Week 1 and 2
Playing with puppets this week has been extraordinary. At first. Ahhh. Confronting. My hands don’t work! The intricacies … The pieces of the puppet go one way and I seem to go the other.
My first job this week was to inhabit the pigeon…get down on my haunches…keep up the yoga…
The pigeons are a work of art. Intricate pieces welded together with many moving pieces. Each puppet has a cup with the puppets name on, because we are
‘working them in’ and so screws cannot be too tight…as a result we have little bolts etc. falling off every now and then. We collect them and they are ready for Sam to fix at the end of the day. By the time we open the puppets will be fine tuned and tightened: we will be used to the puppets and the puppets will be used to us.
We add pigeon sounds (“not sure about this…can’t roll the tongue so well”)…practice makes perfect so I am rolling on a regular basis.
Then there is my squirrel. Delicious. Love her. “Squerl” is tiny, rambunctious, energetic and fast moving (typecast?). She is teaching me about detail. Every action needs to be precise. The move of the head, the flick of the tail, the tips of her paws…
This is ridiculously fun…more than fun…puppets make us focused yet fluid, joyful yet task driven.
We are nearly the end of our second week. I can feel the ensemble growing, led by a terrific team of artists: David (picture above) and Nick (picture below with the artistic associate of the company Helen Stephens).
Sam has multiple skills and one of them is fixing our puppets
Our ensemble consists of four male artists and three female artists, hardly avoidable when you consider the subject matter. I get to play many roles that are male, which is a delight…we are all sailors, then we have our Cameo roles that move the story forward. We operate puppets throughout the show at the same time, which is the beautiful brand of Dead Puppet Society: the puppets and puppeteers are both very visible, working together to create magic.
David in directing mode