Tag Archives: nonsense songs

Oh I do like to be beside the Sea-side…..at Morecambe Variety Festival!!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Greetings Blog readers!  Here’s a quick post about the Morecambe Variety Festival from the weekend before last.

This was an event organised by the lovely Neil Kendall and was at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe.  They had done this event before in 2012 but this is the first time we at Rough Magic Theatre have been involved.

Those of you who are local will know that for many years the Winter Gardens was left empty and was in a very poor state of repair.  However volunteers and the Friends of the Winter Gardens have been painstakingly working away to conserve and renovate the space.

Now it is possible to see what an amazing space it is, was and could be in the future given more money and more love.  Below is a video showing some of what the volunteers have been up to:

 

The festival attracted a lot of local people who hadn’t seen inside the building before and although there is still a lot to do they are very proud to have toilets and a cafe now which help to make the building a more usable and practical space.

Also the fellow performers I was sharing a dressing room with explained that I was lucky as when they had been involved with the festival in 2012 there had been no heating in the dressing rooms.  I am told that there are plans to install heating in the rest of the building which will be a massive leap forward as it will not only mean that the space can be used in the winter time but should also help minimise further deterioration of the plaster, paintwork etc. due to damp.

All that aside, you can see from the photo’s that even in its present state of slightly delapidated grandeur it was a wonderful setting for a quirky vintage style variety festival like this.

During the day, there were a lot of different performances going on, both outside the entrance of the building and on the main stage and around the edges of the downstairs auditorium and I with my Shadow Puppet Suitcase shows performed in the main auditorium area as well as the entrance hall and outside the building too as was appropriate.  You can see Neil’s photo of my “Jabberwocky!” show by clicking HERE.

There was also a showing Georges Melies’s “A Trip to the Moon” film with a specially composed musical score in one of the downstairs bar areas and also other things in spaces upstairs too.  I have only recently discovered Georges Melies but since I have, he seems to be popping up everywhere.  Below is a video of the film which has been restored and uses the hand-coloured version of the film:

 

 

After I had finished my shows on Sunday we saw the “Empty Theatre Tour” which had characters from the different eras of the theatre’s history conducting a tour of the building in character and contrived to convey an idea of being haunted by the history of the building, (in a nice way).

I had half a day performing on both the Saturday and the Sunday and since we were planning to attend the evening “Around the World in 80 Days” Cabaret Fancy Dress Ball event on the Friday night we booked into a Morecambe Guest House for convenience sake.

The evening entertainment was a combination of quirky variety and circus acts and burlesque performances, with the majority of the performers doing 2 separate performances.  These were linked together by a “flashman” M.C. and his put upon lackey touring the globe looking for the fabulous pink diamond of Limpopo!

In addition there was a fancy dress competition which was won by a lady who had made an ingenious outfit out of the pages of the “Morecambe Visitor”.

Speaking of marvellous local events.  We’ll be appearing at Bentham CARnival again this year at the end of the month, (to find out more about the event click HERE).  It will be a part of the Yorkshire Festival this year and is celebrating the opening of the “Way of the Roses” Passing Place Artwork in particular.  To find out more about this there is another page for CARnival Bentham by Bike that you can visit by clicking HERE.

The artwork is a giant pair of Queen Victoria’s bloomers made out of wire mesh to commemorate the fact that the silk for Queen Victoria’s bloomers was woven at the Bentham Silk Mill.  So bloomers are one of the themes this year as well as fish and fat sheep on bicycles.

I’ll be doing my Edward Lear’s Nonsense show which feature a pair of bloomers/”drawers” made of rabbit skins amongst other things and Tim will be the Mad Hatter who on this occasion will be doing a spot of fishing out of his teapots and kettles!

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.