A Trip to the Puppet Circus

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of visiting Upfront Puppet Theatre‘s new purpose built puppet theatre building near Penrith for the first time.  We had previously visited the Upfront Gallery for our first Puppeteers UK AGM when John Parkinson was in the process of planning the new building.  I believe John had previously staged his performances in some of the old farm buildings on the site.

We decided to go along and see the Stanelli’s Super Circus which had visited Skipton Puppet Festival in the past but we had unfortunately not managed to see it.  It is a rare treat to see a proper marionette show and so close by to where we live.

Upfront Puppet Theatre received heritage lottery funding to purchase Stan Parker’s trick circus marionette collection.  By purchasing the collection John was able to keep the puppets together as a performing troupe rather than being dispersed to private collections around the world and potentially not used for performance at all.

I have heard a lot about trick circus marionettes and even seen some before at the Victoria and Albert Museum including dissecting skeleton marionettes but this has been my first opportunity to actually see them in action.  Cabaret marionette performances used to be a popular and common place entertainment in this country and indeed Stanelli’s Super Circus toured with Stan Parker all over the world.  Not really needing a script, you can see how entertainment like this transcends language barriers and is of course equally enthralling for tiny children through to older audience members.  You can read all about the Stan Parker marionettes on their dedicated website if you CLICK HERE.

A gentleman sat next to myself kept commenting on how it was really very good wasn’t it?  He seemed to have a tone of surprise as if expecting a puppet show would hold few charms for himself as an adult.  It just goes to show what I have always said, that puppetry is a very flexible medium which is suitable for everyone not just for children.  There was also perhaps the implication in his comment that something designed to entertain children perhaps need not be of a high standard.  I find that a lot of people assume that something suitable for children need not be of high quality.

This of course is simply not true.  There are a huge number of theatre companies and television shows that are of an extremely high standard but do not receive the recognition they deserve in the theatre and arts world as a whole because they choose to make shows for children.  I believe that children deserve at least as high a standard of performance and artwork as any other age group and work for children can be far more imaginative and lacks a lot of the boundaries placed upon material that is supposed to be for adults.

Tim Austin (my husband and co-performer) and I were very fortunate to see backstage and have a lovely chat with John Parkinson about the new space, their plans for the future and also got to see what he called his “puppet cupboard” but which in reality was more of a puppet room.  It was considerably larger than Rough Magic Theatre’s puppet room but then I think John probably has more puppets to fit into it.

John has got (as well as many marionettes which he has made for their own shows) an enviable collection of wayang golek (Indonesian rod puppets) which I was very interested to see.

We hope that John’s new theatre building will go from strength to strength and constantly have the full houses that the quality of the work deserves.  So tell all your friends about the excellent new puppetry space we now have up in the Northwest and if you have not visited yet then do go and see a show as soon as you can!

The Iron Man at Woodnook Primary School

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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I recently visited Woodnook Primary School in Accrington to do two different shadow puppet workshops with two different age groups.  Class 3 had been working on “The Iron Man” by Ted Hughes and their teacher, Mrs. Macleod, thought it would be a perfect story to make into a shadow puppet show with her class.

I agreed wholeheartedly and was very inspired by the idea of working with this story for a shadow puppet show.  I had read the book when I was at primary school myself but thought I had better get a copy from the library to refresh my memory.  Our local library in Bentham is one of the ones threatened with losing its paid staff so I had a New Year’s resolution to make a point of using it more.

The copy of the book that I received was a very recent one with very interesting, award winning, illustrations by Laura Carlin which actually use photographs of paper-cut figures and shapes and their shadows.  So I took this along as well to provide a bit of extra inspiration for the class should they have a different version of the book, (I figured the more different versions of the illustrations they had access to the better).  I did however go through all the different ways the Iron Man is described in the book with the children.  They knew the book really well and remembered nearly all the clues to his appearance eg. taller than a house, a foot as big as a single bed etc.

We also did a bit of work on music and sound effects for their shows, and the class worked on different scenes from the book in groups and performed their shows for each other at the end.  The class seemed to really enjoy using the OHP (over-head projector) that I brought in and the lighting gels for their shows.  Children in primary schools now have never seen traditional OHPs before and the children saw it as a very magical device, (which it is of course).

The children all did really nice work and came up with some fantastic puppets and performances – particularly considering they had never made shadow puppets or performed a shadow show before.  The children who chose to do the scene at the beginning of the book with the Iron Man at the top of the cliff did a fantastic joint narration, (they had memorised that section of the book together as a class previously).

The second, older group (class 5/6) had been working on the “Light & Shadow” topic previously in class.  It was suggested that we could potentially use “The Highwayman” poem that they had been working on in class as source material. This struck me as quite a hard subject matter for a shadow show for children because of all the period costume that they would be unfamiliar with.  Horses are quite challenging to draw as well.  So I gave the groups the option to either do “The Highwayman” or to come up with a story and characters out of their imaginations.  I did, however, use the poem as an example to help them think about how to draw and cut out a character as a shadow puppet for a show.

The second group, despite having slightly less time than the first, did remarkably well and came up with some very creative character and story ideas.  They also did some very nicely cut out puppets and performed their little shows for each other at the end.

I also did my “Jabberwocky!” suitcase show for both classes to give the children inspiration for their own shows at the beginning of the session.

If you would like a shadow puppet workshop or a show for your school or youth theatre group CLICK HERE to get in touch.  The content of the workshops can be tailored to fit your group.

If you are thinking about a puppet show as a treat for the whole school, remember that it is the 150th Anniversary of “Alice in Wonderland” so CLICK HERE to find out more about our adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s fabulous book.