Tag Archives: Lear

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!

Edward Lear Again…

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

Gok Wan, eat your heart out!

Some of you may be wondering what is happening with my new shadow puppet suitcase show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”.

Just to confirm, this brand new show will be appearing at the Skipton Puppet Festival in September 2011.

As the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival is in June I shall obviously be mainly concentrating on that first. In the meantime, however for all of you shadow puppetry fans out there here’s a few things to be thinking about.

The shadow puppet in the picture is made in a different way to the majority of my previous shadow puppets. In order to show the detail of the different foods that the “Old Man”‘s costume is made of, I felt a lot of cut out detail, with pieces of coloured lighting gel would be the best way to show what the character is wearing, which is in fact the main subject of the story.

As my shadow screen is very small, I shall have to show close up detail of individual bits of the man’s clothing one at a time as they are introduced so that the audience can really see what they are made of.

Something that is much on my mind with relation to this new show is music. In my other suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” I composed a tune specially to fit in with the poem which I sing, live as an accompaniment to the puppets movement. I think that many people like this musical element of the show in particular and it is something a bit different and special in comparison to other puppet shows I have seen.

However, thanks to the Puppet Centre Trust, a few years back I did a very good voice workshop for puppetry professionals. I used a section of the Jabberwocky poem to practice story telling and different ways of using the voice and it was possible to inject a lot of drama and interest into the words through speaking rather than singing the words. It is possible that attempting to impose a repeating verse type tune on the words of Lear’s poem would remove some of the drama and meaning from the words and possibly make it less easy for the audience to pick out the words in the first place. Considering that a lot of people are not familiar with the poem, “The New Vestments” it is especially important that the audience be able to hear every word so they can follow the story.

I have now got the potential to use recorded music and sound effects for the show as I have recently purchased a very neat, very portable P.A. system suitable for use with the shadow suitcase.

So now I am going to turn the idea over to you my faithful blog readers, who thinks that I should attempt to put the poem to a tune and sing it, and who thinks I should use background music, percussion or sound effects and speak the poem in a dramatic way? Please vote now! And if you haven’t voted on my previous poll regarding the name of this new show, please vote on that one too.