Tag Archives: jabberwocky

Suitcase Theatre to Pram Theatre?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Christmas Entertainment for "Santa's Late Night Shopping Evening", outside the "Coach House", High Bentham

Christmas Entertainment for “Santa’s Late Night Shopping Evening”, outside the “Coach House”, High Bentham

The Shadow Suitcase Theatre that I created way back in 2004/2005 proved extremely popular, pretty much, from the word go.  It is unusual and quirky and has the advantage of enabling the performer (me) to go and find an audience rather than the other way round.

The one-man-band aspect of singing and stamping, with jingle bells attached to my leg, also seemed to be very popular with audiences too.

The first show I created for it, “Jabberwocky!”, also proved to be a happy choice as it is a great favourite for a lot of people.  One of the obvious advantages of the poem/story is that it’s fairly short and, as such, would not clutter up the interior of the suitcase with more puppets than could be managed at once.

After a while, it became obvious that I needed a new show to go in the theatre so that I’d have something fresh to offer to festivals who might want to invite me back.  I created this second show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”, shortly after starting this blog, so you can see the details of my thought processes for creating this show if you search in my earlier posts.

My good blog readers kindly helped me to indentify that another musical poem would be preferable to a spoken version because less people have singing in their puppet shows.

There were far more characters, & therefore puppets, in “The NewVestments” (the Edward Lear poem of choice for the show) and I was still stuck with a suitcase of exactly the same size to store the puppets in.  Luckily, I came up with the idea of fitting the puppets between a concertina of card to help keep them in order whilst performing.

I had come up with a number of ideas for this show that wouldn’t have worked with this suitcase theatre because the suitcase was too deep (or my arms too short).  Thus, I have had in the back of my mind the idea of creating an all new, all singing, all dancing, super-duper suitcase shadow theatre using a more conventionally shaped suitcase, with a “landscape” or “wide screen TV” style shadow screen.

A number of audience members have also, over the years, told me that they would have liked to watch something slightly longer as they were enjoying it so much.  I always saw that as a plus because it is better for an audience to want more than to be bored.  Last year, I had comments from the “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” audiences saying they would have liked to see the puppets on the screen for longer or that they would have liked them to be bigger so that they could take in all of the detail.  I think the children had no problems as they can take things in very quickly and have good eyes for small detail (it tended to be adults that would make these remarks).

As I said earlier, if I made the puppets and the screen larger so that the audience could see them better I would immediately encounter a practical problem with how to store big puppets in a small space, (a space that I have to carry strapped to my body – so weight is also an issue).  If the theatre is made large enough to store large puppets then it would no longer be possible to use it in the way my current theatre is, (strapped on like an ice-cream vendors tray).

This led me to thinking; I’d not have to worry about carrying all the weight around if I were to swap to something like a trolley on wheels or some kind of pram-base.  I could store my mini P.A. system in the shopping tray in the bottom.  I could also try to work out something  more rain-proof than my current set-up.  If it was actually an old style pram, they come with rain hoods already on them – I could perhaps use the original fittings to shower-proof my shows.  The interior of a pram would also contain more room to store bigger puppets.

Thinking of ideal case scenarios as I was perusing vintage prams on Ebay, I noticed that a lot of them had a removable carry cot with handles.  What would stop me from having not only a new, slightly larger, shower proof shadow theatre, but also a portable toy theatre that could be attached or slotted into the pram base as well?

So this is my latest project idea: to create a new portable shadow/toy theatre using a pram base that will enable me to make the puppets slightly larger and, theoretically, to make the shows slightly longer if I want to.  It will also mean that it will be slightly less hard work for me (wheeling something rather than carrying something strapped to my body).

I do have a pram base already as they are so useful in street theatre for large processional puppets, lanterns and percussion rigs etc.  I will have a look at that first to see what potential it has.  Also, on March the 16th in Bentham, there will be the B.E.S.T.(Bentham Environmentally Sustainable Town) annual “Give & Take Day” which is extremely popular and a good way of reducing waste going to landfill. I shall be keeping an eagle eye out there for unwanted prams too.

Currently, I am just investigating possibilities.  I am, as yet, unclear whether I want the theatre to actually look like a vintage pram or whether it’s just the practicalities of the pram that will be useful and not its appearance.  If any of my lovely readers have any ideas about good places to look for unwanted prams (bearing in mind our High Bentham location) or ideas for adapting prams into theatres that they’d like to share, please leave a comment.

Thoughts on Mintfest, Lakes Alive: From Firey Villages to Kendal Mint Cake

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Both myself and fellow Rough Magic Theatre performer Tim Austin attended Mintfest in Kendal as X-Trax Delegates.  This gave us the opportunity to tell lots of very useful people like festival bookers etc. about our work and the shows that we do.  We also got to meet lots of fellow artists and performers and of course to see the shows at the festival.

Sometimes it can be quite hard to get a chance to see fellow performers work if you are always performing at the same festivals and this was a great opportunity to see what other people are doing.

We saw “Frolicked” do their new show “The Alchemist” which is apparently their first static puppetry show.  Up until now they have been concentrating on strolling puppet characters, (and of course their recent foray into interactive performance/gaming “The Birds”).  It was very accessible being largely without spoken words, but relied on the written word for a lot of the plot/jokes, (e.g. identical spray bottles saying respectively “No Fly” and “Grow Big”).  Overall it was very light, charming and gently amusing and of course the puppets were beautifully made.  It seemed quite short to me, but then that can be better for children.  It would have been good to have had more audience reaction to the antics of the rats, (after the style of crocodile stealing Mr. Punch’s sausages)but I don’t know if that was more to do with the audience itself or the style of the performance.

The Fire Village Royale by Der Vurmeesters was the highlight, for me.  This was in spite of the pervasive soaking drizzle on the Friday night when we went to see it.  It was like a sort of medieval, magical, firey village full of various odd characters interacting with fire and fireworks in various ways.  One lady liked to rest her feet in a water trough periodically before manipulating it so that the whole length of the trough burst into flames.  Another fairy like person who was a guardian of a metal gate (which was set on fire)liked to do hula-hooping and (yes, you’ve guessed it) the hula hoop was also on fire!  Between the sort of “set pieces” which were cordoned off, various people wandered backwards and forwards, some on marvellous bicycles and some on foot.  The most spectacular was a man in a mask that sat on top of his head,( so he appeared extra tall).  He was in the habit of setting his head on fire so it was just a firey skull and also had a firey sword.

After being presented with sparklers by an excitable Alchemist looking chap, we were rather alarmed when the firey headed man decided to walk straight at us.  We understandably backed away, but then he presented his sword for us to light our sparklers from.  I don’t think I would have enjoyed it half as much if that hadn’t happened.  It made us feel really part of what was going on, rather than just being a spectator.

There was also a body puppet which was entirely on fire, which I assume was a metal structure with fire rope attached, and this figure was controlled by the walking motion of the operator who was at least a metre behind the burning figure.  You can see it in the video below.  The music and beautiful lanterns also contributed greatly to the magical atmosphere.

As this is meant to be a puppet-centric blog I have mentioned the two main events with puppetry that we saw, not forgetting Squashbox‘s Dinosaur puppet and a cave-man humanette for their “Stones & Bones” show.  A very amusing little show which was remarkable for the amount included in a one man show.  Craig Johnson, the performer coped heroically well with the incredible amount of bad-mannered people who decided that it was okay to try and get past by squeezing their way through his backstage area, (no innuendo intended).  He used the old favourite joke, “It’s just a stage they’re going through”.  Also ironically one elderly lady emerged from the set just as Craig had promised to produce a dinosaur from behind the scenes!

Although I saw an incredible amount of fantastic theatre and enjoyed the festival tremendously, Tim and myself found ourselves getting increasingly frustrated and angry about the behaviour of some of the audience members( both adults and children).  Hardly any parents were exerting any influence on their children to keep them safe and out of the performers way during dangerous acts, or to stop them misbehaving and causing danger to the performers by throwing things into the performance area, or to stop them standing up and moving around constantly and blocking other people’s view.  Then there were the adults, as aforementioned who hadn’t any problems with walking straight through people’s performance spaces while they were actually in the middle of a performance.  It all seemed to indicate a lack of concern for others which was somewhat disheartening to see.  Some parents, (and I have heard from other performers that this is not unusual) were actually encouraging their children to hit Artizani’s giant inflatable lobster which was perambulating about Abbot Hall Park.

One could argue that it was a sign of the success of the festival that it encouraged those not used to the conventions of theatre to experience good quality performance, and maybe this is simply a feature of any street arts festival on this scale.  On the other hand that doesn’t mean that I have to condone this kind of behaviour or to like it.  If you have any opinions or experiences of this kind of behaviour or anything else in the post, please leave a comment 🙂

We now have video footage of our popular Shadow Puppet Suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” on our website, click HERE to take a look!  This show is available for Halloween events this year and we have a variety of other options available for Halloween as well, (please ask!)

Don’t forget you can see us at “That’s the Way to Do It” festival in Redcar, on Sunday doing our “Alice” show and introducing the strange monster that lives in the Rough Magic Theatre shed.  See the WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME page for more details.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t mentioned the Kendal Mint Cake, take a look here to see more about Richard Dedomenici’s attempts at building a full sized Kendal Mint Cake igloo.