Voice of the Show

The foundation course has ended but Suzie's pursuit into puppetry is far from over... Stepping out of the shadows: Shadow Puppetry!  For our last session on this course we examined what might have been, for many of us, our first foray into puppetry – whether this was on a bedroom wall in the dimming lamplight or against the canvas of a tent with a torch whilst camping – we all have childhood memories of making shadow play. Shadow puppetry is an ancient form of storytelling and entertainment, an old tradition with a long history especially in Southeast Asia where it is often revered as art! Although I think my shadow puppetry has a little way to go before it could be described as such...! All that's required is an object, a light source and some kind of screen. We were to make the objects, the light source was supplied by a mobile phone or a projector and there were two screens set up – one made from two tables put together and turned on their side with a sheet acr...

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...

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...