Tag Archives: jabberwocky

Shadow Suitcase Theatre at Beverley Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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I had a fantastic time at Beverley Puppet Festival on Sunday.  We only found out about Skipton Puppet Festival Biennial sister festival last year when I met Anna & Haviel from Indigo Moon.  They and the Beverley Arts Trust organise the festival and it was great to be there for the first time.

Beverley is a beautiful place with beautiful old buildings like the Friary, (where the majority of the performances took place) and the minster.  And, most importantly given the recent trend of storms and torrential rain, it was clear and the sun shone brightly throughout the day.

I had been booked to perform both the new “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” suitcase show and the old favourite “Jabberwocky!” as well.  Both seemed to go down very well.

Later on in the afternoon my later sets were spent wandering out of the friary gardens towards the town where there were captive audiences sat outside pubs and restaurants. I do always ask people if they would like to see it first rather than having forced entertainment.

But we also encountered what I presume was a family group in the garden of one of the houses next door to the friary.  On enquiring whether they would like to see the show we discovered that it was the 93rd birthday of one gentleman in the group.  I did him a special birthday performance of “Jabberwocky!” over the low garden wall of the house.  They all enjoyed this so much that they took the birthday “boy” out to look at the rest of the puppet festival afterwards.

I was lucky to have my husband Tim Austin as steward and “roady” for the whole day. He was a star, helping me carry things, making cups of tea and switching my mini PA on and off for me.  It is possible for me to do these things on my own if necessary but it would have been a lot more tiring, especially with the two hour and a half’s drive there and back as well.

We managed to catch one or two of the other shows while we were there including Malcolm Knight’s Punch & Judy, Lady Lucinda by Noisy Oyster and in the evening the fabulous show by Sofie Krog (of Denmark/Spain), “The House”.  This was a comedy horror for adults and teenagers using glove puppets with an extremely sophisticated rotating set like a giant doll’s house.  The puppets looked fantastic and they were operated with fantastic skill but most importantly it was hugely entertaining and funny.  Anna Ingleby had seen them at the Charleville-Meziers festival and gone to the trouble of organising a mini-tour for them in this country so that it would be worth their while to come and do their show in Beverley for us.

A big well done to Anna and Peter Rolinson and all of the other people whose hard work helped make the festival a success especially the lady who made the lovely sandwiches.

Buxton Puppet Festival approaches with rapidity, we will be there on Tuesday the 24th.  You can book for our shadow puppet workshop and Alice in Wonderland performances on the Where You Can See Me page which has links through to the Buxton Opera House site.

Edward Lear Again, Again….!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Edward Lear's "The New Vestments"

Gok Wan, eat your heart out!

You may recall some time ago that I mentioned I would be creating a new Shadow Puppet Suitcase show called “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” for Skipton Puppet Festival this year.

For those who would like to see me performing the show, I shall be one of the Street Theatre shows and will be appearing on Saturday the 24th of September.

I am now on with the process of devising the show and thanks to your contributions to my poll about whether or not to set the poem to a tune and sing it, I have decided in favour of using a tune.

Some time ago, I attended an excellent “voice work for puppeteers” workshop run by the Puppet Centre Trust at The Royal Exchange, Manchester.  This was around the time I was devising my first suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” based on Lewis Carroll’s poem of that name.  I was encouraged to use the poem as an aid to voicework in storytelling and discovered that the tune I was using did diminish the ability to alter tone of voice, pace etc. and thus compromised the show in terms of pure storytelling.

Lots of people have told me they like the singing best in my “Jabberwocky!” show, and it is something that is a bit different from what a lot of other puppeteers are doing.  However, it seemed extremely important to me that people be able to follow the story in this new show, as unlike “Jabberwocky”, “The New Vestments” by Edward Lear, is not very well known.

The other difference between the two poems is that “Jabberwocky” uses nonsense words, whereas “The New Vestments” uses a nonsense (or extremely silly and unlikely) story.  Therefore, pleasure can be derived in “Jabberwocky” just from listening to the sound of the words and not worrying about what they mean at all.

So, bearing all this in mind, I wanted to create a tune that followed the rhythm and patterns of the words and the meaning of the words, rather than the poem following the tune.

A lot of random singing and recording in Audacity later….I have composed a tune I was happy with and that a couple of people who listened to it for me think is really good.

Now all I have to do is learn it so I don’t end up making up a new tune every time I perform it!

I am also toying with various different ways of creating the puppets and sets for the show.  This is quite a challenge due to the amount of action and different images and characters in it.  I shall keep you all informed of my progress and will hopefully see some of you at the performances in September!