NPF ‘09 Gallery NPF ‘09 Itinerary

Performed by Hobey Ford, this show is a selection of three folk tales using shadow puppets. Shown in the Ferst Centre, the stage was set up with a small curtained-off booth and a round shadow puppet screen at the top. A groundrow light was in front of the booth, although only used when scenery was being changed from behind the screen.

The first tale was a North American creation story - unfortunately I’ve forgotten the details of it. For all of the pieces, the puppets were simple black silhouettes (a few interesting effects will be mentioned below), along with black silhouette scenery pieces. In this little scene, some fabric was scrunched up and rotated behind the screen to create clouds, which was quite effective.

The second tale is Billy Goat Gruff, with lots of humour and twists on the familiar tale. It’s fun, with lots of tongue-in-cheek jokes. At the end of this, Ford takes a few minutes to explain how his puppets work. At this point, I’m thinking, "Ok, his set up is almost exactly like Richard Bradshaw’s, his puppets are in the same style - only more folk tale-ish - and now he’s also doing the whole demo-in-the-middle-of-the-show thing". At that point, Ford mentioned that he got started in shadow puppets after seeing Richard Bradshaw’s show. Aha , now I understand.

And the third tale was El Coqui, sort of a take on the ant and grasshopper. You can watch the piece yourself at the bottom of this post. Here, there was a great effect of seeing the landscape going past the running frog, using a rotating piece of scenery and a light inside it.

And finally, Ford showed us his ‘Foamies’, a range of carved foam creatures on rods. These are painted animals, and have so much fluidity in the movement (and yet they are single pieces of block foam from all appearances) I wondered whether they were made out of fabric. 

The puppets and manipulation was very good, but there was nothing earth-shattering about this performance - other than the Foamies - particularly as I kept comparing it to Richard Bradshaw’s work, which I think, is of somewhat a higher calibre performance. I give this show: