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A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.1of 2 – Lancashire Encounter & Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello everyone – I have been quiet for ages for the pleasant reason that I have been super busy.  I’ve been so super busy that I can’t tell you about everything in one go so tune in next week for more puppetty adventures!

First of all “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future” show trotted off to Preston on the 26th & 27th of September for a “Lancashire Encounter”!  “Lancashire Encounter” is a festival that is new this year and hopefully could turn into an annual event to fill in the space between the Preston Guild Celebration years.

We had a fantastic time encouraging the locals and visitors to try our fabulous pedal powered vehicle from the future.  What made the event even nicer was that the organisers had thoughtfully put the puppetry people next to each other so our next door neighbour was Mark Whitaker from Horse + Bamboo with his wonderful Chinese glove puppet show “Festival”.  We had seen Mark perform this fabulous show at Skipton Puppet Festival previously.

CLICK HERE to see photo’s from the “Lancashire Encounter” Facebook page.

 

And speaking of Skipton Puppet Festival – This was on the following week (2nd-4th October) and Mark was doing “Festival” again when we visited Skipton to check out all the shows.

Having seen him perform it about 20 million times the week before we decided to concentrate on enjoying the other shows that were on offer at Skipton.  You can see some of the things we enjoyed in the photo’s above.

We also took the opportunity to go and see Indigo Moon perform their “Jungle Book” show which was absolutely fabulous and used a lot of clever, modern shadow puppetry techniques.  I was particularly interested to watch the techniques Anna Ingleby uses because she is a solo puppeteer in their shows.  Haviel Perdana does all the sound and lighting etc. but only Anna does the puppeteering.  It is tempting to think that less can be done in a show if one has less puppeteers but Anna certainly does not leave the audience short-changed in their performances.  There was enough going on to keep an audience of both young and old enthralled for a whole hour and everyone was invited to see the puppets and scenery afterwards and ask questions too.

We also visited Indigo Moon’s “Minster Monster” shadow puppet installation which was very interesting and used “monsters” from Beverley Minster as inspiration.  What was especially impressive was that the display was still in good working condition despite being left for people to play with unsupervised for extended periods of time!

I was also particularly pleased to have the opportunity to see “Kabaret de Poche” having seen their website including videos of the show and a fun origami mouth instruction video!

My next post shall tell you all about our trip to Lincolnshire to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show at Wolds Words Festival, our visit to London to teach shadow puppetry to 1st year puppetry students at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a visit to a primary school in Middlesbrough to make hand and string puppets!

In the meantime if you are needing some last minute Christmas entertainment please CLICK HERE to check out our Christmas Shows! 🙂

Look out London,….Here I come!!!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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If you have been wondering if I’ve fallen down a deep well for the last few weeks, due to the lack of fresh news on my blog, then you’d be wrong.

What I have in fact been doing, (amongst other things) is making the costumes you see in the photos above.  These are for the “Feast of St. George” GLA Festival.  I shall be doing my “Jabberwocky!” shadow puppet suitcase show in Trafalgar Square on Saturday the 20th of April between 1 and 6pm.  Click HERE for news article.

I will wear the St. George themed costume for this event but the medieval dress costume can be used for performing the “Jabberwocky!” show at any other medieval themed events.  We can also use it for one of the new children’s party ideas we are working on.

This is the first performance I am doing through the street arts agency Continental Drifts and also my first performance in London.  It will be interesting to see how (if at all) the London audiences differ from audiences elsewhere in the country.  I was very amused, when I was in London once, that a local was puzzled by my Northern accent and asked if I was from Scandinavia!

The “Jabberwocky!” show is, of course, perfect for St. George’s Day because it involves the slaying of a big nasty monster by a brave hero with a sword.  The singing that I do in the show also has the feeling of a medieval folk ballad about it.

The journey is going to be suitably epic as we will be departing from Lancaster by Megabus at 3.20am and arriving back at 2.05am the next day.  It is not as bad as it sounds, because we should be able to have a snooze on the bus.  A gallant knight, (in the form of my husband, Tim) is coming too and will hopefully be able to take some photos during the day.  Wish us luck on our arduous quest!  I shall report back on how it went in my next blog post.

I have also finally got confirmation of what shows we will be doing at Mintfest this year in Kendal.  We are very pleased to be presenting our fabulous “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future!” show.  This was originally commissioned and performed in High Bentham as part of “My Last CARnival” last year.  We will be doing the show on the 31st of August and the 1st of September 2013 there will be more details as and when they become available on the “Where You Can See Me” page.

We shall also be doing a new show for Child Safety Week at the end of June.  We have been doing a lot of negotiations with a publisher to see if we can secure permission to do a show based on a famous modern children’s book and we hope to be able to tell you more about that very soon.