Tag Archives: technical

Toy Theatre “Made in Lancaster”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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On Display at The Duke's Gallery, Lancaster

Toy Theatre-like "Nesting Boxes"

I have recently found out about an interesting local festival that is to be hosted at The Duke’s Theatre in Lancaster. The name of the festival is “Made in Lancaster” and as you might expect it is a showcase of the work of people in Lancaster. It spans many different arts disciplines and is meant to be for edgy experimental or work in progress kind of performances etc. As the theatre day of the festival is on June 11th we do not have any time for new work in progress as we are working on our Hansel & Gretel making and performance for the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival to be performed 1-3rd of June. However what we are planning to do is to make a video version of the show before we go to The Netherlands and not only will this mean that the people of Lancaster and anyone else who comes will get to see a version of our Toy Theatre show, and we will have this video then for publicity purposes ourselves, after the event. There are many short film making enthusiasts connected with the Duke’s, both in the Lancaster Film group and also showing their films as part of the Made in Lancaster Festival. So we are hoping that one or two of these gifted individuals will help us out with the filming.

If you’re wondering why we don’t just perform it live, like we will in The Netherlands, the answer is that it does not bind us to being in Lancaster on that date and that the toy theatre and puppets will take a long time to arrange and it would be awkward to slot in between other acts using the same space. We did consider using a live streaming of the performance projected on to a big screen (like George & Ann Neff did for their Nativity show) so that larger numbers could see the performance. But aside from the previously mentioned problems of performing live this would have additional technical elements to deal with and would not necessarily be able to focus on characters and scenery at different distances.

If you’re wondering, what is the picture at the top all about? The answer is that the place where we were holding the meeting about the Made in Lancaster Festival was The Duke’s Gallery, which is inside The Duke’s Theatre building. In this gallery, coincidentally, there were a number of artworks in the form of arty “nesting boxes” which struck me as being reminiscent of Toy Theatres. The whole bird themed exhibition is top quality stuff, very quirky and interesting and definitely worth a look if you’re in the area. Below is a link to an article about the artist who made the above exhibit and another artist involved with the exhibition and it contains Melanie Callaghan‘s email address near the bottom.

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.