Archives for category: Fun
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Good to be a Dede

June 30, 2014 //
2

chicken and nosy neighbour

Last weekend the Dedes were a bit upset with me for favouring the chickens. The birds showed up and I went all gooey. The Dedes have made such an effort over the last few months waiting patiently and quietly in the art cupboard for me to find my feet again. I do appreciate this but I don’t know how to express it. Nosy Neighbour, who always wants to know what’s going on, had a little peek today from the upstairs window to check out the new competition. I am pleased that he decided he wouldn’t swap places with them for anything in the world. And I hope he will tell all the others there is a clear benefit to being a Dede. You are allowed to stay inside when rain is pouring down outside.  On this rainy day I too found a new appreciation for the Dede folk. They don’t make a mess! I am not really looking forward to braving the elements and cleaning out the chicken mansion today. The girls are pretty messy!

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Relationships, Social Network

Cat TV

June 29, 2014 //
0

chicken and cat

The neighbours have four or five cats and come dinner time a few strays find their way to their property for a free feed as well. The moving in of our boarders must have been the talk in the cat community yesterday. Last night, they behaved themselves and only observed from the far distance. Today a few brave ones came closer. The chickens are huge and I hope the cats think it’s TV not dinner. We have been assured the chooks will be able to defend themselves, in fact they can be very vicious. The last thing I want is some casualties on either side. At this stage, the neighbours are as excited about our ladies as we are. Should one of the cats come to harm it might be a different story.

The first night in the hen house was eventless. At nightfall, they all found their way into the chook mansion, we didn’t even have to round them up. When I closed the flap it was immediately lights out and they stopped talking.  I was surprised, as they came from different pens. I would have expected a bit of fighting over the best places on the roosts. Obviously there is a comfortable space for all of them. At half past seven this morning I heard them getting restless and I let them out again, hoping there would be some eggs. Though I was told they might take a break for three or four days while they were settling in. Sure enough the laying boxes were empty. Then after breakfast three of the brown hens were hanging suspiciously around the chook house. When I looked again later one of the boxes contained three eggs. How exciting! Good girls. The two black ones we have are too young to lay. The rest are heritage breeds that don’t lay as much as the brown ones, so no surprises there.

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Categories Fun, Life, Social Network

Sense of Normality

June 28, 2014 //
0

chicken

Today the chickens arrived. Their job is to dig over and fertilise our backyard. I am sure they will have a good life here. As you can see in the pic, our garden is rather overgrown. I am in love with them already. They are gorgeous animals and I am looking forward to keeping a chick diary. I might even start a new blog with chick pics only. Of course, the Dedes would be very unhappy if I started something new and neglected them in favour of some chickens. I can’t do that and I won’t do that. Over the last few months I have been working hard to get some gigs lined up for the Dedes. The week after next I am running two stop motion holiday workshops and I am currently consulting with the Dedes about who will be joining me for those. One of the workshops will be just one afternoon in the Orewa Library with kids between 10 and 12. The other one is at the Toi Ora Space and runs for four mornings. Toi Ora is an organisation that provides art workshops for people in support of their mental health and wellbeing. I am really looking forward to this one and I will write more about it in due course.

I also started my new job this week. I was mainly busy with preparations for the classes that will commence next week. Naughty Boy, one of the Lil’Dedes was keen to check out my new workplace and pestered me all week to take him with me. I assume he is sick of sitting in the art cupboard of my studio, which is  – needless to say – a very messy place. I was a bit worried that all the others might want to come as well, should I give in to his request. But he was so persistent that I finally caved in on Friday. He was whistling all the way to work, but then when we arrived, he took just one look at the desk and decided immediatly it wasn’t worth it. At home he told the others my new place was terribly sterile, not even a single leaf of paper on the desk. Certainly not a place where the Dedes would flourish. Phew!

naughty boy

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Categories Absurd, Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, workshop

A show for an egg

June 4, 2014 //
5

chook house

I did this puppet show last week. My first ever public one  (I had done one before, at the launch of my Hermit’s Web book, but I believe I must have known pretty much every single person of the hundred people who were attending the launch and I can’t really call this public.) I am not a performer. My intention with puppets is for people to participate in the play and tapping into their own creativity, rather than just producing a show for others to watch. Coming up with a storyline for puppets is an invaluable cathartic process.

Anyway, when my friend asked me to do a puppet show at her book launch I happily agreed. The subject of the book is something I strongly believe in. Now my friend has come up with another scheme I can’t say no to either. It is an arrangement that suits the Dedes to a T. You might know that we have just renovated our house and our backyard is a total shambles with heaps of rubble and mountains of dirt dug out from under the house. We will have to redesign our garden and now that I am working from home I am extremely keen to turn it into a producing vege patch.  My friend offered me her chickens for a few months to clear up and fertilise my backyard, so we can start planting in spring. Over Queen’s Birthday weekend we scavenged around our property to find material to build a chook house with. The old fence we took down did just fine. We even salvaged the nails that held it together and reused them. As it is with such things, what should have taken a day, took us three (two of them mainly scratching our heads), but we are now proud owners of a ramshackle chook mansion and are looking forward to receiving the lodgers.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Book Launch, Comedy, Fun, Life, Social Network

Performance

May 30, 2014 //
2

I had to think long and hard about sharing the film of last Monday’s show with you or not. The quality is pretty shoddy. In the end I decided to share the film with you mainly for the audio. The show is pretty simple, but you can definitely hear how the audience gets more and more into it. I had amazing feedback afterwards.

The show was performed at the launch of garden and nutrition guru Dee Pigneguy’s book “Grow me well” at the Takapuna Library. That same evening two other books were launched and Dee was allocated 15 minutes for her speech. She thought a puppet show would be a lovely introduction. She left it entirely up to me what I did with the puppets and I came up with this three minute sketch for Munch, Kin and the Wooden Spoon. The puppets were specifically designed for this event and I wanted them to be able to open their mouths and stuff themselves. My puppets are usually not big on words, so here we go, another surprise. On the evening we had the puppets set up in one corner of the room. Then, when I was sitting in the audience listening to the first speakers, I realised nobody would be able to see the puppets perform where they were. On the spur of the moment I decided  to take the cast to the lectern. It definitely had its benefits and I had the microphone as well, but I had to push the puppets uphill, which caused me a little bit of trouble to begin with. And the person who was holding the camera didn’t have a tripod, so there is a lot of camera shake.

But still, if you are a hardy Dede-fan, you might enjoy it.

 

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Categories Absurd, Art, Book Launch, Comedy, film, Fun, Hand Puppets, Promotion

Puppet show

May 23, 2014 //
4

spoon puppet

Monday night I will have a little puppet gig in the library in Takapuna. A friend of mine is launching her book about healthy nutrition for kids. I am not really a performer, but agreed to do a very short puppet show with the two puppets Munch & Kin and also this lady, who of course knows how to cook a healthy meal, as she is descendant from a long line of wooden spoons.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Promotion

Semantics, really

May 21, 2014 //
4

artnews ad

We are working on this event for close to eight month now and are just entering the hot phase. Tying up loose ends and promoting! Originally it was called “Puppet Festival”. The manager of the art centre and I, we are both totally excited about the whole affair. We got funding from the local council and everything seems to run smoothly except – and that is the big dampener – whenever we talk about puppets everybody’s eyes seem to glaze over. Strangely though, and I am single minded enough to do that, when you continue to talk, people do get interested in our plans.  So, we finally decided to give it a new spin and renamed it to  The Festival of Performing Objects. Admittedly it sounds much more grown-up and I actually I do love the new name.

We are still looking for artists who want to take part in the group exhibition and also for performers and stall holders on market day. So, if you live in New Zealand and want to take part, get in touch….

 

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Categories Art, Comedy, Exhibition, Fun

Ah, well!

May 18, 2014 //
2

uncool

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life

Marionettes

May 17, 2014 //
2

birdy and ghost

Uhuuu, I haven’t posted for a long time. The reason might be that the blog is called Dede puppets and I am currently going astray with other types of puppets. These here are two marionettes who are currently rehearsing for a busking gig we want to perform at the grand opening of puppet festival in August.  You might notice, that I pinched L’artiste’s tunic for the ghosty figure. That seems a bit nasty, eh, as L’artiste clearly needs his tunic for confidence. But I let you in on a secret, he actually has six or seven of them in his wardrobe. So he won’t notice one missing and I just love the material for it’s colourfulness. I am not entire happy with the two characters, but only rehearsal will bring out the flaws. The bird character is too cute for my personal liking, apart from this I don’t know where the design came from. I made it from a picture that was stored in my memory. I must have seen wooden birds of that type long time ago. He would work better if he was wooden, as marionettes rely on gravity. This one is made of dry-felted balls. To weigh his feet down I glued some old coins at the bottom, for good luck. I deemed this appropriate for a busking bird and I tell you what, he tap dances like a pro.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, craft, Fun

A day at the Circus

May 4, 2014 //
2

Last Friday Cath and I did a workshop at the Mairangi Arts Centre together. It was a holiday workshop for kids aged 7 to 12. Originally we wanted to do two days. The first day should have been puppet making and the second day creating the stop motion film with the puppets from the previous day. Unfortunately there weren’t enough takers for puppet making, though the stop motion part was reasonably popular. So we had to create the actors for the film on the same day… It was all a bit rushed, but I finally learned my lesson: Don’t mention puppets!

Of course, on the day the kids were really happy to create their puppets. They had heaps of fun, but would they enrol in a puppet making workshop. No way!

Ah well, here is the result: As I said it is all a bit rushed, but it was certainly a good sign that the kids didn’t want to leave when the class came to an end.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, film, Fun, Promotion, Stop Motion, workshop
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