family

I haven't written anything on the blog for a while as I'm away from the Boo, staying in Minneapolis, Minnesota. in the USA. I'm visiting home and family - but not people related to me, or the place that I grew up. This is a different type of home - the place that I first fell head over heels with puppetry and the community of artists, organisers, families and eccentrics that gather around a puppet theatre.This family is In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, and I am staying at the house of my lovely puppet-sister Sandy Spieler, director of the theatre and my great mentor. And just like any other type of family, the times that everyone comes together are the same - births, deaths, marriages and milestones. Well this year I missed the miletone - the gigantic, joyful 39th Mayday Parade and Festival. But two other imortant events are happening in this family's life which I wanted to mark - first, the much mourned passing of Jim Koplin - academic, farmer and volunteer for 25 years at in the Heart of the Beast, with whom I passed many, many hours paper macheing and discussing poetry, politics and planting.

Here's a picture of Jim with Sandy, preparing the giant River puppet on one MayDay morning. his puppet family held a beautiful memorial service at the theatrelast Saturday, performing puppets that Jim helped to make, singing songs he would have loved and telling beautiful stories about him.
At the other end of the family celebration spectrum, this coming Saturday I will be attending the wedding of a wonderful young woman who I first met making parade puppets together when she was a beautiful feisty flame-haired 7 year old. And over the many years of the parade that I have been part of, she has also been like an inspirational big sister to my my own feisty red-haired daughter. It should be great fun, not least because it will bring so many people together.

Something funny happened yesterday evening which reminded me that there is also another kind of puppet family, almost like a bloodline that runs through, linking one theatre company with another across continents, joined sometimes by a shared aesthetic, sometimes by social or political motivation, but truly connected by people, puppeteers travelling around, working with different companies, taking ideas, tricks and techniques with them and leaving a puppet trail behind them. And so last night I met Mark Dannenhauer, a photographer and sometime puppeteer that Sandy worked with in the early days of Bread and Puppet Theatre. As I told him about our work at Horse + Bamboo, he told me of a new company, made up of B+P performers, who are touring with a horse and wagon in the Applachian mountain region of North Carolina. They call themselves the Rural Academy Theater. Sure enough, when Mark put me on the phone to Gabriel, one of the founders, he already knew of our work, but even more coincidentally told me that Chez - better known known to us as the less wolfish performer from our own Red Riding Hood, is going to tour with them on their horse-drawn tour this autumn, before coming back to work with us! Which made me think it would be so much fun to make a family tree, showing all the lines of influence, inspiration and relatedness, including Welfare State International and Bread and Puppet, Horse + Bamboo and In the Heart of the Beast, Handmade Parade and Shadowland  http://www.shadowlandtheatre.ca/ along with hundreds and hundreds more links. Although maybe just as well there's the www, as I think it's beyond my powers of genealogical investigation. But a journey to visit them all, now that sounds like lots of fun....

busy boo

I'm writing this from the cold but sunny doorway of the Boo. Today we're a polling station, so I've been here since 6.30 this morning welcoming neighbours into the building to do their civic duty. Of course, lots of people are coming who've never been here, and are really interested to get information about what we've got on. And then, of course, there are the few you'd expect to refuse information, already furious that they have to come into such a degenerate arty space to vote - hmmm...wonder how they'll be voting. Still, it's always fun to irritate people with a smile!

On Sunday we managed to squeeze in 90 people to see Angel Heart Theatre's Mazymeg and the Honeybees. The show was great, and people really loved staying around to look closely at the beautifully made puppets. Before the show the studio was heaving as usual with families making pollination crowns and little toy theatres full of bees and flowers. Long-time puppet enthusiast Dan (pictured above) made a fantastic scene inside a beehive, complete with honeycombs, larvae and a bee clock(!) with a pixie from the show paying a visit.

The space really was bursting at the seams again. Very welcome news, then that we've just got the first part of the funding towards expanding the space (wow - brilliant!). We do need to match-fund all of it (and then more besides), but ultimately it will enable us to seat far more people in shows, allow them to get a better view of the stage, expand the studio space for making activities, and provide access to the garden and the studio from the front of the building so that we can have more happening here.
Speaking of more happening...

On Friday 10th May Senegalese Kora player Doudou Cissoko will be performing here, and we're turning the theatre space into a place for dancing and toe-tapping. Sadly for me it coincides with my exciting  adventure to Ireland with Incredible Edible to look at community gardening in Cork. Then, two days later on May 12th  the whole building will be buzzing with our (sort of) annual Open Day. Lots of drop in activities, storytelling, works-in-progress. Should be a great day, and a brilliant opportunity for people to see all the usually off-limits parts of the building.

And so to news of Moominland Midwinter. Well, after a bit of a bumpy journey, it looks as though we have the go ahead to proceed with the show! WooHoo! So now lots and lots to make. First of all, some changes Moomin Characters ltd want me to make on the puppets already made, and then maybe a giant moomin. That would be cool.

many hands make ... work more fun!

The workshop has been buzzing this week as a wonderful team of volunteers paper mached, scrimmed, drilled and sanded their way through a mountain of moomin making, and learned a few handy techniques in the process. A teacher, a theatre designer and two foundation students joined me in the workshop and it was great to see what we achieved between us. Elke and Kaylie , who came for all three puppet making days, really wanted to learn how to make a trigger control for puppet heads, so sure enough the heads for Little My and Salome the Little Creep that we mached on Friday got removed from the moulds and now are able to nod to each other beautifully!

Rowan and Lauren pitched in on Tuesday, paper macheing heads, sanding wooden hands and removing the body of the biggest of the moomintroll puppets from its mould - these puppets will be around 4ft tall in total, so I'm very keen to see how they look when all the parts are put together - and, more importantly, how practical they are for puppeteering. Its going to be important to keep the weight down as much as possible, so the heads and bodies are paper mache, but I think the limbs will be wooden - I'll just have to hollow them out as much as possible. It did feel a lot like the mashed potato scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I started to make the body, but somehow ended up looking more like a poor-man's disposable Barbara Hepworth sculpture! Let's hope the audience don't think that, too.

It feels really good to make progress on the show - it's a bit of a stop-start process having to go through the process of approval from Moomin Characters Ltd, the organization who manage Tove's estate, and some of the characters have been made and remade a few different times. When we made Little Leap Forward a few years ago, we based all the masks and puppets on childhood photos that Guo Yue provided for us of his family in China, and whilst Yue and Clare Farrow, his wife and writer, approved the script, they were happy for us to interpret the photos into mask form. I hoped it would be similarly straightforward with the Moomins. The great news thus far is that Hattie's script has been approved, and so has the beautiful set design produced by Tom Rogers. But I am still trying to find a happy meeting place between the needs of a puppet that has to be neutral enough to carry a range of emotions throughout the show, and the requirements of the licensing body. Hopefully the latest crop are closer to what they have in mind.

The Nightingale has also just sang its last song for a while. Here's a review from when it was in London. I saw it just over a week ago in Bath, and Mark and Aya were still putting their all into it. Thank you to both of them, for always making sure that each audience who sees it for the first time gets the same wonderful performance as those at the beginning of the tour. They've been on the road for a long time - I'm sure they will be quite glad to be home again for a while. Hooray!

making choices

The first crop of new Moomin characters are starting to emerge from the clay buckets in the workshop, and the realisation has dawned that all sorts of design choices have to be made- what level of modelling goes into the faces? Will they look like the same characters without big eyes? Of course the complication with this show is that the decisions aren't ours - the character designs have to be approved by the foundation who manage Tove Jansson's work. Usually in creating a Horse + Bamboo show,  the masks and puppets have their own logic - but the logic of line drawing is quite different, and the bits of information you choose to leave out aren't necessarily the same.  Somehow Moomintroll himself was more straightforward (which we made for the R+D months ago) - a smooth, simple head, a rounded snout. But Too-Ticky is more complex - for a start, she's more human. Well, we'll see what the foundation have to say.

Yesterday was also the design R+D for the new 20 Stories High show - Melody Loses her Mojo. For this show we are talking about creating a puppet to represent Harmony, Melody's 5 year old sister. In this show the 'fitting in' is with the human characters rather than the other puppets - the Mojo puppets represent a different level of reality, whilst Harmony is definitely of this world. In Horse + Bamboo shows puppets are sometimes used to be 'little world' versions of mask characters, so of the same materials, style, colouring. In this show Harmony doesn't want to obviously be a puppet at all - and so all the information I would usually choose to leave out of the sculpting might need to be in - therefore much more realistic. Usually I work so instinctively - it feels this is definitely the year to be questioning my choices, my long held beliefs.

MOOMINS!

I've decided - Monday is the official start of puppet making for the Christmas show - MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER. It's a show we are making for the Egg, the beautiful children's theatre in Bath. The last two days have been a slightly exhausting delight - Lee Lyford (the Egg's associate director), Hattie Naylor (the writer), Tom Rogers (designer) and myself spent pretty much two whole days working through Hattie's script and working out HOW it can all happen. Tom has the incredibly hard task of working out how to represent all of the many spaces and scales in the show without filling the stage to bursting. And now the list has emerged - at least 35 fully articulated puppets - Too-Tickys, Hemulens, Little Mys and Moomintrolls in various sizes, not including shadows, animations or flat objects. I think I'd better get going!

I shall be strengthened and motivated by the words of the inspirational children's author David Almond on Desert Island Discs this morning - "Where else is our culture going to be regenerated except through young people and through art for young people". Made my day.

order from chaos

It's been such a mixture of stuff recently - sadly none of it in the workshop (mind you, that is still a bit chilly, so perhaps not such a bad thing!). A lot of my attention has been put into working on designs for the Christmas show (ah, the mystery....!) - a mixture of budding excitement at chatting with Bob and Jonny about design solutions, neat little ways of portraying big ideas with simple, quirky visuals, and frustration at not actually being able to realise any of them just yet. It's great to have a long inroad into a project, a time for talking over possibilities and not feeling pressured into taking the most obvious path, but sometimes the best solutions to problems are found whilst in the workshop, in the wonderful state you enter when carving, sculpting or papier macheing that lets your mind wander in creative circles, hovering around an idea, looking at it from unexpected angles and then swooping down on a solution your conscious planning mind would never have come up with. I got a wonderful present for Christmas from my son, Joe. A book of cartoons by the delightful Steven Appleby. He writes about the blessings that come from having a messy mind. It really struck a chord with me. Sometimes when I try hard to think about something, it eludes me. But when I'm layering on the brown paper and paste the elusive clever bit of my mind, the bit that I'm not in full control of, swoops down and scores a goal.

The other big piece of work has been programming the last bit of the spring season and trying to shuffle around the possibilities for the brilliant Puppet Festival on July 6th and 7th. In some ways its not dissimilar to making a show. Sometimes all the little bits of paper with names of shows and companies and amounts of money have to sit, apparently at random, on my desk and through time, whilst thinking about something else, a brilliant thought will come that ties things together and makes it feel like a festival.

Well, the puppet festival isn't fully formed yet, so I won't give anything away about that, but some of the wonderful surprises for the Spring season are that we have 3 international shows coming up -  Doudou Cissoko, a fantastic Kora player will be here on Friday May 10th at 7.30 thanks to Spot On Rural Touring, La Baracca, an internationally renown company creating work for early years audiences will be binging Spot, a playful interaction between a performer and a moving light on Sunday June 9th (don't worry if you look at the link - it's in English!), and...late breaking news...Slapdash Galaxy, a silly and wonderful shadow puppet show about the wonders of the Universe for older (though not mature...) audiences, will be here on Thursday June 13th at 7.30. Christina, Mark and Jonny saw it at the Edinburgh fringe last year and Chris has enthused about it ever since - but then she does have a bit of a thing about Outer Space (and Brian Cox...)

I've been feeling terrible that I haven't had a camera with me at key moments in the Boo calendar recently. I love to be in the studio in the slightly chaotic yet delightful making sessions before every show, and see delightful interactions between parents and children, astonished at what they've been able to make.I wish I could take pictures with my eyes and look at the joyful faces over and over.  We made really beautiful knot-doll cloud babies when DNA were here in January - parents who are firm wonderweb believers, re-learning how to sew and teaching their children -  and then just recently, when the Tinderbox from Norwich Puppet Theatre came to visit we took on the most complicated project to date - crazy dog puppets with giant eyes! Luckily Joel the amazing photographer came to the rescue and sent me pictures of  the puppets his family made on the day - pretty fun!

Last, but certainly not least, the new WEBSITE is live and lovely. Hooray, Bob!

work-in-progress

Joy! We unexpectedly found a couple of days free in the tour schedule for Mark and Aya that hadn't been filled with schools workshops, and decided to use the opportunity to tweak bits of The Nightingale that didn't feel they were working so well. It's very hard when they're away on tour to do more than give occasional notes, so by the end of last year I had quite a list of niggles that would take rehearsal time to rework. It was the first opportunity that Chris Davies, the musical director, had had to see the show since it was in Manchester at the very beginning, so it was really useful for him to see how it has progressed, and also an opportunity for him to alter things himself. It felt fantastic to add in a new piece of music for the end, shorten some parts and lengthen others, and - most exciting - give the set a fresh coat of paint!
The set has been through a few incarnations - in its first outing last Christmas Bob made painted sculptural reliefs in earth-tones, then for this tour he rebuilt it with a shallow relief of trees and painted it in Chagall-like colours - but it felt too bright. Now its final makeover is complete, it looks just lovely. Here's a detail:

Now Mark and Aya are off on tour again, and our minds here are turning to other things - the new website that Bob is building (live tomorrow - HOORAY!), this Sunday's (Feb 10th 3pm) show at the Boo of The Tinderbox, by Norwich Puppet Theatre, programming for our small-but-lovely Puppet Festival, which will be on the 6th+ 7th July, and continuing the design work for the Christmas show - what a brilliant mix!