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As part of Arts on Tour’s Green Touring Online series I co-presented a session on sustainable making practices. Here’s the gist. I’ve been developing techniques for working with salvaged and low-impact materials for the last 27 years, and my work for performance has toured nationally and internationally to theatres, schools, festivals, galleries and museums. There…
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Making a show is a deeply iterative process. In the second creative development for Feathers, a room full of people thrashed out the potential and the limitations of the puppets we’ve built, and tested them against Dan Giovannoni’s boisterous script. A list of tweaks and changes emerged, some necessary for narrative or performer comfort, some…
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Five great humans joined me the workshop last week to sample the ageless storytelling potential of shadow puppetry. In training to deliver Terrapin’s new series of intergenerational workshops, the participants were thrown in the deep end: I told them a story from my own childhood, and they had two hours to figure out how to…
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We’re in the countdown to rehearsals for Terrapin’s next touring show, Feathers. In the role of puppet designer, mentor and lead maker, I’ve been working with Danny Miller and Mads Hillam for almost a year to build seven characters, all technically challenging in their own way. The emphasis, as always, has been on using materials…
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After three years as Lead Maker and Head of Workshop at Terrapin Puppet Theatre, I’m handing over the reins. In that time the workshop has gone from a corner of the waterfront rehearsal room to a well equipped unit in the industrial area. I’ve taught, worked with and learned from many makers in the network…
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After a schools tour that played to almost 11,000 Tasmanian kids, Paper Escaper has hit the theatres of the island. It’s a wordless show, told in images and sound, and tells the tale of a pop-up book character who tears themselves out of a boring story. The Maker, a force for order who slowly loses…
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It’s Saturday night above a pub in Thirroul NSW, and the band is playing Purple Rain. This little creature is bound for the Wollongong Art Gallery tomorrow and it needs some urgent attention, so I’m doing surgery with paper bags and school glue. It was made in 1997 for my first solo show, Pets and…
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Our Puppet design and construction workshop wrapped up with some frantic safety pins and flying scraps of fur. There’s never enough time to finish a puppet just the way you’d like, but at least these makers have peered into the bewitching rabbit hole that is puppetry. On the last day everyone took turns to puppeteer…
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Thinking in multiple planes can really melt your brain. It’s Day 4 of our Puppet Design and Construction intensive, and everyone’s working on their mechanisms. Mads (pictured) set herself the challenging brief of swivelling eyeballs and moving eyebrows for her rabbit, all operated with one hand. The process of moving from a 2D drawing into…
