Tempest: Jason's Shots

Here are some fantastic photographs of our final rehearsal taken by my good friend Jason Sexton. His website is:http://jasonsextonphoto.com/

...and sometimes I get cranky and wind up writing Letters to the Editor

Published in this weeks edition of "Hometown Oneonta"
(The Daily Star wants it to be 177 words shorter)

During the course of my apartment hunt, I was recently shown an apartment with a hole in the ceiling large enough to fit a dining room table into. The owners of the building treated the fact that the tenants of the apartment upstairs may at any moment become roommates with a blasé indifference that needs to be seen to be properly admired. They assured me that the obvious massive structural damage was no problem and could be patched up and ready for me to move into by tomorrow.
The truly astonishing thing about this story is not merely that it is perfectly factual and presented without the slightest exaggeration, but that the landlords in question were actually willing to rent Non-Student Tenants.

A person like myself who has been searching for less than a year might actually stand a chance of finding a place to live here.

This sort of thing must be stopped!

Oneonta, as you may know is in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Of all the apartments here, a mere 97% of them are made exclusively available for student rental.

Clearly this is not sufficient. All local rental units must be converted to student-only housing without delay!

Unfortunately the landlords of this town are forced to contend with a persistent population of non student renters, who, with their unreasonable demands, are far from ideal tenants. These are the sort of tenant who will actually have the audacity ask for their security deposit back, request to be allowed to keep pets, and worst of all demand to live in the kind of conditions where the SPCA will allow animals to live. Our poor landlords are virtually powerless against this outrage. The rules governing rental housing in our beloved town are so hard on landlords that they may occasionally consider obeying them! Some are left no choice but to rent to so-called “Young Professionals” (which we all recognize as a euphemism for things like:“Adjunct Professor” or “New Family”).

It is essential that the town council do everything that they can to eliminate the subtle menace of these adult renters from gaining a toehold in our beloved town. If we allow such undesirable persons to find a place to live here, they may eventually buy houses, start businesses in our precious vacant storefronts and disrupt the cherished Status Quo with completely unwelcome prosperity. I urge you, Citizens of Oneonta, to do everything in your power to prevent this dangerous element from making their homes here. Keep our rents high and standards of living low! Make sure our younger population stays transient and do your part to prevent terrifying change from taking root. We must do everything in our power to prevent any potential of a population increase.

Only by taking definitive action against this menace today can we keep things exactly the way they are!

John Ryan
Oneonta?

Tempest: Before and After

    I have very self-consciously not posted anything on this blog for some time. Partly because, as I stated in my last entry, I didn't want to give anything away to the audience before they had the opportunity to see the show. Another element in this decision was knowing how involved a process this build would be. In short, you can either talk about swimming the English Channel, or start swimming. You can not do both at the same time. Now that the dust has settled, and the final curtain has come down, I can discuss a little of my process and display some of the results here.

    It should be noted I can only speak to MY end of the creative process of The Tempest, because that is the only part I was wholly involved in, and thus,fully understand. Nobody should ever make the mistake of believing that I accomplished anything on my own. Theatre is by it's very nature, a collaborative process. This show was the work of many hands. I am deeply grateful to everyone who participated in The Tempest. It would have been a very different entity  if even one of the 30+ people involved were not a part of it. I intend to give full credit to certain key players in a later post. For now please accept my deepest gratitude and know that you made this show both nothing like I expected and everything I could have hoped for.

Last November I posted a few of my early process shots. I thought I would begin by showing you what these puppets look like now that they are complete. If you want to see the drastic changes these have undergone you can check out my original blog here

First here is one of the two seagulls that were in the show. They have come quite a long way from the bald foam. If you look carefully, you can see that two of the rods have been repaired. I wish that I had managed to take better pictures during the show and rehearsals. one of the most enduring images of this production for me was this seagull silhouetted against the purple lit Cyc curtain.

Next here is the head of our heron. Because of his "eyebrows" and the funny walk the puppeteers found for him during rehearsal, he has been christened "Groucho". Notice that he has different eyes from the original process shot.  Also. the puppeteer who operated him found the original controls cumbersome. I needed to shorten them for her ease of manipulation and comfort

 Finally, Trinculo. Aside from one stage, Trinculo was the "guinea pig". He defined the look and feel for the rest of the human characters for me, I only wish I could take credit for the beautiful costumes of these puppets, but they are the work of Kristen Palazzoli. I will discuss them in great length later. The hair turned out nothing like I planned, but in retrospect, couldn't have logically been any different.

More later. Thanks to all!

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.

Sketchbook Project: Inner cover- The Big Reveal

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was to me which topic I should chose for the Sketchbook Project.

Dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are cool.

Not only that they're a good conduit for some of my obsessions:
Birds
Bestiaries and field guides
Dragons
Comparative Anatomy

     To be honest during my childhood, I never had the typical all-consuming obsession with dinosaurs that boys are supposed to, but, then dinosaurs were much different back then. I liked them, to be certain and had my favorites, but back then dinosaurs were thought of as huge lizards, cumbersome slow and stupid. I was always more interested in behavior. Elephants and lions were more intriguing and tangible to me. Suddenly in the nineties,  dinosaurs were reshaped as though they were made of Plasticine. Lumbering cold blooded  prehistoric monsters became active, agile, well adapted animals with complex social structures. Dragging tails lifted from the ground to become elegant counterbalances. sprawling legs straightened and became muscular running limbs. Chest cavities expanded to make room for the big hearts and lungs of warm blooded creatures. Dinosaurs became beautiful and fascinating, more like birds than reptiles.

    Today with the combination of new technology and amazing recent discoveries out of the deserts of Mongolia and China, dinosaurs are wilder and more wonderful than I could have ever imagined. We've discovered astounding new species and reexamined what we believed we knew. There are answers to puzzles we thought unsolvable, and exiting new lines of inquiry to explore.
In my sketchbook, I intend to concentrate mostly on the most birdlike aspect of dinosaurs- feathers. This will give me a focus and the chance to investigate some of the most captivating current notions. I intend to be as accurate as possible using the most up to date information available, but inaccuracies are inevitable as new discoveries surface. Even the great Charles R. Knight couldn't avoid this.

The color of the cardboard cover reminded me of the sort of stone where you might find fossilized tracks. I liked the monochrome of the inner cover, so I drew  with coffee. The drawing is bisected by the pages so that you can't immediately see what is casting the shadow.
The dinosaur casting  a long shadow is Compsognathus. They were small theropod dinosaurs about the size of a chicken. He is following the footprints of a Greater Rhea, a South American cousin of the ostrich. Without giving too much away, this is not going to be my last bird/dinosaur juxtaposition.

There you have it. My Sketchbook Project is officially underway. More updates coming soon!

Crittercam: The new girls

    I've been remiss. It's been two months since I last posted anything here. the reasons for my neglect are complex and diverse. If you are well enough acquainted with my recent history, you may already understand some of them. I hope you will not take it personally that I chose not to describe them here. I'd just like to take a moment to apologize to the regular readers of my blog . Ill try to be more consistent in my posting habits from now on...for both of you!

    As you may already know I keep a small zoo in my apartment. It currently consists of a lizard,a tree frog, some fish and birds. I don't ordinarily write about them because quite honestly they don't do very much that's interesting. I also don't want this to turn into one of those bizarre obsessive blogs that catalog every detail of the lives of somebody's pets. I figure enough people already don't read this thing.

   Having said that, occasionally something cool does happen with the menagerie that I'd like to share even if I'm the only person who's interested. Such is the case today. Today I finally got a pair of female Lady Gouldian finches. I've had two males for a while now and have been looking for potential mates for my boys for a couple years (living in a small town in Upstate NY may have it's advantages, but it does make it a little challenging to obtain exotic birds). I thought it would be a nice way to ease back into posting to put up a few shots of my birds. The birds had different ideas about that. I picked out some of the better pictures of my uncooperative little subjects from today. Bear in mind none of this is what you'd exactly call "great photography" 

The breeder I went to had a lot of cool mutations and color variations available. I stuck as close to the "standard" variations as possible. I like holotypes. The black headed variety is apparently more common in the wild and the red heads are more common in captivity. Gouldian Finches are endangered in their wild habitat. It should be mentioned here that Australia has had a very sensible export ban in place for it's native fauna since 1959. Since finches in general only live about 15 years, and since the person i brought them from is extremely reliable and keeps flawless breeding records, I can guarantee that my birds are captive bred. 

 I like this one, I have no idea what they're looking at

 This is about 10 to 25 percent of what you wind up with when photographing birds: a blurry picture of where the bird was a fraction of a second ago

 Occasionally, and for no readily apparent reason, an animal will suddenly decide that they really hate photography and will do everything in their power to ruin every shot you try to take of them, even going so far as to spontaneously run into pictures of other animals just to make them blurry and unusable. This was the last good picture I was able to get of the black headed one for about an hour.

 Meeting their new cage mates

 A rare family portrait showing all my finches. There are a pair of zebra finches, spice finches and a society finch that share a large flight cage with my Gouldies.

 From left to right: My male Society finch (I'm trying to find a girlfriend for him), the new girls, a female Spice finch and my female Zebra (Her chest is bald because her mate plucks at it. I tried to remove her so that she could regrow her feathers once, but she sulked and was so miserable that I relented and put her back. I'd rather have her look miserable than actually be miserable. I guess that proves finches can be just as stupid as people!)

 Here is my redhead girl next to one of the males. You can really see the difference here!

 I managed to line up a good  picture of the black headed one... then she mooned me.

                                                                   Gotcha!

Sketchbook Project -Quandary

For my birthday this year, my younger  sister, Sarah, of the blog Sarah Draws Things (a blog everyone who reads this and likes great illustration ought to be following, by the way!), signed me up forThe Sketchpad Project . The way it works is this: You are given a small blank sketchbook to fill out and mail back to them by January. The sketchbook is then part of a traveling exhibition and becomes a part of Brooklyn Art Library's permanent collection. My sketchbook came in the mail last month along with a snazzy orange sketchpad sleeping bag, a strange pencil made out of recycled blue jeans and an information card complete with  a list of themes to chose from (see below)

• Travelogue
• Memoir
• Narrative
• Atlas
• Almanac
• Chronicle
• Sketchbook
• Chapbook
• Documentation 
• Photo Log
• Dwellings
• Strangers
• Participate
• Diagrams
• Warnings
• Lists
• Creatures
• Dinosaurs
• Upstairs
• Mystery
• I'll classify my book later (Which I am currently singed up under)

The sketchpad has sat on my bedroom table since. Not much has happened with it yet aside from the occasional admiring glances from the residents of a nearby reptarium (an anole and a green tree frog, since you're wondering). I don't know what to do with it. I have entirely too many ideas and can't seem to commit to one. I thought maybe if  I wrote them out here maybe that would help me decide, or I could possibly get some useful feedback. So- here's what I'm thinking:

Travelogue- I'd like to do something with this, but my budget and schedule won't let me run away to Africa right now. Of course I could always do it based on my past travels (India, Guatemala, Professional touring, etc) but they aren't as fresh and immediate as I'd like. My sister is using this category and doing a beautiful book on Venice. I could always do a travelogue of a fictional place as well

Narrative- It might be kind of fun to tell some sort of visual story with the book, I just don't have any focused ideas yet. I've also considered doing illustrations for all of those recently discovered Fairy Tales they just found in Germany, but frustratingly, they have yet to be released in English.

Sketchbook- This seems the easiest option, but I'd still like it to be a little more concentrated, focus on trees or birds or something.

Dwellings:  An exploration of where different things live. Might be fun.

Diagrams- An unusual choice. I could do something in the nature of an instruction manual on puppetry, small animal care, tracking, woodcarving, or any of those myriad of other unusual and utterly unemployable abilities I have.

Warnings-This might be fun. A book of all kinds of ridiculous warning labels and signs, or possibly the rulebook for navigating Fairie

Creatures- This is probably the one most in my wheelhouse. I could do a field guide about my own versions of dragons or griffons or other mythological beasts, or a book of recently discovered species. Something like that.

Dinosaurs- Pretty self explanatory. Dinosaurs are cool.

Mystery: No real ideas for this one. Seems like it could be fun, though.

Well, that's what I'm thinking. I'd love to hear your suggestions
-J