Live from UNIMA 2008: Day Seven

Read yesterday’s post here. Follow along with Flickr pics here.

Day Seven: Dirty Hands, Shadows, and Farting Confetti

(Be warned, long post ahead!)

Today was pretty manic. After a very filling breakfast, I headed to my first workshop; Visual Narrative and the Object, taken by Sue Giles from Polyglot Puppet Theatre, and Jessica Wilson (Aussie puppeteer). The workshop aimed to help you devise works through object exercises, finding a visual narrative (duh!) for everyday or abstract items. As the facilitators said: it is about finding the knowledge of what the audience sees in an object (ie. a table is used for putting things on), and finding the knowledge of what else you can do with that object (ie. a table turned upside down and used as a skateboard). Although I’m not into performing, I took this class because I want to learn more about writing for puppetry. I find it very hard to write with puppetry in mind, and prefer applying puppets to a script after I’ve written it. I’m also keen on abstraction, so this seemed like a good workshop to take.

I’m not sure if I was wrong or not. Oh, there was nothing wrong with the class itself, just that I suddenly remembered why I hated so much dance classes at uni. I never did like physical workshops…

Anyway, the workshop was in one of the spaces at the Blue Room, and we all quickly got comfortable. A warm up was done using the ‘eating space’ concept – I’d never heard of the term before, but was familiar with the exercise – by which you walk around the space and try not to walk into anybody else, all the while trying to take different random tangents. We did variations on this theme, including: finding two people and keeping equidistant from both, while still walking; using those same two people, and keeping yourself in between one another (that one was particularly turned funny, when the same small group of people tried to outrun each other); using two people and picking a different ‘level’, or height, at which to walk (kneeling, crouching or standing); stopping every so often to look at an item in the room; looking at a new item and whispering its qualities; looking at a new item and applying an emotion to it; picking up the item and applying the emotion to it; etc.

Next, we began doing small improv object exercises. Each of us had to get up and perform a short scene, where we had some ‘object’ (imaginary) hidden away somewhere on them, and then had to interact with it. Some people had things hidden in their clothes, growths, or simply toilet-humour stuff. I, as usual, had to come up with something too complicated for my acting skills, and pretended to use my glasses as a pocketknife. Yes, everyone else in the class seemed to have some form of ability to act; I bombed. (Still, no one else had the idea of pocketknife glasses!)

Once that humiliation was over, we moved onto object exercises with an actual object. I picked a ball of red wool to play with, and we soon began exploring different uses and emotions. Finally I settled on a ‘rock around my neck’ type use, which made my body bend over as it tries to compensate with the weight.

We were then asked to walk from behind one flat, across the room to another, using the object and that particular character that we’d discovered. There were some great ones: a woman who used a glove hanging out of the front of her pants; a man who was totally fixated on a bag of pencils; a woman who scarily (literally) had a pair of scissors hanging off her toes. We got up in groups, and walked across the ‘stage’, interacting with each other along the way.

Taking that further, we walked across the ‘stage’, again in groups, but this time with a new object in the centre of the area, for which the characters needed to negotiate for – or ignore if that’s what their character would do. This was very funny. One scene had the guy with the pencils push a woman with a broom out of the way to get a box, the object of negotiation, and she slow-motion spun off the ‘stage’ and behind the flat. Another character, with shears, came along, and tried to get the box. She takes advantage of the pencils and steals one in order to write her name on the box; the guy gets her back by spilling his pencils into the box, and we had a lovely sound of all of them falling in.

We sat down and discussed moments that we saw in this last exercise, to pinpoint things we liked and wanted to see more of. Then we moved onto the next exercise, which was pretty much the same as the last, except we used large objects. I got a small round desk, and we proceeded to play with it and find an emotional connection. I pretty much played with the idea of how it spins, when upside down or on its side, and then had the idea of using it as a getaway from a ‘bad guy’.

Finally, we got into small groups and used the large objects to create small scenes on a particular topic. Mine was a group effort on evolution, using a wheelbarrow. There was dirt in the wheelbarrow, and we had a whole ‘creating the earth by dumping it in the wheelbarrow, moving the wheelbarrow, woman lies down and gives birth using the dirt’ thing… Yes, it was as weird as it sounds. And yes, the entire class thought so too. (It was deemed that I would be the one to do the dirt moving part, hence the first part of the title of the post)

This brings us to lunch, and boy did I need it! Although I’m not into physical workshops, I’m still glad I went. Sue and Jessica rushed us through a lot of useful exercises, many of which I could see how to apply in my own little way later on.

I went and had a very fast lunch, since I had to be back in half an hour for my next workshop. It’s actually a two-in-one thing; Richard Bradshaw, the great Australian shadow puppeteer, held a workshop and then a masterclass, and you could pick to go to one or both. I went to both. The workshop consisted of Richard explaining how a basic shadow puppet works (draw out an image, make three pieces out of it, and have two rods, which work two of those sections), and how to do the steps of each build.

I’ll explain using my puppet that I made as an example. I wanted to make a flower. So the petals become one piece, the stem is another, and the leaves at the bottom is the third. Each piece overlaps each other slightly, and to make the joints, a small piece of copper wire is pushed through the pieces (ie. the base of the stem through the base of the leaves). Make sure the pieces are in the middle of the wire. Now make each half of the wire into a spiral; this creates a sturdy, but easy to build, joint. The rods are simply pieces of wire, with a handle on it, which hinges to the back of the relevant pieces by way of masking tape. Richard showed us another way to attach the rods, but I’m not going to go into it here.

There were all sorts of tips and hints given out, and as I don’t know anything about shadow puppetry all of it was new and important. Some of the gems: shadow puppets are basically figures that have no movement, have limited movement, or has movement but that movement itself is limited (ie. jaws of a head, which only opens on a 30 degree angle, compared to a jaw that can go 180 degrees). Richard showed us how to both create a stopper so that a jaw doesn’t open too wide, as well as an elastic return that keeps the jaw shut. The rod should be as close as possible to the joint of the piece you want to move, to ensure that only that piece moves when you move the rod. Rods should be longer if you want to move the shadow puppet higher up on the screen, and shorter if they only move along the bottom. … There’s so many useful things, that I can’t fit them all in here. If anyone wants a copy of my notes, I can send them one; they include info on joints and attaching rods, how to do coloured shadow puppets, stuff about staging and lighting, what to use for a screen, etc.

Anyway, there was a short intro/explanation, and then we began making our own puppets. We used a thin white cardboard, scissors, some copper wire, some rods, and masking tape for attaching the rods. I could have done the other method of attachment, but I reached tired at this point, and couldn’t be bothered. At any rate, Richard had explained the masking tape method first, and it was up to us to use whichever method we wanted.

This brings us to the masterclass part of the two-parter, which, it must be said, wasn’t so much a masterclass as an intro to some of the things Richard Bradshaw has done, and how he did it. In the room, he had set up his stage, and we watched from behind as he sped through some of his short scenes from his shows. He has some bloody amazing puppets, many of which are quite complex. There’s a witch that turns into a bat, rotating figures (shadow puppets rarely turn on stage, but are simply removed from view, and a new one, facing the other direction, is brought onstage), ones with moving eyes and mouths, etc. (Check the Flickr pics for some examples)

By this time, we’d run out of time, and I had to run off to a show in Fremantle. A small group of us were booked in together, so we rushed to the train station and got to the play just in time. Read the review here. The show finished, and as I waited for the others to come back on the train, I called my mum – Perth being two hours behind Melbourne, I wanted to catch her before she went to bed. At some point, one of the girls I was with told me I should leave, as there was some sort of brawl outside, and the girls were going to be taking a cab. As I left, cops turned up, luckily I just headed on my way. A little while later and I’m back at the hotel, writing this!

Oy, am I tired!

Tomorrow’s diary post: another meeting with a Perth thespian, a discussion on animatronics, and puppets go improv! With any luck, I’ll be able to fit in a trip to some of the puppet exhibitions going on. UPDATE: Read the next day’s diary post here.

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