Tag Archives: Punch and Judy

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.

Beverley Puppet Festival and Upfront Puppet Theatre’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We optimistically purchased tickets to see Drew Colby’s “My Shadow & Me” (Shadowgraphy) some time prior to the Beverley Puppet festival and checked whether we would be ok to bring a 1 year old child with us.  We thought that with a showing of 2pm we stood a good chance of being able to get Anthony ready and travel over 100 miles east across Yorkshire in time.

Then we found out that there would be a Puppeteers UK meeting there as well at 10am and I thought to myself if we do REALLY well we might even get there for the meeting too!

We did NOT get there for the meeting too.  We didn’t even get there for 2pm.  We only managed to leave the house by around 10.30am and of course we had to stop for lunch and in the end only just got to the festival in time to see anything at all!

We caught most of the “Tiniest Cellist” act by Ettenoiram (of Hungary).  Clive Chandler’s Punch & Judy was nearly over when arrived so we just had a little chat with him after his show.  We also saw Lady Lucinda Harrington-Carrington by Noisy Oyster (of Frome) heading by (whom we had encountered at Beverley when we performed there previously) and also saw Professor Ambrose Merryweather & His Fabulous Fossils by
Vivify (of Scarborough) in the distance.

We had been thinking disappointingly that in order to be back in reasonable time to put Anthony to bed we would have to set off home again but when Mark Whitaker appeared for a 4pm performance of A Bird in the Hand Theatre’s “Special Delivery”, we thought we couldn’t really pass up an opportunity to actually see a full show.

Ironically, the main two acts I had caught at Skipton Puppet Festival the previous year (when Anthony was a very tiny fellow all wrapped up in his pram from the rain) had been Mark Whitaker’s “Special Delivery” and Clive’s Punch & Judy.  We had unfortunately not been able to watch all of Clive’s show as at that age he had found it too loud and started crying.  Anthony was able to watch and appreciate properly Mark’s show this time and my husband and Rough Magic Theatre co-performer had not seen it before, either.

It is a lovely little street theatre show – very adaptable (somewhat like my shadow puppet suitcase shows) in that the whole staging is mounted on a bicycle which is wheeled into the space by Mark and then remains there, freestanding, (using the kick-stand).  This leaves Mark free to perform around it and use more of the space (coming close up to the audience for various bits of action etc.

The show includes a whole range of different types of puppetry and story-telling techniques including a “crankie” and Kamishibai style “storyboards” and various small “table-top” type puppets.  These show the interior of various people’s houses who are receiving parcels, which are themselves in little puppet theatre boxes designed to look like paper packages on the bicycle.  This is in addition to some lovely wordless slapstick character work by Mark, (in the character of hapless postman) involving sandwiches and self-raining umbrellas (a joke that worked much better in Beverley in the sunshine than in Skipton, where mother nature was already providing plenty of rain!).  Altogether a very charming and magical show (the finale with the hot air balloon is particularly lovely).  It is, however, definitely a show for an intimately sized audience as the puppets are very small scale.

 

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As I explained in my previous post, John & Elaine Parkinson of Upfront Puppet Theatre were kind enough to invite us to see their new improved version of their production of the Pied Piper of Hamelin based on the Michael Morpurgo version of the story.

We were not sure how well Anthony would cope with an indoor marionette show of this length but he seemed to stay pretty happy for a good long stretch before needing a bit of a break for a drink.  When we tried him again after the interval he once again seemed to get frustrated that he could not get close and play with the puppets, (making distressed noises when characters disappeared from view).  This unfortunately meant Tim did not get to see all of the show as he took Anthony out when he was getting too noisy.

The Michael Morpurgo version of the story has (as you would probably expect) a bit of a moral and political agenda compared to the traditional tale.  The town of Hamelin has a sharp divide between rich and poor – with the poor street children at the bottom of the heap and kept outside the town walls scavenging on the rubbish tip.  Because of their unwillingness to share with or even encounter the street children (who are forced to steal to survive) the townspeople begin to foul the streets with rubbish to avoid having to take it to the tip.

The rats migrate from the rubbish tip into the town (and so do the children in their search for something to eat).

The Mayor of the town is the villain of the piece being greedy and not using the people’s taxes to benefit the townspeople (by dealing with the rubbish properly for example).  He of course refuses to pay the Piper properly and in this version of the story the Piper promises to return the children of the town when the town is made a fit and proper place for all the children with food and housing and education etc. catered for.

I particularly liked the Mayor puppet who has a good strong caricatured shape to his body and clothes.  I thought the movements of the puppet fitted his character and the meaning of the words and action he was expressing in various different scenes very well.

There were also various very ingenious and quite effective techniques for moving large amounts of puppet rats about the stage.  UV lighting was used to good effect to light up the eyes of the rats and give them the sinister and evil appearance required by the story.  The most impressive effect involved a large number of rats moving across the stage on a gauze curtain and then somehow diving off the curtain rail into the “river”.  Though there were also some cartwheeling rats diving into the river that were very effective too.  I think the fact that a variety of different techniques were used to control the rats made it a lot more interesting dramatically.  I think some of the rats being pulled on strings across the stage snagged at one point, but as there were other rats still being moved with various other techniques it did not detract from the action and I doubt if the majority of the audience realised anything had gone wrong.

There was a very nice effect for the magical opening of the cave which I won’t describe so as not to spoil the surprise and the turntable stage and various other set changes were slick and effective.

To meet the the technical challenge of the large number of children heading in and out of the cave large numbers of children were grouped on 4 multiple controllers that in turn were slid across the stage on an overhead rail/pulley system.

The music was particularly good, (I hear via John’s article in the BPMTG newsletter that it was composed by a folk duo and roped in children from the local school for chorus songs).  It really helped to set the scene and keep the story moving along during set changes as well as providing necessary sound effects for the action.

I think it is a very ambitious production for the number of puppeteers (4) and uses a lot of complicated mechanisms to portray the action, (but I guess that is probably the nature of marionette productions and I cannot claim to have seen a great many traditional marionette shows).  In my experience, the more complicated the mechanisms in a production the greater the chance of something going wrong and as we were fairly early in the run I think things were not quite as slick as they doubtless will be towards the middle and end of the run.

Overall the show was very entertaining and told the story well and the puppets and sets are all beautifully made.

It was very interesting to hear from John at the end in the Q&A time about the lengths they had gone to to ensure that the production was a good match for the original book.  For example, specially printing up fabric patterns for the puppet costumes directly from the illustrations and having the puppets inspected by the illustrator to ensure they were a good match.  I think John did a good job translating the 2D images into 3D puppet heads, which cannot have been easy.

It was also wonderful for the children (and indeed the adults) to be allowed to come up close at the end and take photos and ask the puppeteers questions about the puppets.  This is also a great idea because it discourages people from taking surreptitious photos during the show and distracting the performers and other audience members.