Tag Archives: Duke’s

It’s Curtains for you…..!!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

You’ve guessed it I’m talking about my toy theatre show Hansel & Gretel again.

Hello, we’ve been busy rehearsing and trying to make sliders successfully out of wire coat hangers and paper clips.  Listening to our lines tape, (an aid to learning our script – I find it the best way to learn lines for me).  We’ve also got a date down for recording a video of the show now which is less than 2 weeks away, so I’d jolly well better make sure it’s finished by then hadn’t I.  The film will be shown locally just after the Vischmarkt Papierentheater festival at the Made In Lancaster Festival on Sat 11th June, all being well.

I discovered, as I suspected that our lovely local print shop in Bentham is by far and away a million times cheaper to do scanning and copying of my watercolours than any of the printing firms I visited.  Admittedly, I only visited 2 but I was appalled by the prices in the first and the second was even more expensive.

The plan is to roughly make up the sets in corrugated plastic, (nearly finished) and then to draw round them to get the shape/size for the painting which I will do actual size on an A2 size paper.  Then I’ll take them to the print shop who will scan them and then do me A3 size prints which will be attached to the corrugated plastic in two halves.

I’m undecided as to whether I will need to use some kind of spray sealant on the prints which will be 100gm paper and I’ve not made up my mind what will be best for sticking it down, possibly Harry Oudekerk’s suggestion of something he uses which sounds like double sided sticky tape in sheet form might be best, but I don’t know if they sell that in this country.  If anybody knows where they sell it and what it is called, please let me know!

I have also, as you’ve probably guessed, been thinking about the curtain.  I am going to use actual fabric attached to corrugated plastic again.  I have been looking at lots of different curtain designs, and I think I have an idea of what I want now.

You may have also noticed two new links on the blogroll.  Both very interesting for anyone who wants to find out about traditional puppetry artforms.  One is a Javanese site which aims to help people identify different traditional Javanese shadow puppet characters from their characteristics.  They are introducing a new shadow puppet each week. Eventually there will be a whole catalogue so that, if you have a puppet of your own in front of you, you can simply choose each physical characteristic at a time (e.g. gold skin, angry face) and eventually the image of the puppet you are looking for should appear.  It explains better on the site itself, so do have a look.

The other site is a travel blog which mentions a type of puppet I have never come across before, Vietnamese water puppets.  This is a very uncomfortable artform for the puppeteers who are submerged in water from the waist down.  They are hidden from the audience’s view behind a curtain and operate the puppets(who “stand” on the surface of the water) through bamboo tubes and strings.  Again, I didn’t see them myself, check out the blog for more accurate and comprehensive details.

Don’t forget folks, we’re still raising money for Hansel & Gretel through Wefund.  Please visit the site and give some money, or if you’re too poor, just share the link with everyone you know.

More news next week!

Toy Theatre “Made in Lancaster”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply
On Display at The Duke's Gallery, Lancaster

Toy Theatre-like "Nesting Boxes"

I have recently found out about an interesting local festival that is to be hosted at The Duke’s Theatre in Lancaster. The name of the festival is “Made in Lancaster” and as you might expect it is a showcase of the work of people in Lancaster. It spans many different arts disciplines and is meant to be for edgy experimental or work in progress kind of performances etc. As the theatre day of the festival is on June 11th we do not have any time for new work in progress as we are working on our Hansel & Gretel making and performance for the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival to be performed 1-3rd of June. However what we are planning to do is to make a video version of the show before we go to The Netherlands and not only will this mean that the people of Lancaster and anyone else who comes will get to see a version of our Toy Theatre show, and we will have this video then for publicity purposes ourselves, after the event. There are many short film making enthusiasts connected with the Duke’s, both in the Lancaster Film group and also showing their films as part of the Made in Lancaster Festival. So we are hoping that one or two of these gifted individuals will help us out with the filming.

If you’re wondering why we don’t just perform it live, like we will in The Netherlands, the answer is that it does not bind us to being in Lancaster on that date and that the toy theatre and puppets will take a long time to arrange and it would be awkward to slot in between other acts using the same space. We did consider using a live streaming of the performance projected on to a big screen (like George & Ann Neff did for their Nativity show) so that larger numbers could see the performance. But aside from the previously mentioned problems of performing live this would have additional technical elements to deal with and would not necessarily be able to focus on characters and scenery at different distances.

If you’re wondering, what is the picture at the top all about? The answer is that the place where we were holding the meeting about the Made in Lancaster Festival was The Duke’s Gallery, which is inside The Duke’s Theatre building. In this gallery, coincidentally, there were a number of artworks in the form of arty “nesting boxes” which struck me as being reminiscent of Toy Theatres. The whole bird themed exhibition is top quality stuff, very quirky and interesting and definitely worth a look if you’re in the area. Below is a link to an article about the artist who made the above exhibit and another artist involved with the exhibition and it contains Melanie Callaghan‘s email address near the bottom.