Playing Pinocchio! - Week Six

By -



Playing Pinocchio! - Week Six... by Suzanne Kendall


Don't tell Maud (the muppet I made 3 weeks ago)... but today's class made her look a little unsophisticated! Hard to believe I know! And that is because we worked with marionettes - defined as puppets on strings. Rather complex little creatures..


The session was taken by Tinka Slavicek - a puppeteer and puppet maker. For more info about Tinka and classes she runs at Little Angel Theatre, see: http://bit.ly/2stfOCh And she brought some of her friends along too...








After a demonstration on how some of the marionettes worked, we were lucky enough to spend an hour or so playing with them ourselves.

I dashed straight to the more-or-less life-size marionette of the little girl, seen here in the top picture. Talk about jumping into the deep-end! She had a lot of strings and was quite complicated to use as well as being very heavy! My right arm was killing me after only a few minutes of trying to operate her. Clearly strength and stamina are required by marionettists!
 Then I had a go with some of the smaller, less complex models. A little easier but I can now appreciate that operating a marionette requires knowledge and familiarity of the particular model and plenty of practice!

 In this respect I look forward to meeting Pinocchio and getting to know and work with him...
 

  
We finished off by making our own very basic marionette. Please don't tell Maud I've been making other puppets - she's the only puppet in my life! 

 Apart from Pinocchio that is...! ;)

Suzie x





Tickets are now on sale for The Adventures of Pinocchio 

Click here to book your tickets

0333 666 3366 (fees apply)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The story of Voice of the Show

By -
Image
The story of Voice of the Show The end of the start  How did Voice of the Show begin? Well, let's go back to a cold December night in 2016.... Four friends are posing for a photo on a stage set. They are sitting on a chair that was found in a skip, in front of them is a hydraulic grave stone, all around are actors and crew relaxing and celebrating the end of a successful run of 18 shows. Their first production:   A Christmas Carol was by all standards a success -   it sold over a thousand tickets, was staged in a theatre that had never seen a production of that scale before and received rave reviews. But amongst the noise and laughter of people drinking  and enjoying the party there was a moment, a pause. The four people in the chair looked at each other and time seemed to hold for a beat - nine months of hard work and stress seemed to crystallise in that single moment. One of them said: 'How did we just get away with that?'  laughter a...
Read more

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Two

By -
Image
Playing Pinocchio! - Week Two... by Suzanne Kendall Having established that puppets need to be treated with respect it was time to to show similar respect to a rather famous figurehead in the puppet world Ronnie Le Drew. Ronnie came to the class this week to give a talk about his illustrious career as a puppeteer. He was in fact the man behind some very popular puppets that epitomised my childhood: Zippy in Rainbow, Sweep in The Sooty Show (see photo below) the list goes on... As well as working with puppets on television, Ronnie has also worked in theatre (he began at The Little Angel Theatre itself) and films (including The Labyrinth and Muppets Treasure Island). Here's his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Le_Drew His career clearly demonstrates the importance puppets play across all media and how they can connect with a range of audiences too. Suzie x Ronnie Le Drew and Sweep!
Read more

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Seven

By -
Image
Playing Pinocchio! - Week Seven... by Suzanne Kendall This week Maud met Ronnie Le Drew! It was time to bring our muppets out of the bag again and I was pleased to see Maud after my brief affair with bin bags and marionettes over the past couple of weeks! I think she was pleased to see me too, mind you she always has the same smiling eyes and facial expression! However, this week she'd have some more life breathed into her and I'd get to see how much more dynamic she could be... Ronnie Le Drew (see Week Two ) went around the room and briefly tried out everyone's muppets. He demonstrated how the look of the muppet could inform their voice and the way they moved - their character. He showed us various ways of 'walking'. He also taught us how to operate the muppet's mouth when it's 'speaking' - how to lip sync the muppet with our voices - we practiced this by counting. When we got to number 'sev-en' the muppet opens and closes it...
Read more