bristol experimental puppet festival
On discovering this festival and it’s programme, https://bristolexperimentalpuppetfestival.com/program/, I felt very excited - it was clear to me that this was at the cutting edge of puppetry. It seems from listening to ‘Under the Puppet’ podcast that puppetry is experiencing something of a renaissance. This view is perhaps validated by the fact that, like Nottingham, most of the workshops had sold out. From the three days available to me and two friends, we managed to attend three very different, inspiring and informative events.
Puppets for Pallestine was an extraordinary and moving experience. There was a live zoom link to tents in various parts of Gaza to meet a number of puppeteers using puppets for hope and healing amidst the war. Each had made films about the puppets they make and told a story of some kind with their puppets. These were only available on the night, however one of the puppeteers is on this clip https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ibk7r0U4lyc. These puppets were made from food tins and rubbish, others were made from foam. One of the most moving was a paper mache young boy puppet gazing towards the light and eventually set down in darkness just held by a couple set to Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’- a favourite of mine that I write poetry to. There were live performances on the night too at the venue - there was a homemade Crankie - an illustrated roll of wallpaper turned by two bent forks, situated in a decorative frame, narrated live. There was also a shadow puppetry show by activist emergent queer multi disciplinary artist group Moi Ko - a double bill of ‘Release the Documents’ and ‘The Giant and the Sling’. The biggest take away from this event was community impact and the ability of puppets to process difficult experiences. I think I was also moved by the puppeteer community working across borders and cultures together - they felt like my people.
Tour of the Puppet Place
The Puppet Place https://puppetplace.org/ is a centre of excellence for puppetry based at Bristol’s Harbourside. It is home to a number of world-class freelance artists and also offers workshops/training and mentoring. They organise the festival and run the Puppet Place 48 Film Challenge - to make a puppet film in 48 hours. We met several artists on the tour and saw the work of others in residence. I was struck by the ‘Book Hive’ designed by Roseanne Wakely (Rusty Squid), who was also making robotic spiders. It felt as though books may feature in some way in my story hive. I loved the interaction achieved and the aesthetic.
Shown around by artists Matt Gibbs and Florence Scott, we met artists Cat Rock, Chris Pirie and Araceli Cabrera Caceres. Cat Rock was in the midst of making a crow for a production of The Secret Garden in Bath. She explained her process of problem solving in how she wanted the crow to move in her hands - saying she had found some plastic lids that fitted within each other to get the effect she wanted. When the crow spread its wings and flew with her we all gasped at the effect. Chris Pirie was working with schools using puppets to make anatomy and cellular science more engaging. Araceli works with found objects from nature - predominantly bones and wood. She is a former dancer and the puppets can do extraordinary moves that are now out of her physical reach as she ages. What I took away from the Puppet Place was a sense of people at the top of their game, in demand for work, sharing ideas, solutions, resources. They were very supportive of me as a beginner in the field and invited me to reach out to them if I need help with anything. There are several opportunities on their web page that are of interest in the future.
The third event was ‘Today I wrote Nothing’ by Flawed Mandrake. This performance combined a number of forms - table top hand puppets and shadow puppetry. An old Welsh dresser was used for various scenes. I could see this approach working for a full beehive with a number of supers on top of the brood. The performance was enchanting, funny and clever - we loved it. There was a scene with two Babboshka’s - Russian elderly women plotting to concoct a brew to upset the tummy of the writer Danil Ivanovich that was superbly done. What I took away from this was the detail of elements coming in from different places as humorous surprises, using the old dresser to maximum effect. What needs further consideration is what can be achieved by one performer at this stage in the research.
