Our Performance.
For our extended practise final performance, we decided to look at puppetry and dance. To help us get started, we looked online for any relevant acts that we could use. We started to look at something called Lion Dancing. We all found this amazing, however we knew that there was no way in which we could achieve something quite like it, as we didn’t have the skills required.
We then looked at videos of Phillipe Genty. These were great acts to look at as this was the direction in which we were hoping to head for our final performance. The use of puppetry, but having the puppeteers as part of the puppet as well, was exactly what we were hoping to create.
Our focus then started to change slightly and we started to look more at costumes rather than puppetry. We looked at the costumes that were used in the West Ends Lion King, however, we realised that we were going off track, as one of our two disciplines which we had chose, was puppetry. So we looked at how we could relate costume to puppetry. It then became obvious that without us trying, costume and puppetry are already related, as different costumes are used to create different puppets, and whether the puppeteer is in black, or part of the puppet, they will still be in costume to resemble, or manipulate the puppet.
After we had all met to discuss about what it was that we were actually going to do for our performance, our attention suddenly turned to plastic bags. We spoke about the way they moved in the wind, and the patterns and shapes that they could make. We also spoke about how they are seen as a dangerous object for the environment, and how they are un natural, but really they are part of every day life, and now matter where we are, we can’t escape them. We questioned whether they had actually become natural... A part of everyday life.
We decided to start creating costumes out of plastic bags, which allowed us to be in them and create a puppet. We didn’t really have any ideas on what kind of puppets we wanted to create, so played with various objects and palstic bags to create things. I’v posted pictures of what we managed to come up with below.
We then thought about ways which we could interlink the plastic bag puppets with dance. We found an article which we found really intereseting and useful, by Nigel Luck and Janet Lee. You can view the whole article below. ‘Nigel Luck and Janet Lee refelct on a showing of work that in various and intriguing ways looked at the relationship between dance and puppetry.’ (The puppet centre trust. 2009)
Between them they believe that dance and puppetry are ‘not a common practice of cross fertilisation in this country.’ (Luck, N, Lee, J. 2008)
They believe that when trying to cross the two disciplines of dance and puppetry, one always leads more so than the other, and there is never really an equal balance. Which, I think, we all agree with as one minute our piece was heavily focussed on dance, and then when we tried to incorporate puppetry, the dance almost became lost.
Luck and Lee started to look at three different street artists, Steve Tiplady of Indefinite Articles, Sarah Wright, and Beccy Smith of Touched Theatre Luck, who all tried creating work involving dance and puppetry. Three other artists then joined in and these were Idolrich, Ivan Thorley and themselves who were extremely interested in this field of work. In the article they look at how each artist/company has developed and approached ways in creating a dance/puppetry piece.
We found this extremely useful as it allowed us to approach creating our performance in several different ways, and gave us room to find the most successful one.
However, having so many different ways to inter link dance with puppetry meant that Luck and Lee were unable to come up with a solution or answer to what dance/puppetry actually is, and how they can link together. On the other hand, this did then allow our group to look at a much wider range of dance/puppetry to create.
We also looked at another article by Luck and Lee which you can also access below:
This talks about how dance/puppetry peformances are mixing two different disciplines, which was useful for us as the aim for our performance was to cross atleast two different disciplines.
We were unable to meet up over christmas so we kept in contact in other ways. When we all got back to university, we met to discuss exactly what it was that we were going to do. Before the holidays we had been creating different puppets and costumes with plastic bags. Hannah created a huge plastic bag, made out of lots of little bags, and this meant that we decided we wanted to use a big plastic bag in our performance, as when playing with it in class, we noticed that there was so much we could do with it.
We knew that we wanted to be part of the puppet which we were going to create, and we knew that we wanted to try and incorporate dance. We also still wanted to use nature in our performance, but somehow create a puppet using nature. We wanted to use natural resources, however in the time we had, and with the kind of puppet which we wanted to create, we realised that it would be impossible to create a completely natural puppet from scratch. Which was frustrating as I believe that if we had been able to do this, our nature part of the performance would have looked a lot better.
We brought a large camoflauge net to create our nature puppet with and decided to leave it how it was when we brought it. We did this because whilst rehearsing, we realised that we were able to create many puppets from it, just by scrunging it up and taking it higer or lower. Hannah, Laura and I were going to be the nature part of our performance, and Ross was going to be the plastic bag. We brought a huge plastic sheet and made Ross a huge plastic bag out of it, Making sure that it fit him and his crutches. He used crutches for the arms of the bag, as when he didnt have them, it was impossible to actually see that he was supposed to be a plastic bag. We took pictures whilst doing this which you can view below.
After Ross’s puppet was made, we then started to create a performance together, using our different puppets. At first it was difficult in trying to find a way to let the plastic bag and nature incorporate, so we decided to talk about things which we had seen that related to our piece, for example. How a plastic bags blows in the wind. The wind maybe manipulating and trapping the plastic bag? Maybe the plastic bag isn’t as dangerous for the enviroment as we thought? Maybe nature wants it to be part of it? We didn’t want to define what our piece was about, but we wanted to roughly show what we were creating to our audience, and then they create a story for themseleves.
We finally created a piece that we were happy with, however we wanted to perform this on the Dytch at University, and realised that it was such a huge space, we would look tiny, so needed something to help create an atmosphere. With Ross and Laura being heads of the drumming band at University, they suggested that we used steel pans for our piece. Everyone really liked the idea, and when Laura asked them to create a piece of music for us, we were extremely lucky that they agreed.
We didn’t actually get to practise with the band in costume as we weren’t allowed to take the steel pans out of their room until the actual day, and the room which they were kept in, was too small for us to practise in. However, Josie, a steel pan member, came to watch our performance so she could write down where it was that we wanted to music to change tempo. We also visited them whilst they were rehearsing with their steel pans, and roughly acted out what we were going to do, to the best we could without the costumes.
I have uploaded our final piece below:
I feel that our piece went really well and I was extremely happy with what we did. However i was upset about the weather condition. We knew that it would be windy, and we knew that we would have to work around that, but I feel that due to the weather, in some parts of our performance, creating the puppets we wanted to create, were hard to do as the wind was blowing the camoflague sheet in all different directions. For example, when Hannah and I created legs for a puppet in which we made, we tried to walk it forward, but due to the wind, the legs were blown back, and I was worried that people were unable to see what it was that we were trying to create. On the other hand, I feel that the wind was extremely good for Ross as the plastic bag. It meant that the plastic sheet was able to move like a real plastic bag would, and without Ross moving, the bag moved itself. I also wish that we were able to rehearse with the steel pans in costume. I think this would have created a better link between the music and performance which we created. I also think that we could have inter linked dance into the performance more. It was more movement which we ended up using in the performance, but I think that this was due to the type of performance we wanted to create, and the atmosphere that it was in. Ross was able to dance, which I thought was really good, however I don’t feel that our nature puppet danced that much. Overall though, I was really pleased with what we created, and if we were to do it again, I would try to incorporate more dance into the piece.
