Most of the puppetry at this festival was found on the street or outside. Here is a page with two different outdoor pieces from different parts of the city.
Tag Archives: puppetry
Puppet Postcard #3
One of the most amazing things in Santiago a Mil was the street show DUNDU–two massive light-up puppets that were created in Germany and have been appearing at events and festivals around the world for several years.
Puppet Postcard #2
This travelogue page is about the show Nómadas by the Chilean-Spanish theater company Teatro Llave Maestra, which was presented at the Santiago OFF festival.
Space-Bop Rehearsals
Séamus Miller with the rocket ship. Photo by Tia Shearer-Bassett.
We are thrilled with the enthusiastic response to Space-Bop, including this lovely review from Our Kids. If you would like to see it, visit our friends at Arts on the Horizon.
Meanwhile, here are a few photos of the rehearsal process. The cast is Séamus Miller as the performer/clown and Christylez Bacon as the musician.
October Grab Bag
A round-up of links, articles and videos we shared on Twitter this month.
See article #2.
- If you’re in DC this week, check out this film festival. Like our show Saudade, it focuses on stories of immigration.
- If I ever make it to Vietnam, I’m definitely going to try and see some water-puppetry.
- Ten years ago, I met Marsian De Lellis at the O’Neill Puppetry Conference in Connecticut. This article he wrote on HowlRound is a great piece about reasons we do puppetry.
- There’s a puppeteer in this list of 20 Theatre Workers You Should Know!
- Next time I can’t get elementary students to focus, I’m definitely going to tell them about these Lego Ninjago puppets!
Puppets in the Berkshires
Company member Genna Davidson attended a two week puppet intensive up in New England this summer. Here is her account of the trip.
This past August I spent two weeks in Williamstown, Massachusetts (okay, so it’s not really the Berkshires, but it’s just next door) at the New England Puppet Intensive. I worked alongside an incredible group of artists learning, playing, eating, and sometimes stargazing.
The workshop was held at the Buxton School for the Arts and as the name forewarns, the workshop was intense. The two weeks felt more like two months because we were up at 8:00am and worked until 10:00pm or 11:00pm every day. In the morning we warmed our bodies and minds with yoga. Then we either had drawing or Suzuki (a Japanese approach to actor training). After lunch we would usually break into small groups and work on creating our final 10-minute puppetry piece to be presented at the end of the second week. The “puppet camp” counselors (David, Pete, and Nan) guided us on our journey and provided us with the inspiration for the final performances.
This year the theme they gave us to use as a springboard for our work was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I was very proud of the performance my group gave. Our exploration of Shelley’s work led to the creation of a puppet who trades her limbs for new ones only to find that she is haunted by the stories attached to each limb. Our piece ended up being somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes long. Ooooops. They didn’t make us cut it shorter though. There were two other small groups. One group meditated the importance of the ones connection to nature, and the other created a piece about creating feminine beauty through destruction of the self. It was inspiring to see how each group took the starting material and ran with it in different directions.
I think the most important thing I learned at the Intensive is that to create work you have to jump in even if things are half done and you can’t see clearly where you’re headed. You have to trust that the story will be what it needs to be and creation is always a journey into the unknown.
An Interview with Gabriela Cespedes
When Cecilia was traveling in South America last year, she took a workshop with Argentine puppeteer Gabriela Cespedes in the art of caja lambe-lambe puppetry at the Convocatoria de Mujeres Titriteras (Convention of Women Puppeteers). The following is an interview with Cespedes about her work. It has been translated from Spanish and condensed for this blog post.
Gabriela Cespedes, teaching a lambe-lambe workshop in Argentina.
Cecilia Cackley: How did you become a puppeteer? When did you first become interested in puppetry as an art form?
Gabriela Cespedes: My training comes from acting. I started doing theater in 1988, with Mariu Carreras, a great teacher. It essentially taught me that theater takes place when we are dealing with the public and that is why you always have to create and perform work for an audience. Puppetry came later, in 1996 when I start to do street shows with two colleagues and became forever trapped in the art of puppetry …my interest in this technique must have been born from playing with small things, making houses, staging and playing with friends to make characters.
CC: Are there projects that have changed in response to audience comments? How do you maintain a balance between other people’s criticism and your own vision?
GC: At first audience comments about a work they had seen affected me a lot and I always tried to change small things … but after a while I realized that art is intimate and solitary, that one can not meet the whims of each viewer … so when someone makes any criticism I take it with respect and affection, and on the other hand I still respect my artwork as I conceived it.
One of Gabi’s lambe-lambe shows, set up for spectators.
CC: Do you work alone or in collaboration with other puppeteers? Why or why not?
GC: At this moment all my works are solo … by choice or because it has been easier to move from one place to another by myself with my puppets !!!!
There are plans to work in groups … but we are always organizing activities in conjunction with other puppeteers.
CC: What project are you working on right now?
GC: At the moment I am researching miniature drawings to use in both stop-motion animation and lambe-lambe theater or caja magica.
CC: What advice do you have for people who want to work with or learn more about puppets?
GC: The art of puppetry is an ancient technique, captivating, trapping, that allows us to travel into unsuspected worlds … but mostly it is hard work and a lot of research, and that is fundamental to puppetry … and as they say in Japanese “give life to the wood” in that is everything, be able to give life to everything that comes into our HANDS !!!!!
Puppets and Clowning
Some of my colleagues from this trip to Armenia.
After getting back from Winnipeg, I had just a short break before leaving on another international trip, this time to Yerevan, Armenia with a group of clowns and artists led by Patch Adams. Adams, the founder of the Gesundheit Institute, is a clown, activist and speaker. He saw our show Cabinets of Kismet in 2013 and we have been in touch since then, talking about the possibility of using puppetry on one of these trips.
It was a new and different experience to be working with puppets in an entirely improvised setting, without words (I don’t speak any Armenian) and usually without story. Our group visited hospitals and orphanages in four different Armenian cities, encountering children of all ages. I found that the puppets usually worked best in a hospital setting, or where children had limited mobility. In these kinds of places, we were moving from room to room, often on our own or with just one other person. The intimacy of small numbers meant I could take the time to introduce the puppet, play and let the child try it out for themselves.
Clowning and puppetry have a lot in common. An emphasis on physicality, over the top reactions and wordless interaction are hallmarks of both art forms. Just as the children laugh at the surprise of an adult in a colorful wig or giant false bottom, they laugh at the surprise of a puppet appearing out of a bag or box. I had never worked as a clown before and so I didn’t have as many familiar ‘bits’ or planned interactions to fall back on, but I found that the puppets worked well as an introduction to many kids, especially those who were shy at first.
I brought only hand puppets on this trip–a sock puppet, basic glove puppet and tiny mouse finger puppet–thinking that they would be easiest for the kids to understand and manipulate. If I have the opportunity to do this kind of work again, I’d like to bring some object puppets (similar to what we created for Kismet) and see if kids respond to that. Part of the fun of puppetry is often taking familiar objects and turning them into personalities, with or without words. It would be great to see what kids in other places come up with using that style of puppet.
April Grab Bag
A round up of articles, photos and links we shared on Twitter this month.
See #5. Photo by Mister Finch.
1. Another profile, this time of puppet-maker David Haaz-Baroque.
2. Pat has seen this from Peru and really likes their work. Too bad we couldn’t go up to NYC for the show!
3. Beautiful unique puppets from Vietnam.
4. More cool creations, this time by Matt Hopkins from Portland, OR, shared with us by our friend and Malevolent Creatures collaborator Nikki Martin.
5. The toadstool spirits here reminded me of some of the Malevolent Creatures characters.
Postcard #3
Reply
Wit’s End artistic director Cecilia Cackley is currently traveling in South America. While she is gone, Cecilia is keeping a visual journal of the places she visits and shows that she sees. She will be posting pages here occasionally as virtual postcards from her trip.
Wit's End Puppets 