Tempest: First Look

     I'm in an interesting position as a chronicler of my creative endeavors.  I'm working on a big project (A full stage version of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" using puppets). It is a project that I'm very excited about and naturally want to discuss in great length. I'm incorporating all kinds of new building techniques and doing work that I'm extremely proud of for it. On the other hand, I want to avoid doing just that because I want my audience to come into the theater with as few preconceptions as possible. The more I tell you now, the more you'll know to expect later and the piece won't seem quite as fresh and new. I don't want to spoil the surprise.

    After a little internal wrangling, I've decided to carefully tip my hand on occasion, to give anyone interested the smallest peek behind the curtain from time to time. My hope is that I can keep everyone generally aware of what I'm up to without, as it were, giving away the gold. 

   So- without further babbling from me here are a few process shots which I hope you will enjoy. bear in mind that what I'm showing you are very much works in progress at this stage and will change a great deal by opening curtain.

This gull is a simple 3 rod puppet built out of polyfoam for simple movement. It can flap and turn it's head from side to side. It has a wingspan of approx 3 ft. 

Slightly more complex is this heron's head. It is also built out of foam with a latex and cheesecloth overlay. The beak is operated by a simple trigger mechanism. Learning how to make simple resin cast eyes was a real boon for this project and my work in general.

Most of the puppets for "The Tempest" are going to be in a modified Bunraku style. For ease of performance I'm going to keep my design of the rigging as simple as possible. In the human characters this means a nodding head rig rather than a mouth trigger. Few of my cast will have any experience in puppetry and I want to make sure that they learn the basics of lip sync without being wholly dependent on it.

 Trinculo is a court jester and one of Shakespeare's comic characters. I exaggerated his facial features to cartoonish proportions and gave him a vaguely worried and hangdog expression. I want him to be tall and lanky, in contrast to Stephano the butler, who I intend to make short and stout.This will hopefully suggest the classic "Abbot and Costello" comic dynamic for these two clowns.