Archives for category: Hand Puppets

Eve of the opening

August 8, 2014 //

The Festival of Performing Objects is opening tomorrow. It is an all day event for me. We have Market Day from 11am to 2pm with buskers and market stalls and puppet making for kids. Then later from 3:30 to 5:30 we have the exhibition opening with the artists attending. It was a very busy week setting up the exhibition, but Kim and I are very excited and pleased with the outcome. It looks amazing! As far as we know it is the biggest collection of puppets in New Zealand since the 1980s. What an achievement.

The picture shows Dragon by Norbert Hausberg, a Wellingtonian puppeteer with 30 years experience. Unfortunately, we only have his puppets as he himself is otherwise engaged. But his puppets are certainly something!

Tags art, Characters, exhibition, life

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

Meet the Spoon Family

August 3, 2014 //

At the Festival of Performing Objects we are going to have a Kid’s zone in the Gallery and we hope that the little visitors will take to an impromptu play. I bought a packet of googly eyes for $2 at the Salvation Army Shop, and the wooden spoons in the Everything-is-50%- off-sale at the 2-Dollar-Shop. My ethical conscience is cringing at the price, but as I am living on flour and water at the moment, I told it to shut up! For my workshops I usually make a trip to the North Shore Resource Centre to get material. This is a really good volunteer organisation that my friend Cath put me on to. They collect leftovers, recycled or surplus material and you can get a big bag of all sorts of goodies to create puppets (or other artworks) for a dirt cheap price. The most expensive part of these characters are the squishy noses made from disposable ear plugs. Unfortunately, they only had orange ones in the hardware store.

Anyway, I got carried away embellishing them. The idea was that the wooden spoons should be really simple so that they are easy to clean. Ah well, the handles are still easy to wipe down and that is where you hold them.

Tags art, Characters, craft, exhibition, imagination, thoughts

Categories Art, Comedy, craft, Exhibition, Fun, Hand Puppets, Promotion, workshop

Packing up

July 31, 2014 //

Oh dear, this year seems to be the year of best intentions. I am so sorry for having neglected my blog for some time. Though it doesn’t mean the Dedes have been neglected.

You might know I have lost a few of my major sources of income at the end of last year and I have been working hard to secure new income streams. Now six month later everything came to fruition at once and this just means I am rushed off my feet to fulfill all my promises. My book of “101 recipes with flour and water” is still not finished, however, I am using it a lot, but I am stuck on 51 recipes. My backyard chooks deliver an invaluable addition to my diet too.

Recently I have taken on a part-time teaching job. My first salaried job in 20 odd years. Even though I have been teaching for a long time, it was always on a contract basis. It seems with a salary inevitably come the politics… Something I want to steer clear off as much as possible. Navigating the foul ground takes a lot of energy. Believe me, I feel some good puppet stories coming on….

The Festival of Performing Objects is about to start. This weekend I have to deliver the Dedes I want to show in the exhibition. Every Dede is keen to pack up and go. Some of them will just sit in the Gallery for the month, while others will get action in the stop-motion workshops of the last week. I have to make a decision who is going to do what. I did a lot of work in the early days of the organisation unfortunately with all the changes to my working life poor Kim (the manager of the arts centre) had to bear the brunt of the recent weeks. She did an amazing work luring puppeteers out of the underwood. I am very confident it will be a fantastic exhibition.

It looks like we are getting quite a bit of attention. The first article about the event was published this week.

Tags art, background, craft, dede puppets, life

Categories Art, craft, Exhibition, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Promotion, Stop Motion, workshop

Library visit

July 14, 2014 //

At the moment we have school holidays and I did two puppet workshops last week. They couldn’t have be more different. The one I was so looking forward to was a four morning course where the participants were supposed to do the full monty – creating the actors, coming up with the story, making props and then filming the thing. The other one was just one afternoon in the library, where the participants invented an impromptu story and used the Dedes to act it out.

The course in the library was fantastic. It doesn’t take long to set the youngsters (aged between eight and twelve years) off to come up with a weird and wonderful story. There was no stopping them. All of them were running around making up props and chopping and changing the storyline. One of them sneaked in their own puppet. You might notice the non-Dede in the group picture at the end of the film when they celebrate.

Ah well, the other workshop was totally different. First of all it was a different age range. Here the participants were teenagers and puppets are so uncool. It is strange how kids can be so creative when they are twelve and with their thirteenth birthday all the creativity seems to go out the window. And then when they leave school, they are expected to be creative to find a job….

We did get there in the end, though I don’t know how much sticks in their minds, but I’ve learned heaps.

Here is the film from the library.

Enjoy.

Tags art, dede puppets, fun, reflections, story telling, workshop

Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, film, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Stop Motion, workshop

Good to be a Dede

June 30, 2014 //

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!

Tags art, Characters, dede puppets, friends, life, relationships, story

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

Sense of Normality

June 28, 2014 //

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!

Tags art, Characters, dede puppets, friends, life, story telling

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

Travel

June 20, 2014 //

I have started a new teaching job this week and had to fly to Christchurch for induction. The Dedes and I have a deal that when ever I go places I pick one of them to accompany me should there be space in my backpack. I believe they view this as an assurance I will return to them. This time I chose Mr Vague, a placid old fellow who goes with the flow. I certainly couldn’t have coped with one who wanted to paint the town red at night. I knew there would be a lot of information to take in during the day.

Right! He was so placid that he stayed in my backpack pretty much all the time. I was traveling with my new colleague Bonnie, who I met for the first time when I took my seat in the airplane. Mr Vague is very shy. That is why I took him. I thought he might come out of his shell when he is away from the other Dedes. But no, he stayed where he was because he heard us chatting away and did not want to impose. I wanted to show him the town centre that was struck by a horrific earthquake in 2011 and still looks like a battle field. As it is winter, it was dark by the time we left the art school. The town is also closer to the south pole than Auckland and therefore colder. I thought he might be interested in the Cardboard Cathedral, designed by disaster architect Shigeru Ban to temporarily replace the original cathedral that was damanged in the quake. After all, Mr Vague is made from the same material. He took a quick glance and said it is too cold to come out of the warm backpack.

We were there for two days and like all the Dedes he loves breakfast. So a cup of coffee finally lured him out for a quick chat in the morning. The warm ambience of the art noveau cafe suited him well and the coffee was excellent. That is all he needed to be content for another day and have a snooze while I was off to more induction.

The next time I saw him was when I arrived at the airport and heard that our plane would be delayed by 4 hours, which meant we wouldn’t be home before 2am. He shrugged the news off. “Nothing you can do about it” he said and shouted me a beer. Neither of us got flustered – Mr Vague because he had slept for two days, and I because I was too tired.

Tags art, character traits, Characters, dede puppets, life, mood, paper mache, story, story telling

Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Hand Puppets, Life

Performance

May 30, 2014 //

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.

Tags art, book, book launch, Characters, friends, story telling

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

Puppet show

May 23, 2014 //

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.

Tags art, craft, friends, fun, puppet show, story

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