The Moon, her Face changeth like The Sea...

Animation - what is animation?
At which point exactly does a marionette, hanging motionlessly from its strings offstage, become alive?
Why am I even interested in answering this question?
Is there some kind of little secret to be found at the point where inanimate becomes animate?

Meddling about with Brecht and Puppetry

Next week the Performance Arts, Puppetry, Design for Stage, Sound and Lighting strands put on our 'site specific' version of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, at Trinity Buoy Wharf in South East London. The four Musketeers, I mean, Puppeteers, have finally been given free reign over a project and we have really enjoyed creating our little 'tea party' scene, in which the two women fighting over the play's bandit hero, Macheath, have a nice cup of tea together with rather hostile undertones. We have made two human-sized 'Polly' and 'Lucy' puppets which we operate in the Japanese Bunraku puppet style - ie. two people operate each puppet, standing behind it and providing their outer arms and hands to give the puppet live hands, with puppeteer #1 operating head and dominant hand, puppeteer #2 supporting puppet body and operating non-dominant hand. Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with the puppet build, taken on by techie extraordinaire Matt, I did make some rather fetching hats, the pink one being my favourite and bestowing eternal life onto my farmers market coffee cup.



The nomadic life of puppet...



Its good to get to grips with actual manipulation techniques at last, and, as Polly #2, I'm learning a lot from Polly #1, my most important lesson so far being: unless your concentration is totally fixed on your puppet, any expression you produce will turn you into an actor, bring the audience away from the puppet, and render you a total failure as a puppeteer! Isn't it fascinating that simply the line of your gaze determines where an audience looks, and therefore what they experience. I suppose being a puppeteer must be rather like being a parent - yourself is no longer number one - your focus is placed on something other than yourself. Its a tough lesson because I tend to get carried away and before I know it I'm acting, not puppeteering...but this is the point of puppetry...to become invisible, or at least to be visible but secondary to the puppet.

Goodbye, Our Lady.

I'm looking back on the main event of the year, Our Lady of the Flowers, my interactive "shrine" to the goddess of the bees, (performed by me, with full mask and costume) who is consumed by an unexplainable grief and a desire to unearth some dusty forgotten myth which lies in the dreams and wishes of the shrine's visitors. Valmar and I first showed at the CSSD Student Puppetry Festival and then at the Accidental Festival at the Camden Roundhouse, and it was fascinating how different two performances can be. The first one, in a black-painted, low ceilinged studio in CSSD, was an intense and lovely experience (for the Lady of the FLowers anyway..)as she sat there all day, surrounded by flickering candles and wafts of jasmine oil, accepting the 'wish scrolls' of the visitors and immersing herself in the soft melancholic sounds of Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Pentangle and other 60's folk nuggets. In that space it was easy to have full focus and concentration...behind the mask time just sped by, it was a blissfully meditative experience and one which I can't really explain or put into words, but it brought back the strange magic of puppetry to me - the intensity of emotion involved in using objects which cannot express emotion. Its the concealment of feeling, the concealment of what is real....isn't that what much of everyday life is about? And is that why so many people, young and old, 'theatre minded' and not, seemed genuinely attached to the Lady of the Flowers...the concealment of her true feelings was taken to the extreme by her mask...I think people related to that without really realising it.

Our next performance (although I'd rather call it an interactive installation)was in the cluttered, noisy, buzzing atmosphere of the Camden Roundhouse cafe. Good, in that it attracted the attention of cafe visitors who would otherwise never have known about such an event. But bad, in that it was very hard to fully 'enter into' the Lady of the Flowers in such an environment, watching people catching up with old friends, engage in deep conversation, play with their babies etc.... I suppose the conclusion is that whilst I originally intended for Our Lady of the Flowers to act like an Indian or Mexican street shrine, for everyday people going about their lives to come and pay homage to, giving their 'wish', it actually needed a very secluded, sheltered and quiet location - it needed its own little temple! So maybe if I go any further along these lines I need to start coming up with designs for mini street temples....hmm how about cob....or maybe an intricately patchworked yurt...



For the moment, though, Our Lady is going on the back burner until I find an ideal public location for another 'wishing shrine'.

Our Lady of the Flowers

She started from a dissected plastic milk container.

That and the sketches........

of a true Goddess of the bees.

Draped in roses, dripping with beads.

Seated at her throne in a cosy, gold-embossed shrine.

Our Lady of the Flowers.

Reeking of jasmine, enough to make you giddy.

Our Lady - full of a sadness that no one understands.

Mourning the loss of....does anyone know.

Is it the bees she mourns?

The naming of Sylvanus

It was a troubling departure from London...all was in a state of disarray. At midnight, with only four hours to go until the alarm call for departure to Stone Henge, I still felt I had to continue with the puppet. He would somehow be important during the festive period - I wanted him to look his best. I wanted him to have a black velvet jacket.

Four am on the morning of the 21st of December, the Winter Solstice, the puppet was wrapped in a blanket, tied with cord, and would later sit on my lap as my bleary eyes watched the scenery change from North London to Wiltshire. Three years after first setting foot inside Stone Henge for the shortest day of the year, we were returning.

It was beautiful to be back. There was the same awe and the same feeling of returning to a safe, sacred, ancient space filled only with people whose similar inclinations had led them to make their voyage there, that very early morning. However, a fear passed through me - that I wouldn't feel the same magic, the same physical sensations which, last time, overwhelmed me. We listened to the Druids' ceremony. I felt like a spectator, whereas last time I felt like a participator...it made me feel empty. Then I remembered the puppet wrapped in its blanket and bound with its cord, hanging from my shoulder, ready to serenade the 2yr old son of my good friend Melissa who we were due to find in amongst the stones. I suddenly knew that this would be a space in which, if I unwrapped my puppet and let him sit on one of the stones, come alive, start breathing, watching and moving, he would be totally accepted. I began to unwrap the puppet.

Well thats the very moment when those crazy feelings returned. It was as though a fever was suddenly seeping into all the muscles of my body, draining them, weakening them, as if they were contracting against their will. The feeling that I had ingested magic mushrooms, or some strange substance beginning to overtake all of my limbs. It was the very feeling I had had three years previously and it didn't come on gradually, it arrived with a jolt - the moment I unwrapped the puppet. Strange.

We found the rock. Tall, thin, above my head height. I gently lifted the puppet so that he was sitting on the rock, looking down onto the hundreds of heads witnessing the solstice ceremony. I could not see the puppet, nor could I see the figures beneath him in his panorama. But one hand was on the stick controlling his head, the other held the metal rod guiding his left hand. And so the puppet became a spectator, a mute onlooker expressing his emotions through the raising of his hands and the turning of his head.

Dear blog, this was my first ever puppetry performance. This was the morning that I stepped into the unknown. Sure enough, he didn't let me down. He felt, he watched, I was wrapped in bliss to be living through him. My feelings finally had a home, a world to inhabit.

The ceremony came to an end, the crowd dispersed. There was an interim. Then the attention rotated 180 degrees. Now the sea of faces were watching the puppet. There was no more dialogue from the Druids to promt the puppet's performance now, only the simple fact that this figure was here, on a rock, on this morning. He continued to live, breathe, create his own story, feed off all around him. Cameras bleeped and flashed.

The lady who smiled the most throughout the performance wondered what the puppet was called, and when I told her it didn't have a name, that today was the first day of its completion and existence, she wondered whether it might be named after Sylvanus, after her Druid guide. And so on 21st December my very first puppet was christened Sylvanus.

A table puppet in the making ...

Playing Truant

Excuse me for going home this afternoon. I just couldn't do it any more.

You see, when you spend weeks being given incredible skills, having creative doorways opened for you, it gets to a point where unless you go home and sleep, and process all of this wonderment and decide what on earth to do with it, it is pointless.

We've learnt how to communicate a message by making a puppet.

How to communicate a message by using an object.

How to communicate a message by manipulating light sources.

We've been given a tool box which for me is exciting beyond belief, but the downside is that I am so exhausted I can't think straight. That is why I need to be here, home, trying to remember what I originally intended to do with this degree.

I think it's time to just..........um...........try and put something together. To take the plunge, stop procrastinating, pondering, speculating..........and just start making something that is mine, comes from my brain, no matter how sketchy, how amateurish, how naive. Wasn't that why I did this in the first place?

Part of the exhaustion of the past 24 hours stems from a visit I made after school yesterday, to the Mayfair Squat. Two people from my course told me they were going to a squat in an exclusive street in Mayfair, central London, to prepare for a performance they are putting on tomorrow involving a painter and a pianist. They told me this squat had become a collaborative artistic eutopia. I was tired, and feeling a little run down, but gut overruled brain and I knew I had to go with them.

It is exhausting to be over-inspired. It truly takes the life force out of you.

Past immaculately-suited Park Lane businessmen we stroll beneath huge, ornate buildings with vast windows....shiny black chauffer-driven vehicles whizz up and down the road....there is an exclusive-looking restaurant on one side of the road. On the other.......a fairly neutral but majestic building, with one enigmatic, hand made flag hanging over the entrance. The massive wooden door has a handwritten squatters' rights sign fastened to it. We knock for ages, no answer. This building is five storeys high after all. Finally a small, foreign guy wearing a beanie lets us in and disappears back into the labyrinth. My friends try to find their contact. I follow, up sweeping staircases, along passageways, across landings.

Its hard to express my feelings. Imagine you had a dolls' house in which you had invented a make-believe artistic hideaway, filled with mysterious nooks and crannies, distant melodies, treasure, and a variety of characters each with an interesting story to tell. Then imagine you became tiny and were able to explore it, wide-eyed.

On the bottom floor, a dozen bicycles belonging to the temporary and permanent inhabitants who constantly came and went through the wooden door. A huge drawing room, in which some people were constructing what looked like a treehouse with inter-connecting bridge. The next floor up.........we pass through a room containing a maze lined by doors. We twist and turn through the room, catching occasional glimpses through the gaps, of peoples' private dens and studios. On the top floor, a girl and a boy are creating a kind of glade surrounded by an arc of tree branches. There is the smell of burning sage.

What huge potential has this £6 million disused, high-ceilinged, expansive mansion.

After clearing timber, lugging a piano and sweeping the floor I leave with my head in a whirlwind.