Tag Archives: hansel

Toy Theatre “Made in Lancaster”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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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.

Nice but Naughty?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We’ve been really getting stuck into the plotting and appearance of our Liquorice Toy Theatre, Hansel and Gretel show.

Tim is about two thirds through the mini-masterpiece that is the script so far, (that is I’m assuming it’s a mini masterpiece, I’ve not read it yet!).  I, on the other hand have been carefully making a visual list of exactly what pieces of scenery and puppets I will need to make.  I just finished this yesterday.

In the process, I have drawn my first sketches of what I want the witch to look like.  My personal early memories of the Hansel and Gretel story as a child were very much tied up with a picture book I had of the story.  In this version of the story, it seemed to me that the scariest and most memorable part was the fact that the witch appears to be exactly like the most harmless and sweet old lady you’re ever likely to meet.  The fact that she is really the most evil kind of witch there is, the sort with red eyes, was one of the most exciting bits of the story.

So it seemed to me that one of the most important themes of the show should be the difference between appearance and reality.  The witch should be like her liquorice house, seemingly sweet and good but dark on the inside.

Given the above, I was astounded to discover the amount of stage and film versions of the story I found with very “witchy” witches, with black conical hats, black cats etc.  The source stories also vary quite a lot.  The original stories were, for example, changed in various ways to create a more Christian message.  So basically we just decided to go with the different bits of the stories we liked best.

Another interesting thing about the witch in the story, is that for a witch, she doesn’t do much magic.  The only magical thing about her seems to be that she has a house made out of food that doesn’t go off or get eaten by animals.  The main thing that seems to mark her out as a witch is that she is evil and eats children.  Then there is the question of whether the bird that leads the children to the house is a familiar of the witch or whether the bird is part of a number of instances in the story where nature favours the children.

I am not going to show any of our sketches of the characters at this stage as I do not want to spoil the surprise.  What I will show you however, are two of my favourite versions of the story I found on You tube.  A shadow puppet film by the marvellous Lotte Reiniger and a very early feature length stop motion animation based on the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck, (not the singer – the singer got the name from this guy).  Considering how early this film is, the quality of the animation and the “acting”, facial expressions etc. are amazing! A definite rival to Disney, and deserves to be better known.  The witch in this one is very witchy and the father is just a bit too gleeful about the nasty things the witch will do to the children, but it is none the worse for that.  I like a bit of quirkiness myself, Enjoy!