In any random group of international travelers, there tends to be a large number of creative open minded people, exactly the sort of people who it is fun to compare notes and possibly collaborate with. The kind of people most likely to be favorably impressed by my odd career choice. The fact that many of them are attractive young women is entirely coincidental. The trouble starts when it comes time to actually show what you can do. The chances of anyone having a good usable puppet with them are extraordinarily slim. Musicians never have this problem. Someone always has a guitar. Jugglers usually come fully equipped. Actors, dancers and vocalists never even have to think about it.
The practical result is that either you have to explain as best you can and leave everything up to the imagination, or spend a great deal of your time abroad frantically sourcing materials and hurriedly attempting to build a shadow show. Time, I hasten to point out that could better and more constructively used for drinking rum in a hammock.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that my natural tendency as a puppeteer is towards grandiose theatrical ideas best executed on a full sized stage. I want to build the next "Lion King" or "War Horse". This is terribly difficult to do without financial backing. Instances of Broadway producers stepping forward to offer me large production budgets have been rare. Casual observers have commented on how frequently this doesn't happen to me. My natural inclination for working large also has the unintended side effect of needing to find storage in my apartment for stuff like this:
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| Minotaur 1999-2000. Mixed media. |
As an intellectual exercise, I've decided to change gears and deliberately design and build a series of smaller puppets that could neatly fit into any given carry on bag. For my first piece I thought I would build a rod puppet that could be manipulated by one hand with finger rings. Here is the system I originally designed. It worked, but I found for practical purposes, it limited the range of motion the puppet was capable of. I changed to simple rods in the final version.
The puppet was carved out of maple. Maple while beautifully grained is ordinarily a wood that I'd consider too heavy and dense for puppet building. One of the advantages to my size limitations is that weight became much less of an issue. I was therefore able to use an attractive piece of maple that I had on hand. Here are the blocks that I used.
....And here is the finished product! He is finished with coffee(one of my favorite wood finishes! more on that later) and jointed with leather. His ears, paws,eyelids and tail are also leather. the eyes are polymer clay with a high gloss finish.
As a special added bonus, here is a minute of test footage that is now up on Youtube! :
This was a fun exercise. I like how it turned out. I may have to do more small scale work.
cuuuuuuuute... i like the color of the coffee wood.
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