Tag Archives: adult puppetry

Sustainable Outdoor Arts

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Me in hero pose picking up my new car

I recently attended an online sustainability symposium hosted by Wild Rumpus which was looking at all the things that we are, could and should be doing to make our work as outdoor artists more sustainable.

At the beginning of the year we made a big step as a household and as a theatre company towards greater sustainability by swapping our vauxhall zafira for a second hand Nissan leaf.

The zafira was a swap from a Vauxhall Combo van without rear passenger seats so that we would have somewhere to put child car seats following the birth of our first child in 2017. It was a good choice for a compromise between personal and business use as the seats fold down to provide a very large amount of space for carting puppets/sets /workshop materials etc.

Then came the announcement about all new cars being electric from 2035, (more recently they are considering bringing this forward to 2030). In addition to this my car had turned 5 years old and I had just had to get it seen to for its first major repair job (while in my ownership). I felt like the longer I kept it the less it would be worth and the more repairs it would be likely to need.

Tim (my co-performer in RMT and husband) had already started using an electric vehicle (a Renault Zoe) as a second car for our household. So, I felt relatively comfortable with the idea of switching to an electric vehicle of my own as I had already had experience of driving his.

One of the main differences is that it has no gears so those people who have driven automatic cars would find the swap to an electric vehicle quite an easy one.

I decided to get a second hand vehicle as I would be able to buy this using a hire purchase arrangement and at the end of 5 years I will own it outright and have something to show for my investment. At the time, Tim had a PCP on his Zoe and has now switched to a new lease (and a newer Zoe) without the option to buy. I wanted a car at the end of my payments.

So I got a Nissan Leaf which, while nothing like as big as the Zafira, has a fairly roomy boot and the ability to fold the rear seats flat for extra storage space. It is bigger than the Zoe but has a smaller battery (30 kwh) which gives a range of 120 miles with a fully charged battery in ideal conditions (it does not perform as well in the cold).

Before lock down we had the delightful plan of visiting the Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival for the first time in my new car. This happens every year and commemorates the first documented sighting of Mr. Punch by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary (so it is the official birthday of Mr. Punch).

We were going to take the children too and make it a sort of bus man’s holiday and stay overnight the night before. We had not been previously as the travel costs for us from North Yorkshire to London for an unpaid gig are very expensive but with an electric car we felt the trip would be within our means. We also felt it was worth trying as an experiment to see how practical it would be to use the car to transport the shadow puppet suitcase show to London in this car.

It was going to take a long time to get there compared with a vehicle with a bigger range (hence the need for an overnight stay) but it was going to be an epic electric car adventure.

Then lock down happened, the live event was cancelled and the May Fayre moved online instead.

So the only business journey I actually have done in the new car was to ‘For The Love of It‘ a street arts networking event in Manchester which happened immediately before lock down. The car performed well. The inbuilt sat nav got me to the venue (Cobden Street Works the new base of Walk the Plank) which I had never visited before without a hitch. I navigated to a nearby Instavolt charger at a garage and put on enough charge to enable me to complete the return journey and that was that.

One major change I have had to take on is the use of a smartphone which I inherited from my husband when he upgraded his. A lot of electric chargers require the use of a mobile app for that particular network (and there are lots of different charging networks). Instavolt, however, is one of the networks that allow you to charge using a contactless debit / credit card and the charger had lots of simple easy to read buttons that light up in order to tell you what to do.

I have since discovered that I was fortunate in my choice of first charger experience as Instavolt are very reliable and easy to use compared to some other networks. Some charging points can be broken when you turn up or the charging point works but the app doesn’t.

Another problem for some electric charging points is that they can be ‘Iced’ (the parking space is taken up by an internal combustion engine vehicle) which stops electric vehicles from using them.

The solution to a lot of these problems is Zap Map. This is an app which let’s you plan your journey. You input the range of your vehicle, where you want to go and it suggests charging points you might want to use to get there.

You can see if anyone is using the charging points, whether any are broken and users can report issues they have had with the chargers and upload pictures of the charging station so you can see what it looks like and find them more easily. So if you are planning a long journey and can see a particular charging point is having technical problems over and over again then you can simply choose a different charging point for your route. I think it eliminates what they call ‘range anxiety’ pretty much altogether. If you have plenty of money that is not such an issue any more anyway as most new electric cars have enough range to complete most journeys without the need to charge away from home (in the UK anyway as nowhere is very far away from anywhere else compared to America for example).

We are going to have a different epic electric car journey soon as we are going to Cornwall for 2 weeks. We are planning to use the Zoe as it has the greater range (particularly as we are now in Winter) and we need to get to YHA Eden project (where we are staying) by 10pm at the latest. This gives the different challenge of fitting everything for the holiday into the smaller bootspace This will include clothes for a 3 and a half year old and a 19 month old plus everything else they need and stuff for me and Tim. 

So I shall also be taking a holiday from blog writing for 2 weeks so there will be more on the progress of our Secret Keeper Shadow Puppet Murder Mystery Series then. Till then Very Best Wishes and stay safe to you all my lovely readers.

A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.2 of 2 – Wolds Words, Central School of Speech & Drama & primary puppets in Middlesbrough

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Apologies for the huge delay on the second installation of “puppet stuff!!!” avid puppetlady readers:

On Saturday 24th of October Tim Austin (my Rough Magic Theatre co-performer and husband) were invited to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show for the “Wolds Words” festival in the library building in Louth, Lincolnshire.  On the following Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I was due to teach the First Year puppetry students at Royal Central School of speech and drama and the Monday following that I was due to work in a primary school in Middlesbrough making hand and string puppets.

The performance space for “Alice” was upstairs but we had lots of help getting all our props and costumes up to the room from Angela Reynolds (the lady who booked us from Magna Vitae) and her young daughter.  It was a modestly sized but very appreciative audience, all of whom were very reluctant to leave at the end of the show!  We invited them to ask us questions and to see any of the puppets they were interested in more closely which they seemed to enjoy immensely before they left.

So after packing up and eating a well earned meal we went to Norfolk to visit Tim’s relations (which is not too far from Louth) and planned to go on from there to London on the following Tuesday.

I had made contact with Nenagh Watson through Facebook earlier in the year when we had a chat about how my suitcase shadow theatre worked as she was interested in making something similar herself.  She expressed interest in my coming to work with the students at “Central” (I shall use this as a shortened form of “Royal Central School of Speech and Drama” for the rest of the post) but I explained that as I live such a long way from London that if I ever came to work with the students it would ideally need to be a block of work rather than the odd day here and there.  It wasn’t possible to book this in at the time that we spoke about it but Nenagh thought she could probably arrange something later on in the year.  In the meantime she asked me to make a suitcase theatre for her which she used to create a little show for her wedding.  CLICK HERE to see my previous post on the making of this suitcase.

Then when I enquired about doing some work at Central a bit later in the year Nenagh managed to arrange for me to do a block of 3 days with the first year puppetry students.  This also coincided with the “Suspense” puppet festival organised by Little Angel Theatre.  This is a festival that we have never attended previously as we do not produce theatre specifically for adults ourselves and because London is a bit out of the way just for a pleasure jaunt.  Nenagh also kindly arranged for us to stay with a friend of hers who lives in London and we came in a day early (Tuesday) to get settled.  This also allowed us to attend a Devoted & Disgruntled event on the Tuesday evening that was hosted by the Little Angel as part of the Suspense festival.  The discussion question was “Puppetry – Shackled by the Past?”.  If you do not know what a devoted and disgruntled event is CLICK HERE to see more information about these events which are run by “Improbable Theatre Company”.  It was a great event and there were lots of interesting discussions and I was able to meet not only Nenagh herself and some of the students I’d be working with but also several puppeteers who I had only met through social media before, such as Sian Kidd and Penny Francis.

Sian was performing Mirth & Misery’s “Death Puppet Klezma Jam” show as part of the festival but unfortunately this was not on while we were there.  While we were down in London, apart from the D&D event, we managed to see “Ubu & the Truth Commission” by Handspring Puppet Company (of Warhorse fame) and also the official “Suspense” opening event which had lots of time for chatting, munching and mingling and a puppet cabaret which included some snippets of upcoming shows in the festival.  We got to meet Aya Nakamura again, (of whom I am a huge fan) and also her co-performer Mohsen Nouri from Rouge 28 Theatre who I had not met before.  They performed their Mademoiselle Lychee humanette striptease act which I hadn’t seen before either.

For the workshops with the first year puppetry students from Central, I performed both of my Shadow Puppet Suitcase shows for them, (“Edward Lear’s Nonsense” and “Jabberwocky!“) for inspiration and Nenagh also brought the suitcase theatre that I had made for her to show the students and she also showed us the puppets and techniques that she had used for the special puppet show that she’d created for her wedding.  She had used some 3-D shadow puppetry using a scene made out of wire and acetate and did a starry night scene using card with pin-pricks and a torch which was very effective and also did some shadows outside of the suitcase using a white shirt and a light with red heart attached to it, (it’s a bit difficult to describe but the technique showed a glowing red heart through the shirt).

Having had all that inspiration the students had the rest of the three days to create their own short shadow puppet performance which they would perform with the suitcase theatre.  Jemima and Freddy both chose nonsense poems as inspiration and Jo picked a short poem by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d brought to give them ideas, while Seb decided to make a shadow puppet play out of an environmentally themed piece that he had written previously.  They all did excellent work and performed their shows for some of the other students on the Friday, (all of whom seemed very impressed and well entertained).  All of the students helped each other to perform their shows rather than choosing to create shows where they were being entirely self-sufficient.  This gave them greater scope for creativity, more challenging lighting and sound effects.  You can see photo’s of their work below:

Work by Jemima Hand – Jemima created a performance based on “On The Ning Nang Nong” nonsense poem by Spike Milligan

Work by Frederica Hayes – Frederica created a performance based on a short section of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll (“Fit the Seventh – The Banker’s Fate”)

Work by Sebastian Mayer – Sebastian created a performance based on an environmentally themed story that he had written previously.

Work by Joanna Wheele – Joanna created a performance based on the poem “Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I finally got up to our base in North Yorkshire I had to make the journey to Middlesbrough for my primary school workshop through all of the very foggy weather we had at the time.  An early start at quarter to five ensured that I reached the school in good time but unfortunately my sat-nav took me on the worst possible route back again through the Yorkshire Dales, (which can be misty at the best of times).  Luckily I got back in one piece but it was very low visibility and made for hairy driving conditions!  I did hand and string puppet making using the same technique that I had used previously at a school in Bridlington (CLICK HERE for pictures and more details).  I wasn’t able to take any pictures at the Middlesbrough school unfortunately.

I have crammed an awful lot into this one post so if anyone wants to ask for more information about anything I have written then please ask 🙂