Tag Archives: Puppeteers UK

Lots of fun at Beverley Puppet Festival!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We had a great time performing our new show “7 Songs of Love” at the Moving Parts Arts Scratch Space at Beverley Puppet Festival this year. You can see images of the show in rehearsal on the slideshow above.

We will performing the show again at More Music in Morecambe on Saturday October 1st sometime between 12 and 4pm as part of their Fun Palaces event. So please do come and see it if you are interested in booking the show. We are interested in using the show for rural touring as well as more conventional theatre spaces. The show has a heavy emphasis on eighteenth century sailors/sailing so would be great for any maritime themed events/locations. It features a variety of eighteeth century folk songs so would also be of interest to folk festivals/music festivals. The show uses a minimum performance area of 4m square and ideally requires blackout, (does not have to be total). We are currently self-sufficient regarding tech. The version we performed at Beverley was 25 minutes long, but we intend to work on expanding the show to around 45 minutes (potentially with an interval). We can also combine showings with shadow puppetry workshops for adults or children as required. We are in the process of putting together a video trailer using the footage we got from the scratch space showings and will post this too as soon as we have it.

We are interested in partnering with venues to work with us on improving and expanding the show. We need space to rehearse and develop the show, a third eye, ideally some funding and performance opportunities as well. Please get in touch if this is you!

It was so wonderful to see so many familiar faces in person rather than on a computer screen. The atmosphere was really great and the fact that we were accommodated in the Beverley Friary YHA (which was also the festival hub) meant that there was plenty of opportunity to meet other puppeteers when we were not performing. We had just one performance on the Saturday and one on the Sunday which meant that (for a change) we had plenty of time to see other people’s shows. We were also able to attend the PuppeteersUK meeting at which the Chair (Malcolm Knight of Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre) spoke about the future plans for PUK and the current situation in the UK regarding the puppetry sector and also the impact of Brexit on touring, festivals etc.

We watched some of the other Scratch Space shows (as we wanted to support our fellow scratch space artists) including 7 Ravens by Tragic Carpet, Displaced by Prickly Pear Productions and Noughtymation by our friends at Noisy Oyster.

We also took a look at Noisy Oyster’s “The Noughty-One” installation which used the same 3-D printed puppets as the “Noughtymation” scratch piece. Nik Palmer had been experimenting with these during lockdown and I was very interested to see them in action live.

Sarah Rowland-Barker returned the favour by coming to see our scratch space show. We got lots of positive feedback from the audiences as well as some suggestions for improvements. One of the things we were unsure of was the age range the show was suitable for as the content is more adult than our usual offerings. Feedback suggested that it was suitable for Keystage 2 and up.

We also went to see “Kit and Caboodle” by Thingumajig Theatre. I have encountered Thingumajig many times at many different festivals etc. but I have mainly seen their processional work and this was our first time seeing one of their static shows, (I say static but it was of course combined with a little walkabout to gather an audience with their wonderful pack mule “Kit”).

It was very interesting seeing this show after having watched the Scratch Space show “Displaced”, (which was used the real stories of different refugees) as Kit and Caboodle dealt with many of the same issues but in a more subtle and family friendly way. It was good to see some positive/sympathetic messages about immigrants and refugees in both these shows as we need an antidote to all of the toxic messages about this subject in the press. As Kit and Caboodle is a street show there is more chance of the message reaching ordinary people in the street who might just happen to come upon it accidentally. As an indoor show, however, “Displaced” would undoubtedly be attended by people who are already sympathetic to the message of the show.

Andrew Kim very kindly let me have a closer look at the crankie theatre box that very cleverly slotted into the side of the set, (you can see it in action in the video below). I even got to have a go at cranking it! This was particularly interesting for me at the moment as I want to experiment with some crankie shows myself.

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.