Collette Knowles
2

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.

Sherlock Holmes and The Speckled Shadow Puppets!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
2

Hello to all my lovely readers!

As promised here is a revelation of the SECRET puppet project that I was working on in October and November 2013.

I was asked to make a set of shadow puppets for Theatre Mill’s production of “Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band”.  This was staged in the fabulous National Trust property “The Treasurer’s House” in York.

That is me bottom left tutoring the new puppeteers back stage.

That is me bottom left tutoring the new puppeteers back stage.

Theatre Mill had decided to include a Gypsy Tale as part of the story and this was what the puppets would be used for.  This was not in the original Conan Doyle story but was added in to expand and complement the story.  This was a sensible decision in my opinion as the original story is actually very short.

I thought that Greek style shadow puppets would fit with the style of the production best.  So it was very interesting for me to try and produce puppets that were in a different style to my usual one.  I also suggested red as the colour for the screen as this would contribute to the supernatural atmosphere they were trying to create.  The original idea was that the screen would double as a shawl of one of the gypsies too so I thought it was a good colour for that as well.

I was not allowed to publicise this earlier as the Director and Producer were very keen to keep the shadow puppet show as a surprise for the audience.

I was lucky enough to find a review of the show that mentions the shadow puppet show specifically:

“My favourites, I have to say, were the colourful and ragamuffin bunch of gypsies that frequently piled onto the stage in a whirl of colour and sound. They were fun to watch, wonderful to listen to, and their puppetry show was so stunning that I would happily pay money just to see that bit again.” – Mari Elliott, Full Circle Arts

Click HERE to read the full review

Please feel free to ask me questions about the making of the show. 🙂 You can also contact me if you would like shadow puppets making for your own productions.