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.

¡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.

I have another site for my costume and dressmaking. But since I began working in the charitable sector I have moved away from freelancing as a seamstress. With a little more freedom in regards what I can make, I've become very interested making puppets and objects for performance. As it's become more integrated with my performance work, I thought I would post here about a few things I've made which are more to do with performance than dressmaking. It's been really good fun working with 3D shapes, different and new methods and improvising, learning and problem solving as I go.

Way back in 2013 myself and others at the Cube got obsessed with Wildermannen and produced a New Years Eve event based on it. We held a few costume making workshops to help people prepare and restricted the entry numbers as we expected some very large costumes! Happily, lots of other people got as into it as us, the workshops and the event went down a storm and we ran more workshops in 2014 at Supernormal festival. Mine and other's costumes were also used in the beautiful Strike Our Scythes video.

I liked the tall costumes with creature's heads towering above, so I made a boar's head (a nod to the Forest of Dean). It's an aluminium mesh structure, covered with muslin and felt and then fur (I can't remember why I chose that colour now, it's striking but not rustic). There's some extra felt/newspaper to add weight where it's needed and the aluminium is amazingly light; it's important with headpieces to get the balance just right otherwise you end up with terrible neck ache. I'm especially proud of the eyes and love the textured leather in the ears.

I also made a toy Wilderbadger as a gift. I improvised the pattern and was really pleased with the shaping, especially his curled ears. His staff is a pick from a box of dates.

Last winter ¡hen~dø (I'm planning another post to expand on what ¡hen~dø is, explanation is virtually impossible) did two events with in house performances, a play I wrote called The Land Where Scientifically Valuable Minerals Form and a hendomime variation on Chatecleer and Partlett. The Land Where Scientifically Valuable Minerals Form required some props which were literal interpretations of the descriptions in the text, including a raven beard and chestnut hair. 

The chestnut hair became a wildly imaginative variation, since we couldn't find any dry chestnuts, and was an old bicycle helmet covered in mixed nuts, wasabi peas and dried fungi. One of my favourite things about ¡hen~dø is the level of joyful idiocy. Sadly the 'hair' was too perishable to keep, but the beard is still going strong.​

These paint tubes were another gift. They have no function, but I like them.

Finally, a sign. I painted this during a meeting and was distracted. It's one of my favourite things I've made recently since it makes me giggle. We left it like that for the event.