'War Horse' scoops Six Tonys

 


At an emotional ceremony in New York last night, Handspring Puppet Company's 'War Horse' won six Tony Awards for Best Play; Best direction of a play; Best lighting of a play; Best Sound design of a play; Best design of a play and a special Tony Award for Handspring Puppet Company.

According to Janni Younge of Handspring in Cape Town, South Africa, their acceptance speech went something like this:
"People ask why they have such an emotional response to this play about a horse made of cane and aluminum. After thousands of years of our dependence on the horse, the First World War ushered in the modern era and we lost forever the horse in our lives. It is that story that Tom Morris so fortuitously recognized in Micheal Morpurgo’s ‘Warhorse’ and its possibly that immeasurable sense of loss that makes this play about horses so emotional.

The people at Handspring who have made this award to us possible, are the team who build the horses in Cape Town led by Thys Stander and the incredible puppeteers here in New York, who, under the guidance of Mervyn Millar, perform this feat night after night.  We feel so lucky to have been part of such a fantastic creative team and that Nick Starr and the National Theatre put so much trust in what must have seemed a crazy idea at the time. Thank you Broadway League and American Theatre Wing for honouring puppetry with this special award." You can watch the BBC clip here. Here's the report from the BBC!
This is a major triumph for world puppetry and as part of that world and a friend of Handspring, I am extremely proud.

Furry Puppets Go Daddy

US based Furry Puppet Studio has been doing some great work of late. Puppeteer-designers Zack Buchman and Maria Gurevich opened their NY-based studio a few years ago have been creating really visually stunning puppet characters. Take a look at their website here.
Their latest commercial for web company 'Go Daddy' is perfectly catered for puppets, with a great sense of humour. There is a great little clip on the making of this commercial, which you can watch here!

South African Cantata plays in Brooklyn

Composer Philip Miller's REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape & Testimony is inspired by and based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings, which broke South Africa from its apartheid past in the 1990's and ushered in its democratic present. The work combines South African vocal soloists (including the opera superstar Sibongile Khumalo) and a string octet with a 100-voice choir made up of members of the Total Praise Choir of Emmanuel Baptist Church of Brooklyn, New York, a group of South African ex-pats led by the Lion King choirmaster Ron Kunene, and the Williams College Choir. The piece also incorporates sampled audio recordings taken directly from the TRC hearings - testimony from victims of apartheid atrocities and their lawyers as well as the torturers, soldiers, and government officials on trial. Through this testimony the collective memory of South Africans was built. REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape & Testimony is an extraordinary and important work - a real artistic excavation of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The United States premiere was hosted in Brooklyn on 6 July 2007. We were there! More information about the piece can be found here. You can see video clips of the production here.