BAMcinématek Puppets on Film

Bam festival 'Puppets on Film' is being launched in Brooklyn, New York on 12 November 2011. There are some great puppet classics being screened like 'Puppet' the new documentary that interweaves a broad look at the fraught history of American puppetry (its marginalization as children's theatre and its sudden explosion as high art) with an intimate thread following Dan Hurlin, a downtown artist, as he creates a complex puppet work about eccentric an Depression-era photographer; 'Being Elmo - A Puppeteer's Journey'; 'Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy' by Roman Paska and John Turturro and the latest 'Muppet Movie' amongst others.

Long before computer graphics, fantastic creatures came to life as puppets made of foam, fabric, metal and wood.  Puppets on Film, co-presented with the Jim Henson Foundation, features fascinating documentaries about puppetry as well as a roster of fantasy films and shorts from the around the world. If you'll be around New York in November, take this opportunity to see some puppet gems!

Last night at the Melbourne TV puppetry workshop

After many weeks of design and building of their television puppets, we have finally begun the performing of the puppet for the camera. The puppeteers in the photo are focused not on their puppets, but on their TV monitors on the floor. The current eight-week introductory TV and Web course has a wonderful young energetic focus on performing for the camera and the importance of this communication tool in our modern web-based world. We've recently been invited to implement a four-week intensive TV training course, in co-production with a local TV channel in Burkina Faso, West Africa next year. Watch this space for future courses in Australia and International on-line courses we're running next year too. If you are interested, drop me an email here!

Corporate Puppetry

Over the past weeks, I have finally started making inroads into the world of corporate creativity in Australia. It was, at first, a daunting process, with the question "how would the corporate world accept 'a puppet' as a tool of transformation, communication and change"?  I've never really been a part of that executive club with the corporate empire seeming extremely alien to my world. I'd never even dared to don a suit, let alone enter the golden gates of 'The Corporation'. That is, until now! Armed only with a roll of brown paper, a Mbira (African thumb piano) and a few household objects, I entered the boardroom with baited breath. I suppose I anticipated the suits would attack me and tear my creative soul into shreds, but this didn't happen. They instead lapped it all up and cried out for more.

So imagine this. A bunch of business executives rolling around on the floor and re-discovering their 'lost child', while animating an empty soap bottle, a hammer, a pliers, a bottle opener and a broken garden tap. The results were outstanding and the metaphor worked like a charm.

It all began with a large insurance company wanting to expose their IT Department to a creative experience, where they would get the chance to empathize with both their product and their customers. I lead them through some improvisation techniques, which allowed them to feel 'safe' in the creative space and gave them the license to explore the 'characters' injected into their objects and resolve work related issues while telling their stories.

Then last week, I participated in a three-day Creative Methods Conference, sub-titled 'Widening the World of Work' held at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne.

Not only did I get a chance to learn 'the true corporate creative experience', but I also got the chance to present a short taster workshop last Thursday afternoon in the Bishop's Parlor. (You can see cartoonist Simon Kneebone's impression of the workshop above). You can also view my short promo piece for the Storyteller Conference blog here.

All in all I found the conference a truly inspiring three days, meeting like-minded souls engaged in both creativity and change in the empire of the corporate. Watch this space for more such talk soon!