Sadly we have been far too busy cracking on with things to post before now.
We decided to cobble together our costumes from what we already have plus some charity shop and ebay purchases in true Rough Magic Theatre style.
I did a lot of research online and on YouTube and made myself a bum roll out of repurposed fabric (old jeans). If you don’t know what a bum roll is, it is what ordinary women in the eighteenth century wore under their skirts to make their bums and hips larger but is considerably less cumbersome than panniers which well off ladies wore and which could only really be worn by someone who doesn’t have to do any work.
We visited More Music and experimented with various lights and clothes line props and white sheets etc. etc. and decided that we could actually make use of our old booth frame but with the legs fully extended (so it would be taller than how we used it previously) and to use screen fabric over the entire width rather than having a smaller frame in the middle. We used a black tarp. to mask off the bottom section. We decided not to use our old floodlight as this only provides crisp shadows when puppets are right up against the screen. We thought we would use a combination of our OHP and some handheld led lights instead.
In our more recent rehearsals, having found that the fabric I bought reaches all the way to the floor as well we decided that we are going to use the screen all the way down instead of masking off the bottom. This means we will need to use a different approach to hiding the puppeteers (if we wish to hide them) so it will be interesting to work this out in rehearsal.
We are also intending to use some 3D shadow puppets and body shadows, and the full length screen will allow full length body shadows to be used.
I probably won’t post again for a while as we will be busy cracking on, but I hope these little snippets will whet your appetite and look forward to seeing everyone at Beverley Puppet Festival. See our WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME page for more details.
Another big thankyou to More Music in Morecambe for the use of their space by the way.
We visited Promenade Music Shop (in Morecambe) to ask for advice about P.A. systems that could do everything that we need them to do. They recommended the Yamaha Stagepas 600BT Portable Blue tooth P.A. system and mentioned that More Music already had a couple and had ordered 2 more. They also told us that there was a very long wait on these kinds of products at the moment and that we might struggle to get hold of one in time for our gig.
We mentioned that we would like to be able to use radio-mics with the P.A. but they said that they are very expensive. I mentioned that I already had a portable Megamouth Pulse mini P.A. system which came with radio mics and they suggested we could use these existing mics by connecting the two P.A. systems together (something that had not occurred to me before).
So I had a word with Ben McCabe from More Music to ask if we could try out the ones that they had and maybe borrow them for the performances. We also asked if they were able to spare us some space for R&D/rehearsal.
Ben very kindly agreed to all of the above in exchange for a free performance and workshop from us further down the line (Ben was thinking that the workshop would be good for October when they are doing a Fun Palace event). We suggested that we would do the performance for them after we had got feedback from the Beverley Puppet Festival event and rejigged the show based on this feedback.
I have also had help offered to me from my long time Shadow Puppetry mentor Ali Clough, (who also lives in Bentham). We had a look at her portable shadow screen to see if it would be useful for our show. It would require tweaking to get it to work for what we want and would be a fairly complicated thing to set up for something that is not actually quite right for what we want, (it would require re-covering as the screen fabric is very old and a little discoloured and damaged). At present we are thinking we might use a variation on the system we use for shadow puppetry workshops (involving extendable clothes props, a table and a clothes line). We want to try and build a show that will fit into just one car so we need something that can pack small but unpack to a relatively large size. We ideally want a size of screen that is bigger than the one on our old RMT booth that we used for “The Tempest” and “Alice in Wonderland” as the new show is going to be a solely shadow puppetry show rather than a combination of puppet types like these older shows.
Ali Clough’s Portable shadow screen with shadow puppets from her project with Leo Nolan-Evans.
We could still do with finding some rehearsal space more locally in Bentham but have not come up with any workable ideas on that yet. We need to find somewhere that can let us work during school-time hours which is when we will have time free from looking after the children. Our daughter is starting at the school nursery after the Easter holidays so I will have much more time to devote to my theatre work from then onwards as I had previously been looking after her on 3 weekdays.
I had been thinking of asking to look at the costumes at the Grand Theatre in Lancaster with a view to renting something out only to discover that they do not hire out costumes any more. I am currently looking into “Northern Costume Hire” in Barnoldswick instead.
I have also been working on our main Rough Magic Theatre website (www.roughmagictheatre.co.uk). I finished making a new website on WordPress.com some time ago but was unsure about how to transfer this new site to our existing domain name and how to get rid of the old site (or whether we needed to).
I got help from a local Bentham business “A White Knight I.T.” and worked out a way to do do it by transferring to their web hosting service and copying the new website across. This has avoided me having to pay 1&1 IONOS and WordPress as well in order to forward the site from IONOS to WordPress. However, it has not been a completely smooth process and not everything on the site was working as it should straight away.
I would appreciate it if as many people as possible could visit the site (CLICK HERE to visit) and tell me if all the links are working properly, if you can see the pictures and slideshows and generally let me know what you think. You can leave any feedback as a reply/comment on this post please.
Puppet Lady 