Tag Archives: online puppetry

Sustainable Outdoor Arts

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Me in hero pose picking up my new car

I recently attended an online sustainability symposium hosted by Wild Rumpus which was looking at all the things that we are, could and should be doing to make our work as outdoor artists more sustainable.

At the beginning of the year we made a big step as a household and as a theatre company towards greater sustainability by swapping our vauxhall zafira for a second hand Nissan leaf.

The zafira was a swap from a Vauxhall Combo van without rear passenger seats so that we would have somewhere to put child car seats following the birth of our first child in 2017. It was a good choice for a compromise between personal and business use as the seats fold down to provide a very large amount of space for carting puppets/sets /workshop materials etc.

Then came the announcement about all new cars being electric from 2035, (more recently they are considering bringing this forward to 2030). In addition to this my car had turned 5 years old and I had just had to get it seen to for its first major repair job (while in my ownership). I felt like the longer I kept it the less it would be worth and the more repairs it would be likely to need.

Tim (my co-performer in RMT and husband) had already started using an electric vehicle (a Renault Zoe) as a second car for our household. So, I felt relatively comfortable with the idea of switching to an electric vehicle of my own as I had already had experience of driving his.

One of the main differences is that it has no gears so those people who have driven automatic cars would find the swap to an electric vehicle quite an easy one.

I decided to get a second hand vehicle as I would be able to buy this using a hire purchase arrangement and at the end of 5 years I will own it outright and have something to show for my investment. At the time, Tim had a PCP on his Zoe and has now switched to a new lease (and a newer Zoe) without the option to buy. I wanted a car at the end of my payments.

So I got a Nissan Leaf which, while nothing like as big as the Zafira, has a fairly roomy boot and the ability to fold the rear seats flat for extra storage space. It is bigger than the Zoe but has a smaller battery (30 kwh) which gives a range of 120 miles with a fully charged battery in ideal conditions (it does not perform as well in the cold).

Before lock down we had the delightful plan of visiting the Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival for the first time in my new car. This happens every year and commemorates the first documented sighting of Mr. Punch by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary (so it is the official birthday of Mr. Punch).

We were going to take the children too and make it a sort of bus man’s holiday and stay overnight the night before. We had not been previously as the travel costs for us from North Yorkshire to London for an unpaid gig are very expensive but with an electric car we felt the trip would be within our means. We also felt it was worth trying as an experiment to see how practical it would be to use the car to transport the shadow puppet suitcase show to London in this car.

It was going to take a long time to get there compared with a vehicle with a bigger range (hence the need for an overnight stay) but it was going to be an epic electric car adventure.

Then lock down happened, the live event was cancelled and the May Fayre moved online instead.

So the only business journey I actually have done in the new car was to ‘For The Love of It‘ a street arts networking event in Manchester which happened immediately before lock down. The car performed well. The inbuilt sat nav got me to the venue (Cobden Street Works the new base of Walk the Plank) which I had never visited before without a hitch. I navigated to a nearby Instavolt charger at a garage and put on enough charge to enable me to complete the return journey and that was that.

One major change I have had to take on is the use of a smartphone which I inherited from my husband when he upgraded his. A lot of electric chargers require the use of a mobile app for that particular network (and there are lots of different charging networks). Instavolt, however, is one of the networks that allow you to charge using a contactless debit / credit card and the charger had lots of simple easy to read buttons that light up in order to tell you what to do.

I have since discovered that I was fortunate in my choice of first charger experience as Instavolt are very reliable and easy to use compared to some other networks. Some charging points can be broken when you turn up or the charging point works but the app doesn’t.

Another problem for some electric charging points is that they can be ‘Iced’ (the parking space is taken up by an internal combustion engine vehicle) which stops electric vehicles from using them.

The solution to a lot of these problems is Zap Map. This is an app which let’s you plan your journey. You input the range of your vehicle, where you want to go and it suggests charging points you might want to use to get there.

You can see if anyone is using the charging points, whether any are broken and users can report issues they have had with the chargers and upload pictures of the charging station so you can see what it looks like and find them more easily. So if you are planning a long journey and can see a particular charging point is having technical problems over and over again then you can simply choose a different charging point for your route. I think it eliminates what they call ‘range anxiety’ pretty much altogether. If you have plenty of money that is not such an issue any more anyway as most new electric cars have enough range to complete most journeys without the need to charge away from home (in the UK anyway as nowhere is very far away from anywhere else compared to America for example).

We are going to have a different epic electric car journey soon as we are going to Cornwall for 2 weeks. We are planning to use the Zoe as it has the greater range (particularly as we are now in Winter) and we need to get to YHA Eden project (where we are staying) by 10pm at the latest. This gives the different challenge of fitting everything for the holiday into the smaller bootspace This will include clothes for a 3 and a half year old and a 19 month old plus everything else they need and stuff for me and Tim. 

So I shall also be taking a holiday from blog writing for 2 weeks so there will be more on the progress of our Secret Keeper Shadow Puppet Murder Mystery Series then. Till then Very Best Wishes and stay safe to you all my lovely readers.

A Visit to the Harlequin Puppet Theatre

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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I wrote the blog post below before all the business with Covid-19 and social distancing kicked off and unfortunately it is not currently possible to visit the Harlequin puppet theatre for a show.  However Chris has been busy and has compiled a series of online puppet videos which you can view by clicking HERE

 

We have a good friend who lives in Porthmadog, North Wales, who we have visited and stayed with on a number of occasions and each time the route has taken us through Colwyn Bay.  I kept thinking to myself that we should visit the Harlequin Puppet Theatre at some point and then didn’t get round to it.

So when we visited my friend at October half-term time in 2018, we discovered the theatre did have a show on (the theatre has its showings at school holiday times).  So we booked some tickets and took my friend with us as well.

I was surprised that she had not heard of the Harlequin Puppet Theatre before but perhaps it is less well known to non-puppetry enthusiasts.

I had looked up the theatre previously on Trip Advisor and found many glowing reviews from the parents and grandparents of young children and so I had a good idea of what to expect.

The Harlequin is, very much, a one man operation.  Chris Somerville works the box office, acts as usher, M.C., marionette puppeteer and magician as well as selling the interval refreshments.

Indeed, for everything that is included (and compared to other tourist attractions for entertaining families on offer) the whole thing is extremely reasonably priced.

It a small audience when we visited, as the main Welsh school holidays had not started yet.  But as part of the small but select audience, Chris was entertaining some of his fellow puppeteer friends (including Geoff Felix whom I had met previously at various puppetry events such as Skipton Puppet Festival).

I was pleasantly surprised to see how good the auditorium was looking, given what I had heard about the previous arson attack on the theatre.  You could see that the fire door had been replaced with a modern plain door which I presume is a temporary fix until Chris can afford something more in keeping with the period of the original theatre interior.  It also appeared a small section of the ceiling had been replaced with a temporary fix as well.

The show consisted of a fairytale “The Gooseberry Mandarin” written originally in 1928 by Grace Dorcas Ruthenburg as a one act play and originally adapted for the puppet stage by Eric Bramall.

It says on the website that Chris has created this as a new production in 1999, but I am guessing it uses the original voice artists, soundtrack and puppets created by Eric Bramall “back in the day” and perhaps Chris adapted the show to be performed with a single puppeteer, (you can see from the video below that in its heyday the Harlequin productions used more than one puppeteer at a time) in 1999.  It had a sense while we were watching it of stepping back in time to a previous era.

Our young son Anthony (who was about 18 months old when we visited) was kept entertained through this simple, charming (and fairly short) story after which there was an interval where we enjoyed some ice-creams.

The next section was Chris as Mr. Bimbamboozle doing magic tricks with the assistance of a young lady from the audience.  Chris is extremely good at interacting with the children and the fact that his repertoire and format does not change means that he is extremely well practiced and experienced at what he does and this shows.  He had great stage patter and all the comedy magic tricks were expertly done.

After this came a marionette cabaret using short string marionettes with Chris visible up front operating the puppets.  This is obviously a real treat for the children (and the adults) who may be used to CGI tricks where you cannot see how it is done and is not physically present in the room.  I have found in our shows audiences entranced by very simple techniques in our show “The Tempest“.  On one occasion a man could not understand how the shadow puppets were operated when no-one was inside the booth to do it.  It didn’t occur to him that the puppets were not actually moving at that point!

Again the marionette puppeteering skills were incredibly good.  A Shirley Bassey pastiche puppet was very amusing (“Burly Chassis”) though a little dated perhaps.  On the other hand – a classic performer like Shirley is a good choice for a puppet with a long run as modern performers come and go and the current flavour of the month in pop music does not last as long as a puppet does!

The format of the entertainment, using multiple short performances with an interval as well, plus the extremely good interaction with the audience as Master of Ceremonies meant that our 18 month old son Anthony stayed enthralled in his seat throughout.  Anthony was quiet during the performances and did not seek to escape and walk around the room.  This was great, as we had to take Anthony out when we attended Upfront’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” with him.  This was no fault of Upfront’s production, it was just designed for an older audience and indeed, Anthony was younger when he saw it.

So to conclude, I would heartily recommend anyone (especially puppetry enthusiasts and families) to visit the Harlequin Puppet Theatre (once he is back up and running) and see a show if you’re in the area to be thoroughly entertained by a master performer!

Click the link to the Wikipedia entry below for more information about the theatre.

Wikipedia entry