Sue gets a Churchill and a Cigar

Australian puppeteer, Sue Wallace, has been awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research puppetry centres around the world, with the aim of establishing a National Puppet Centre in Sydney. Sue has been the director of Australia's only puppet festival in Blackheath, over the past seven years.
A National Puppet Centre will be some time in the making but with such public and professional enthusiasm it can become a reality. This extraordinary award from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust is very gratefully acknowledged as a support to development of puppetry in Australia.

On behalf of all the puppet crazies out there, we wish Sue great success and we'll all support her efforts in getting a centre of puppetry arts established in Australia. And its about time too, hey Naomi?

Movie Review Muppets?

Can you imagine, these two grumpy old men reviewing the latest movies each week? Well it's exactly what's happening on the website Movies.com. I can't imagine how bizarre the movie reviews will be from these two stunted Muppet geriatrics. Surely they must in their hundred-and-twenties by now?
According to the post on CBC Arts (thanks to Naomi for the note), Statler and Waldorf "auditioned" for the spots by doing commentary on this year's Academy Awards webcast. The site's users responded with positive feedback, so the regular feature was created. A new batch of reviews will appear on the site every two weeks.
Courtesy Movies.com

Puppetry for Film and TV class tonight!

Tonight we finally completed the construction phase for TV puppetry at Sydney Film School, so next Wednesday performance for the camera will finally begin. It's a great challenge trying to balance the workshop time, to encorporate all the skills required for TV Puppetry. Each week we've been polishing up the lipsync and eye focus, while at the same time taking the design and construction a little further.
Next year we are planning more advanced courses to take the art of puppetry for the screen even further by encouraging the students to shoot their own short films on location. For further information on courses, just drop me a line!
Check out the Chensational blog for some interesting foam puppet construction (just page down a little to see the patterns).

State of the Art?

Why am I feeling like a monkey about what's going on in the puppetry world?
What's going on this week guys? Since Noami Guss' article on the state of Australian puppetry, I have been inundated with complaints about how bad it is for local puppetry! I personally decline to see how bad anything is. Maybe it's the push we need to stand up and unite for our humble cause!

On a lighter note, PuppetVision informs us of a new technology which will certainly create future possibilities for puppeteers involved in the television industry to show their work. Google's inbrowser video playback player... on Monday, Google will launch its browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. How exciting is this?

And last, but not least, UNIMA Australia is about to launch its new website for the 2008 Union International de la Marionnette International Congress and Festival, which will be held in Perth, Western Australia. So bookmark the site and check the news as it develops! It's rumoured to be the biggest and most exciting UNIMA festival ever?

Do you recognise these children?

Just an ordinary class of thirteen-year olds? In 1938 these children were put into a Prague orphanage, before being deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp. One of these children, a young poet, Hanus Hachenburg, arrived in Terezin and become well-known for his contributions to a children's magazine 'Vedem'. Besides poetry and prose, Hanus also wrote a puppet play 'We are looking for a Monster'. At the age of only fourteen he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

Sixty years later, I discovered his allegorical puppet play in a Terezin exhibition in Jerusalem. In 2001 I produced 'Monster', for the first time ever, as a theatre piece. It has now become a 'monster' documentary, in which I have taken on the role of detective, travelling throughout the world, trying to piece together clues from young Hanus' life. Finally I traced survivors who had witnessed, first hand, Hanus' incredible talent and the last of these boys remain to be interviewed in the United States and Canada in September.
Watch this space!

Open Day at Sydney Film School

Today was 'Open Day' at Sydney Film School, where many new prospective students came to check us out! Pictured here is the Premier of NSW and Minister of the Arts, Mr Bob Carr, receiving a Green Zuckini award from Fizz at our last open day ceremony. Which one's the puppet, everyone was asking?
Today featured another puppet, Babble, introducing our new 'Puppetry for Film and Television' course starting in 2006.

Mid-Winter Night's Puppetry Blues

Its freezing cold in Sydney today! Mid-winter night's puppetry blues! Well, you guessed it. I've become slightly blog crazy... Having been converted into a blogger on my recent visit to Canberra, the cold capital of Australia by Hil Talbot, our great UNIMA blogger. Then I was introduced to Andrew's very interesting blog site, Puppet Vision Blog. Hope to meet up in Toronto on my upcoming lecture tour of the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa, launching in early September. Click here for info!

Thus far, I have lectures and workshops lined up in Chicago, New York, North Michigan, Boston and Providence and shooting a documentary in New Jersey, West Palm Beach- Florida and Toronto. Then off to Europe for gigs in the United Kingdom, Austria and Poland thus far.
If you have any ideas, contact me!

Puppetry for Film and Television Workshop

Sydney Film School in association with Gary Friedman Productions presents a unique opportunity to learn about puppetry for the screen in Australia in 2006.

These puppetry courses, lead by experieced Jim Henson-trained puppeteer and TV director, Gary Friedman, and British puppet builder for 'The Lion King', Tom Hill, is suitable for film makers, animators, puppeteers and anyone interested in learning this technique. The course includes puppet design and construction, manipulation for the camera, writing and developing scenarios for performance, voice characterisation and short performances for the screen.

Other puppetry courses planned for 2006, include:
The Art of the Marionette
Paper Meditation and Object Improvisation
Puppetry Production for the Stage
Advanced Film and Television Course
Puppetry in Education

For bookings and enquiries, just CLICK HERE to contact us!

Using Puppetry for Communication

Puppets Against Aids

The Communication Innitiative newsletter 'SOULBEAT' this week features programmes using puppetry for communication and development being used in Africa. It focuses mainly on programs that use puppetry in discussing sensitive health and political issues, which are extremely difficult to talk about in many African communities.

Many of these were influenced by the work of 'Puppets Against Aids' which started touring with performances and workshops, to many regions of Africa from 1988 and soon developed into an international outreach program. One of their success stories is the work of the Community Health Awareness Puppeteers (CHAPS), based in Nairobi's Mathare slums. CHAPS is a puppetry group that now consists of more than 400 puppeteers performing in 40 troupes scattered around Kenya.

New theatrical talent in South Africa

Watch out for new up and coming South African puppeteer, Aja Marneweck from Cape Town. After beginning her puppetry career on 'Looking for a Monster' in 2001, she has gone on to create some incredibly innovative theatre with paper and light.

Her new piece is called RESIDUE using with fabric puppets and a giant woman, and her piece pictured above is LA LOBA done with paper. Aja has just been awareded a scholarship to participate in the new summer course in Charleville-Mezieres, France. The workshop will explore through practice the creative potential of the interplay between visual and acoustic languages, using a very contemporary mix of stage techniques and is being run by Dominique Montain and Henri Ogier from well known French company 'Au Cul Du Loup'.

Good on ya, Aja!

Who wants to be a puppeteer?

In an article "Who wants to be a puppeteer?" posted today on Arts Hub, Australia, Naomi Guss discusses the bleak state of puppetry in Australia, or should I say, 'Melbourne'!

Guss indicates that there are only two puppetry courses currently running in Australia, the VCA's Postgrad and Master of Puppetry, run by Peter Wilson in Melbourne and another run at the University of South Australia. Too bad, the writer didn't look any further into what's happening in a few other Australian cities!

In Western Australia, there are courses run by Spare Parts, who have a school of puppetry in Freemantle and the Film and Television Institute in Perth run often courses in puppetry and animation.

In Sydney, there are courses running at the TAFE Design Centre in Enmore, where I taught 170 students during the first semister this year. Then at Sydney Film School, where I also teach varied courses - the main thrust being 'Puppetry for Film and Television'. This is just a start - there are more!

I agree with Guss that there is very limited funding for the Arts, especially for puppetry in Australia, but I come from a country, namely South Africa, where there was absolutely no funding for the arts (especially-so puppetry) where I spent most of my life! So what's the solution? Keep lobbying and bringing puppeteers together to unify and work together on projects. Using both our joint artistic ability and the power of the group, we should eventually get the message across. But still puppetry seems quite isolated and parochial in this country and the only way to change this, is for us to get off our butts and do the work!

Enough said, read the article and let the age old puppetry debate continue!!

STRINGS - the movie!

Watch out for the new marionette movie, "STRINGS", made in Denmark, which apparently will put 'Team America' to shame! I'm dying to see this one ...

"Enchanting... a sheer delight" - ARENE

Director’s Statement
“I was 30.000 feet above ground, when the idea for Strings began to take shape. The aircraft was moving along high above the clouds and on the small screen in front of me, a commercial taking place in Prague was playing. It had marionette puppets as actors and I was amazed of how much expression they could display. I began to wonder how the world would appear, if I was a marionette, and I drew up a sketch of a marionette fleeing his enemy. The puppet was sitting in a treetop while tens of thousands of strings, was closing in on him. I immediately felt the idea was very strong. An idea of a universe inhabited by marionettes with strings reaching all the way up to the sky, to a place where we are all connected -and controlled.
I promised myself that if I won the European Fantasy Film Award for “Possessed”, my next project would be Strings. The plane touched down and a few days later I was accepting the award.
Now it is 4 years later, 4 mill spent, and 200 dedicated film workers from all over Europe have worked for months and invested their hearts and souls in the project. Therefore it is with extreme pride that I present to you, the first fully integrated Marionette feature film “STRINGS”.
Anders Rønnow Klarlund, January 2004

International Lecture Tour

In September 2005, Gary Friedman will launch a lecture tour of the United States, Canada and Europe, discussing the role he has played in promoting puppetry in education and development in Africa and internationally over the past twenty years.

Some of the programs he will illustrate and discuss include: Puppets Against Aids; Puppets in Prison; Puppets Against Apartheid and Puppets for Democracy, all issues, which have played an important part in the social change and political struggle, throughout Africa and other developing countries over the past decades.

He will specifically be focusing on the following two themes in the presentations:

1. Puppetry in International Education and Development
Puppetry has been used to communicate social, health and development issues to communities all over the world. This workshop will discuss some of the projects he has personally been involved in throughout Africa, Europe, North America, Australia, as well as many island communities to put across difficult and culturally sensitive messages such as Aids, Corruption, Drugs, Sex Education, Abuse and Democracy. Many of the projects have been filmed and short video clips will be shown and discussed, explaining how puppetry was used to bridge the communication divide in our modern world.

2. Politics with Puppetry
The history of the oldest art-form in the world didn’t start as an art. It began with the religious function with the ancient shamans in our primitive culture. Puppetry played an important communication role through history, from the political Punch and Judy attacking the monarchy, in the streets of England in the 18th century to the modern day use of puppetry in modern day fights for freedom. From the religious to the political function, from the social and educative function, we will look at how puppetry has played an important socio-political role in many societies in the world, from early history until today. Show personal examples of the political work Gary has done will be shown, from “Puppets Against Apartheid” in the nineteen-eighties to “Puppets for Democracy” in the nineties.

If you are interested in further information about this lecture tour, programs or country schedule, please contact us or watch this space for regular updates!

Two-Day Puppetry Course in Sydney

Gary Friedman Productions invites you to take part in a new two-day puppetry course, The Puppet in Performance, organised by Sydney Community College in Rozelle (Sydney) on Sunday 31 July and Sunday 7 August. It’s only $159 for two days!

The course will explore:
Discovering the world of inanimate objects
Learn simple performance techniques
Giving life to paper and objects
Discovering the world of the puppet
Creating a small miracle on stage
Learning how lighting and sound can amplify a simple performance

If you are interested in enrolling for this course, you can book online…

Click here...

The Beginning

Hello

This is just the begining of what I hope will be an interesting and inspiring new puppetry, visual theatre, television, film and the related news and discussion blog with a permanent link to http://www.africanpuppet.com

I hope to have regular postings available of news from the Sydney Film School, where I am based and the surrounding world on issues and events, which will also make my job easier to get puppeteers and related crazies visiting our regular puppetry and animation film screenings, performances and our continual puppetry workshops and courses run throughout Sydney, at Tafe Enmore, Sydney Film School and Sydney Community College.

Anyhow I'll keep everyone updated as to all activities, both in Australia and beyond!
Hope it will inspire and unite.

Keep the energy flowing...
Cheers,
Gary