Tag Archives: shadow puppets

Rough Magic Theatre’s New Edward Lear Picture Book

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Edward Lear Books at Bentham Christmas ShoppingSome time ago I was lucky enough to receive a visit from Meg Amsden  of Nutmeg Puppet Company (who was chair of BrUNIMA at the time).

Meg is a good friend of Ali Clough of Pioneer Projects who, like myself, is a resident of High Bentham and I had invited her to come and see my new Shadow Suitcase show “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” while she was up here visiting Ali.  Meg was also keen to see our Liquorice toy theatre and Hansel & Gretel set/characters and to hear more about Harry Oudekerk’s Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival in the Netherlands: a festival that we recently attended.  You can see lots of previous blog posts about the making of the Hansel & Gretel show if you search through (click HERE for earliest H&G post).

Meg made lots of lovely comments on the Edward Lear show and also suggested that the puppets could be used to make an accompanying picture book that I could sell.  This idea has been at the back of my mind as a project for “when I get round to it” and finally at the end of last year I did it.

book cover

I made about 10 books of Edward Lear’s poem “The New Vestments” and scanned the shadow puppets to create the illustrations for the book.  I did not use the name of the poem for the title of the show because “vestments” is an old fashioned and confusing word that we tend not to use much these days.  The idea was that I would be able to sell the books to people when I am performing the show but I decided to try selling them at one of Bentham’s late night Christmas Shopping events (organised by We Are Bentham ).  I brought the shadow theatre along with me just for display purposes to explain where the illustrations had come from.  I am happy to say that for this trial run I sold every single copy and my display copy as well!  Thank-you Bentham folks!

If you would like to book my “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” shadow puppet show or “Hansel & Gretel” Toy theatre show don’t hesitate to get in touch.  CLICK HERE to contact me.

 

A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.1of 2 – Lancashire Encounter & Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello everyone – I have been quiet for ages for the pleasant reason that I have been super busy.  I’ve been so super busy that I can’t tell you about everything in one go so tune in next week for more puppetty adventures!

First of all “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future” show trotted off to Preston on the 26th & 27th of September for a “Lancashire Encounter”!  “Lancashire Encounter” is a festival that is new this year and hopefully could turn into an annual event to fill in the space between the Preston Guild Celebration years.

We had a fantastic time encouraging the locals and visitors to try our fabulous pedal powered vehicle from the future.  What made the event even nicer was that the organisers had thoughtfully put the puppetry people next to each other so our next door neighbour was Mark Whitaker from Horse + Bamboo with his wonderful Chinese glove puppet show “Festival”.  We had seen Mark perform this fabulous show at Skipton Puppet Festival previously.

CLICK HERE to see photo’s from the “Lancashire Encounter” Facebook page.

 

And speaking of Skipton Puppet Festival – This was on the following week (2nd-4th October) and Mark was doing “Festival” again when we visited Skipton to check out all the shows.

Having seen him perform it about 20 million times the week before we decided to concentrate on enjoying the other shows that were on offer at Skipton.  You can see some of the things we enjoyed in the photo’s above.

We also took the opportunity to go and see Indigo Moon perform their “Jungle Book” show which was absolutely fabulous and used a lot of clever, modern shadow puppetry techniques.  I was particularly interested to watch the techniques Anna Ingleby uses because she is a solo puppeteer in their shows.  Haviel Perdana does all the sound and lighting etc. but only Anna does the puppeteering.  It is tempting to think that less can be done in a show if one has less puppeteers but Anna certainly does not leave the audience short-changed in their performances.  There was enough going on to keep an audience of both young and old enthralled for a whole hour and everyone was invited to see the puppets and scenery afterwards and ask questions too.

We also visited Indigo Moon’s “Minster Monster” shadow puppet installation which was very interesting and used “monsters” from Beverley Minster as inspiration.  What was especially impressive was that the display was still in good working condition despite being left for people to play with unsupervised for extended periods of time!

I was also particularly pleased to have the opportunity to see “Kabaret de Poche” having seen their website including videos of the show and a fun origami mouth instruction video!

My next post shall tell you all about our trip to Lincolnshire to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show at Wolds Words Festival, our visit to London to teach shadow puppetry to 1st year puppetry students at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a visit to a primary school in Middlesbrough to make hand and string puppets!

In the meantime if you are needing some last minute Christmas entertainment please CLICK HERE to check out our Christmas Shows! 🙂