Voice of the Show

Do puppets dream? Suzie uses gaffer tape and cardboard to find out... Puppet Making: Movement Today we were given the task of making some simple puppets - I say 'simple'... Although the puppets were made from simple materials (cardboard and gaffer tape) they were actually rather complex in the way that they moved.  We made them specifically with movement in mind; how would the joints - the knees, the elbows, the shoulders - be constructed so as to move in a natural and realistic way?! Oli ( Oliver Smart, our instructor ) showed us the intricate way in which a few puppets worked, and then, under his careful consultation, we started constructing our own. Such Stuff as Puppets Are Made On As mentioned above, we used very sophisticated materials - cardboard and gaffer tape! But I'm also referencing a Prospero quote from The Tempest in the subheading there -  We are such stuff /  As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a s...

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...

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Five... by Suzanne Kendall It was time to bin convention and let our imaginations out of the bag today. We re-visited some puppetry basics using - bin bags! You may remember my mentioning an exercise involving bin bags in week one - designed to make us appreciate the potential for life in ordinary objects and to stimulate our imaginations - to see a bin bag as something unique; to look beyond its conventional usage. Today we lay our bags out on the floor and simply sat with them for a while. We watched them when they were still and lifeless. And then we witnessed them come to life when we touched them - we watched them respond - they crinkled and wrinkled and moved. We then made a little 'hood' out of the bags by pinching a portion of the bag between our fingers. We suddenly had something that resembled a little 'creature' to play with. We experimented with the different ways our bin bag 'creatures' could move - slowly, qui...

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Four... by Suzanne Kendall More muppet making today! It was hard to believe that 'Maud' could be improved upon - she was already a real beauty! For a more thorough introduction to Maud, see last week's blog post... but once a bag of felt scraps was introduced to the room, opened and buried into, I began to get some ideas...! I gave her eyes a flash of colour - a lovely, bright and seductive green. I gave her rosy cheeks and coloured in her lips so that she had more of a pout. Finally, I stuck on some eyebrows. Predictably, I accidentally stuck an eyebrow onto myself first - it attached itself to me with fresh, hot glue from the glue gun - ow! Those savage days in design and technology at school all came flooding back... a bit of a comedy act ensued with my jumping up and down and running round the room trying to remove the eyebrow from my blistering thumb with my fingers, only then of course to burn my fingers in the process! Needless to...

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Three... by Suzanne Kendall Today, after a couple of weeks of watching demonstrations and listening to talks about puppetry, our puppetry class became practical. I must admit to feeling a little nervous when I was told we would be making muppets! For all intents and purposes we are defining muppets as moving mouth puppets. Many people think that Jim Henson invented the term by blending together the words 'marionette' and 'puppet' but there is some controversy about this... nevertheless, back to muppet making: I might have been a board-treader at school but was never particularly arty or crafty. Art classes were all very well but design technology terrified me - all those glue guns, scalpels   and cutting machines! Today there were glue guns. And scalpels. And electric bread knives!! There was also foam. A lot of foam! The stuff of which muppets are made... Ordinarily you'd start with a block of foam which you would cut and carve...

And so our journey begins for Pinocchio 2017! We sent our brilliant actor Suzanne Kendall on a six week Puppetry Foundation Course at The Little Angel Theatre, here's her first report..... Playing Pinocchio! Week One... My first session on the puppetry foundation course was absolutely fascinating and made me appreciate what a real art form puppetry is! We looked at why and how puppetry works and were introduced to the idea of puppetry as a communication medium. We examined how the performer treats the object/puppet and how that effects the way the audience perceives it. Oliver Smart (the course tutor) emptied a big bag of puppets onto a table and demonstrated a whole range of them. It was so skilled and entertaining! The strange thing was that the performer completely disappeared and even though you knew they were still there and you could clearly see them operating the puppet, you switched them off. The puppets became more real and life-like than the performe...