Tag Archives: performance

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.

Nice but Naughty?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We’ve been really getting stuck into the plotting and appearance of our Liquorice Toy Theatre, Hansel and Gretel show.

Tim is about two thirds through the mini-masterpiece that is the script so far, (that is I’m assuming it’s a mini masterpiece, I’ve not read it yet!).  I, on the other hand have been carefully making a visual list of exactly what pieces of scenery and puppets I will need to make.  I just finished this yesterday.

In the process, I have drawn my first sketches of what I want the witch to look like.  My personal early memories of the Hansel and Gretel story as a child were very much tied up with a picture book I had of the story.  In this version of the story, it seemed to me that the scariest and most memorable part was the fact that the witch appears to be exactly like the most harmless and sweet old lady you’re ever likely to meet.  The fact that she is really the most evil kind of witch there is, the sort with red eyes, was one of the most exciting bits of the story.

So it seemed to me that one of the most important themes of the show should be the difference between appearance and reality.  The witch should be like her liquorice house, seemingly sweet and good but dark on the inside.

Given the above, I was astounded to discover the amount of stage and film versions of the story I found with very “witchy” witches, with black conical hats, black cats etc.  The source stories also vary quite a lot.  The original stories were, for example, changed in various ways to create a more Christian message.  So basically we just decided to go with the different bits of the stories we liked best.

Another interesting thing about the witch in the story, is that for a witch, she doesn’t do much magic.  The only magical thing about her seems to be that she has a house made out of food that doesn’t go off or get eaten by animals.  The main thing that seems to mark her out as a witch is that she is evil and eats children.  Then there is the question of whether the bird that leads the children to the house is a familiar of the witch or whether the bird is part of a number of instances in the story where nature favours the children.

I am not going to show any of our sketches of the characters at this stage as I do not want to spoil the surprise.  What I will show you however, are two of my favourite versions of the story I found on You tube.  A shadow puppet film by the marvellous Lotte Reiniger and a very early feature length stop motion animation based on the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck, (not the singer – the singer got the name from this guy).  Considering how early this film is, the quality of the animation and the “acting”, facial expressions etc. are amazing! A definite rival to Disney, and deserves to be better known.  The witch in this one is very witchy and the father is just a bit too gleeful about the nasty things the witch will do to the children, but it is none the worse for that.  I like a bit of quirkiness myself, Enjoy!