Summer was incredibly busy last year, I was working in three different jobs so it's taken me months to get round to updating on the puppets we made last spring.
Happily one of those jobs was working on the Living Earth project with the University of Bristol at Sunflower and Greenman festivals.

Our task was to create a show telling the story of living beings over four and half billion years. Simple, right?

We wanted to use our existing puppets to get to know them a bit better and in order to keep a common thread though-out the time-hops we decided to use them as two central time travelling characters who leapt into the bodies of various creatures over time.

In fact, I need to back track a bit to what we'd done with them already. We'd been playing with them by using real life audio, naturalistic verbatim recordings such as The Listening Project. We booked ourselves a performance at ¡hen~dø and used characters and audio from a documentary I'm somewhat obsessed by called Streetwise. It's about people training to become black cab drivers and taking 'The Knowledge' and is full of wonderful characters. Here's a little clip.

I really loved these characters and the level of naturalism required. We'd been using Laban's Eight Efforts to make them breath and move in a human way which was right for their characters. I was taught these Laban modes by my acting teacher Dave Lovatt, you can watch Kate Brehms videos on using them with puppets here.

So to switch to the madcap, time travelling, child friendly show we needed for Living Earth was quite a leap! We chose some creatures that appealed and were appropriate for the era's we were moving through, which were; protozoa, dinosaurs, chimps and early humans. I then set about making Barold and Dougie (the puppets had found a name each) a set of costumes.

One of the of things I learnt is that it would have been much easier to make these as bodies with a head that could be attached and removed, as doing quick costume changes on puppets under a table was quite a challenge! But I enjoyed making the costumes and they came out really cute.

The show was lot's of fun to make and perform.  We were joined by Alan Kennedy, who came up with and co-ordinated the Living Earth project. Alan cameo-ed as a variety of creatures who colourfully explained the evolution we were moving through (and covered our costume changes). We hadn't had a chance to do a rehearsal with an audience, so we learnt a lot from the first show about what we needed to do to engage (and cordon off!) our young audience and from then on  we had a show that was enjoyable, silly and perhaps even a bit educational.

In February I went on the puppet making course with Emma Powell at Puppet Place. I was really excited to be going as I love to learn new things and have become really inspired by puppetry recently. The class was really well taught and facilitated and Puppet Place is a great place, I'd suggest following them online as they share a lot of inspiring stuff.

I went with Dewi, who I had made some puppetry pieces with for ¡hen~dø, which was great because it meant we were learning the same technique and we had the same goals for our puppets (that they would definitely be used in performance, but we were feeling playful and open to who they would become). The pictures here are of both our puppets made in class and an extra head each which we made at home.

​We began carving our a styrofoam head and using foil to add bulk where we needed it. The final layers are papier mache, which can be refined and even sanded for details.

The body is built up on a wire frame, which for me was the hardest part of the process. I'm used to either sculpting shapes from a solid block or using flat forms (a paper pattern for fabric) that are shaped when they are sewn together. The wire was somewhere between soft and hard and had a lot of spring. If I do it again I might find a solid block I can use to form the shapes around, though that would take away some of the organic development of the puppet, which I really enjoyed. I'm planning on making a stuffed fabric puppet since I have the sewing skills, but mainly as an experiment and to see what I can learn from doing so; the method we learnt here means they are nice and light and much more practical for performance. So, more practice forming with wire is probably required for me!

The taller, oval head is mine. We roughed out some sketches in the first week but as I hadn't planned any particular puppet in advance I was happy to let shapes and personality develop as I went along, rather than defer to the sketch too rigidly.

The thing I enjoyed most was learning how to make the joints and armature. I knew I could put something together without the course as I do a lot of making stuff, but I wanted to find out the techniques for the joints that would make it functional and lifelike. As I'd hoped, the techniques for the joints could be used in many different types of puppets. So if I make a stuffed fabric puppet i can still build them a similar way. I especially love the ball and socket joint for the hips. You can see at the back of the puppet that he is hollow and the head is operated from inside. ​

Here's my puppet after the course, at the point where all the wadding is attached to his frame and he has begun to take shape and be fleshed out. He's hanging out of the window to dry his hands.​

Painting the heads was a slightly daunting prospect as it could change the feel and personality of each puppet drastically. We also needed to have something in common between them, so that they appeared to be from the same species, if not the same family. We did some test paints on the smaller heads and also mucked about with different hair from coloured wool.

At this point we've done base coats on the main heads and below you can see some experiments with moustaches for Dewi's puppet! We've got a fair idea of who they are now and how they interact. We were very fortunate to be asked to cat-sit for three weeks (thank you Sean and Eva!) so we had lots of time and space to finish them off and start playing with making them live and breathe. We've got some nice ideas and a core of the piece now, but that's another post....

¡hen~dø  is almost impossible to explain. ​

It started in 2013. It was three DJs mucking about in an empty bar at 4am. Then it became an event. It's about play, but it's not always comedy. It's an open event, but it's not a scratch night. It's planned but there's no running order.

I think what we realised those late nights as we scratched records about regional bird songs beside fairground organ compilations, is that playfulness was a serious matter. We're based in The Cube and at that time we'd started selling online tickets and the venue had become a much busier place.Obviously it's great when we make some money and when there's an audience for the things in the programme. There's an ongoing, fond, in-joke about events which three people come to at the Cube. It is part of it's charm, but it's painful for the event programmer. So we weren't objecting to being a destination for more people, but we were wary of losing our roots and of becoming too businesslike. We wanted to teeter on the precipice a bit, do something pointless but with an impact and encourage others to do the same. We wanted revive the idea that since the Cube is an art project all of it's volunteers are artists. And do something that wasn't afraid to be difficult or obscure.

That's my vague memory and interpretation. The problem is it won't be the same for any of us. And where 'us' starts and finishes is a deliberate grey area too! Here's a typical discussion: 

~How's this for the copy: Not a scratch night, not quite an impro night, hen do is a night of doing things we're not ready for that could take their own twists and turns and about embracing chaos!

~Thing for me in not saying it's a scratch night, is that it can be anything (including a try out) but  . . . it should also be an opportunity to DO a thing. i.e. that thing only needs to exist in the moment and isn't a step or a stage to anything else.

Here's how I attempt to explain it on my CV: A collaborative, multi-disciplinary arts event. We encourage experimental, experiential, participatory performance and installations from a wide spectrum of artists, professional and amateur, from varying disciplines.

It's on there because I have gained so much from doing it. It's made me realise that my years of volunteering at the Cube, all the small performances, workshops, décor and prop making and generally being part of the collective are an artistic practice in itself. And it has helped me make this into something more solid and presentable. And specifically the people have helped me, with technical assistance, giving me a deadline, working together on a show, but most of all with sheer enthusiasm. I've always said it's group where everyone thinks it's okay to run with an idea before you think about it too much and that's been really important for me as it makes things happen.

We've held, I think, eight events at the Cube (not counting the impromptu gatherings), provided Audio Visual Bafflement Solutions as spacemen at Supernormal Festival and a 'mischievous disruption' at the Arnolfini for Andrew Kotting's By Our Selves screeening.

There's been too many artists and collaborators involved for my memory to cope with, but a lot has happened. Poetry, puppetry, cookery, lectures, theatre, improvisation, projections, ​sounds, music and a disco in the urinals.

​I've been really happy to make some theatre in house as The Cube and ¡hen~dø. It's been ambitious and definitely could have done with more rehearsals, but we did it. It's been great to finally have people to work with from within the Cube and I've really enjoyed running workshops and devising work with the ¡hen~dø crew. It's also given me an opportunity to make some ridiculous props and develop puppets, which are things I am really enjoying at the moment.