Tag Archives: Tim Austin

An RTS NW Puppet Showcase at The Lowry

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Tim Austin and I were lucky enough to be invited to the “No Strings Attached” showcase launch event hosted by RTS NW at the Lowry which was a celebration of the new “Furchester Hotel” series on CBeebies and of North West puppetry in general.

Before we went in we had time to look at the Lowry’s exhibition on TV puppetry with many of our personal favourites making an appearance (see pictures above).  It was a real treat to see the original puppets up close and see how they were made.  I was surprised to see that Basil Brush’s front teeth appeared to have been made of wood!

We also had a very brief conversation with Joe Godwin (director of CBBC)!

At the main showcase event,there were two puppeteers from “The Furchester Hotel” (Andrew Spooner – Fergus & Sarah Burgess – Phoebe) with their puppets plus one of the puppetry interns who had been working with them.  Other speakers included Phil Chalk from Factory Transmedia who created “Strange Hill High” (a part rod puppet part CGI tv series) and also a fellah called Ian Mackinnon, who’d worked with Cosgrove Hall back in the day as well as on modern Tim Burton films such as “Corpse Bride” and “Frankenweenie” plus the puppeteers of Hacker (Phil Fletcher) and Dodge T Dog (Warrick Brownlow-Pike) with their puppets.

They were all invited to talk about their work at some length and we were able to watch some clips of them in action on a projection screen and at the end we were invited to ask questions.  Right, right at the end I went up to nosy at the puppets close to and had conversations with the puppeteers as well.

 CLICK HERE for a link to the RTS facebook post about the evening and they have more photo’s there too.

“The Interrupted Wedding” Shadow Show goes to Ladybarn Primary School

Posted on by Collette Knowles
2

Hello again everybody.  Sorry to have gone a bit quiet for a while. This January I have been mostly attending lots of networking meetings, making plans for the year etc.  So I thought I’d wait till I had something a bit more exciting to blog about.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Last week though I visited Ladybarn Primary School in Manchester.  The Year 2s were doing a project called Puppets & Magic.  The teachers planned to make hand puppets out of felt with the children and wanted them to be inspired by seeing some professionally made puppets. So I performed our Shadow Puppet Show “The Interrupted Wedding” and did a bit of a lecture demonstration looking at different types of puppet from around the world and some of the history etc.  Then I showed the children some performance techniques and then the children played with different types of puppets themselves. “The Interrupted Wedding” is performed using an umbrella for a shadow screen and is a show we use for parties as well as in schools. The show went down extremely well with the children who really enjoyed the story.  This story is an original one written by Rough Magic Theatre’s own Tim Austin.  It is always nice when children tell you they have enjoyed something without being prompted.  In my experience children give very honest reactions compared to adults who might want to be polite and spare your feelings. They also seemed to particularly enjoy seeing some of the puppets from other Rough Magic Theatre productions that I brought in for them to see.  There were 2 rod puppets from our version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, (Stephano and Caliban), the “Pig/Baby” double ended “mouth” puppet  from Alice in Wonderland and the Bunraku style Alice puppet with real hair, (which came off my own head).  The Alice puppet is fun to show how she works as you can see all her insides by lifting up her dress, (kids always find that kind of thing funny) and then of course her head can be removed to show the hand control.  Seeing the Alice puppet’s body without its head is also something children appreciate a lot! The next school we are visiting is in Keighley where we will be doing our “Hansel & Gretel” show and doing a shoe-box toy theatre workshop.  You can read about this workshop in an earlier blog post HERE. If you are interested in booking any of the above shows or workshops please get in contact.  Click HERE to get in touch.