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The paint is not long dried on a juvenile T-Rex, designed and constructed for Erth as the newest member of their dinosaur crew. We have a venerable history of dinosaur-making together, dating back to the early 2000’s when we battled it out in the courtyard of the Melbourne Museum in our first ever dino body…
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Apparently people liked Feathers! After touring Tasmanian schools last year and playing to over 14,ooo students, Feathers has just wound up a theatre season on the Island. Thanks for all the stars Lesley Graham. Thanks too to the performers who brought these characters to life, and the makers who worked with me at Terrapin on…
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Our new shipping container workshop is up and running in Glenorchy, Tasmania. It’s a daily joy to be building a custom space for Axlebone projects, with the mountains looking on. Everything is still in boxes but it’s time to get to work on a satisyingly complex puppet design and construction job for Erth. I’m revisiting…
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I made a mascot. Tasmania’s AFL team doesn’t exist yet, but Rum’un the Tassie Devil does, and went live today. More than 400 hours of handwork. Thousands of strips of fur, made from donated old school uniforms from around the state. Input from the local wildlife sanctuary Bonorong on the unique physiology of the species,…
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The latest build was a challenge in swiftness and simplicity. Darwin-based Business Unusual needed a neutral puppet of childlike proportions, one without features or finishing, a moving template. I made two, and the sister puppet – with subtle differences – has been handed over to the students of the wonderful Davina Wright, at UTAS’ Faculty…
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I can’t divulge what giant character I’ve been working on for the last eight months, but in a few weeks the result goes public. The brief has been exacting. It has to represent in ways that people young and old can be proud of: to bridge biology and legend, and carry echoes of the first…
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I recently presented with the wonderful Dr Tanja Beer on Ecoscenography and Sustainable Puppetry Practice. Some interesting questions were raised by the network of artists and designers involved in the EU-based Impulse Project. One was about longevity: when proposing salvaged materials for theatre design, clients often question whether it will last. There are several ways…
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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…
