Last chance to participate in October Creativity Workshop in Sydney

Click on the poster for all the workshop details or check out my previous post here!
Book now, only a few places left.

If I were King of Australia... Edward de Bono

Named 'The Godfather of Lateral Thinking', Edward de Bono, was in Australia over the past week to participate in a Creative Innovation 2010 Conference in Melbourne. Run by Creative Universe, the idea is to unlock our full creative potential. The concept of the conference was to share ideas and try to solve a few global and community issues. A good idea should create value to both ourselves and our communities.

This is the work which we are involved in, using our paper and puppetry workshops. We present these world-wide in schools and universities, to help nurture creativity and channel ideas into short performance pieces, which then can be taken much further. How much creative innovation are we missing out by not thinking outside the box, while at the same time forgetting to look at the wealth of innovation deep inside of ourselves.

Puppetry in Portugal

Today we conducted magical workshops with the talented students of  St Julian's School in Carcavelos in Portugal. The small groups of IB Drama students from years ten and twelve initially created some magical scenarios out of brown paper. These were embellish through the use of voice as their instruments, as no spoken language is used in the story telling. Sounds and song help to bridge gaps and create a universal language when using the metaphor of paper to tell a story.

Two weeks ago we did a week of workshops in Slovenia. These were for students, teachers, puppeteers and professionals who wished to learn more about using puppetry. After Slovenia, we had a few gorgeous days of sightseeing in Venice and Milan, before flying to Lisbon this week.

You can view our American International School Workshop slide show from Vienna here. I still haven't had the time to finish editing the short films we are making of our workshops in Europe this year, so please be patient. More from France next week!

African TV Puppetry Workshop 2009 is First Official International UNIMA Project

Internationally acclaimed Kenyan puppetry group "CHAPS" have had their first 'Puppetry for Television and Web Workshop' scheduled for October 2009 accepted as an official pilot project of the UNIMA Commission for International Cooperation in Switzerland. For further details, see here!

The two-week intense workshop, which will be conducted by African-Australian puppeteer, Gary Friedman, is due to take place during the International Puppetry Festival in Nairobi in October 2009. The workshop is aimed to give the already existing group of over four hundred East African puppeteers, who were trained by Friedman in the nineteen-nineties in 'Puppetry for Development' work, further skills to take their messages into the multi-media, via television and the internet.

I recorded a short film on CHAPS 'Puppets Against Corruption' project in the early nineteen-nineties which you can view here!