The puppet head has been largely assembled. The lower jaw is hinged to the corrugated hose-pipe neck at the point where it attaches to the inside top of the skull.

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Above: lower jaw hinged to plastic hose.

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Right now the jaws remain in the closed position when the head is level, but gape open when it’s manipulated upwards and the lower jaw drops. There are fixings inside to hold the jaws closed with elastic cable, but I haven’t yet added it because it may be unnecessary. If I decide to use the cable to secure the jaws closed, then they’ll be levered open with a finger inserted into the loop of wire just visible in the photographs at the back of the lower jaw. At the front of the jaws I’ve added teeth made from wire bent into zig-zag shapes.

Above: upper part of head.

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Above: with the lower jaw in place, the wire teeth meet at the front. Everything is held together with loops of  fine jewellery wire.

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Above: I’m unsure about the spiky mane in the original sketch. At the moment I like the puppet without it.

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The Mari Lwyd is supported by the puppeteer with a horizontal hand-grip at the shoulders (not shown in any of the photographs) and the head is manipulated by grasping the neck with the free hand, though I’m thinking of adding a black rod to the top of the skull for better control. The plastic of the neck creates a lovely arching shape, but there’s quite a lot of resistance in it and a handle into the head would make for easier manipulation.

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The puppet has a much more ‘industrialised’ appearance than I’d originally envisioned, though I like that a lot. The transparency leaves everything on show, including the wire armature sewn inside the plastic mesh. All this has evolved because of the potential for interesting effects on-stage and on-screen when the Mari Lwyd is lit. I’m even thinking of using hand-held mini lights on the puppet to create a more dream-like state. There will be lots of experimentation in rehearsals. I’ve over-exposed the image below to show the way the plastic may respond to light aimed at it from the front.

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David Wall was only twenty when he was promoted to soloist at the Royal Ballet, and he rose magnificently to the challenge. He danced all of the principal roles in  the classical repertoire, and he originated the roles of Lescaut in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, and Rudolph in Mayerling. He was one of the dancers I greatly admired when I was a student, not so much because of his technique, but because of the insights he brought to the characters he danced. In his later years David Wall was the much loved balletmaster of English National Ballet.

In 1961 when Rudolph Nureyev defected and was offered a home at the Royal Ballet, Macmillan was in the process of creating his ballet Romeo and Juliet, choreographing the title roles on Christopher Gable and Lynn Seymour. However, the Royal Ballet saw the production as an opportunity to launch their about-to-be-acquired Russian superstar in a major new work, and recast Romeo and Juliet with Nureyev and the company’s reigning prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. (Seymour was understandably devastated, and shared her feelings in her 1984 autobiography Lynn.) Fonteyn brought indisputable qualities to the role, but she lacked Seymour’s achingly yielding line and heartrending vulnerability. (She lacked youth too, something that was painfully clear in the film made of the ballet for cinema release.) HERE, in a brief clip filmed for a TV documentary, the sublime Seymour dances the role she was born for, not with Christopher Gable, but with the wonderful David Wall. What you see is not dancers showing off bravura technique, but two actors at the height of their powers making utterly believable characters through the medium of dance. It’s as though Seymour is swimming through the air, her arms fluid and describing the tenderest arcs. And Wall is the most attentive partner, passionate without flamboyance. All this was in 1979, late in Seymour’s career and some eighteen years after Macmillan had created the role on her. And yet it’s as though all the emotion is freshly minted and without precedent. There is no archness, none of the affectations of more showy dancers. A ravishing, unforgettable partnering.

David Wall and Lynn Seymour in Romeo and Juliet.

Zoe’s Blue Cat is currently living on the sitting-room mantel shelf.

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He  sits opposite the articulated Welsh dragon given to me by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan.

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I think he looks as though the space was just waiting for him!

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Here’s the Mari Lwyd head Mark II. Mark I had to be abandoned when I discovered I’d misjudged the internal architecture of the head and hadn’t left room for the jaw mechanism. I also decided I didn’t like the eye-placement on the earlier head. Too high up and placed to the front.

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Above: Mark I head with the eyes set too far forward.

Only predators have their eyes placed forward like that, the better to pursue their prey. I did it on purpose to give the Mari a stranger appearance, but it just ended up looking wrong. Trial and error, trial and error. Sometimes you have to make something and fail before you realise how to improve your plan. I really like the new head. Tomorrow I’ll turn that paper-pattern lower jaw into a construct of wire armature under plastic mesh, hinge it to the upper part and  get the whole thing working. Then the plastic hose neck, saved from Mark I, will be attached, and I’ll begin working on the ribcage and forelegs. This is fun. I’m flexing the creative muscles quite a bit… at night I go to sleep working out how to do things and wake up still thinking about them… but a challenge is always grist to my mill! I also have a notion to articulate the ears, so that I can get them to stand high or lay back. Mmmm. More problem solving!

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Below: the puppet-makers’s work-table.

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Above: the dining-room at Ty Isaf turned into a workshop.

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Below: paper-pattern for the Mark II head.

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Below: the envelope yielded a slim package three inches square.

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Inside, the dearest little blue cat maquette, curled up for the long journey…

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A quick stretch and a yawn, and he was ready for adventures.

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The Blue Cat is significant in Zoe’s iconography, regularly appearing in her work. I’ve always greatly coveted images of it, and so to have a maquette of my own to play with is quite wonderful. Thank you so much dear Zoe. This has filled my day with pleasure!

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The reverse of Zoe’s cat.

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I’m working in the dining-room. Nice big table to lay things out on, and the window seat affords plenty of light. The above photograph of the Mari was taken as I noticed its reflection in a mirror, with the light behind showing to advantage the transparency I aimed for in the puppet. The ‘shroud’ is muslin, and I plan to leave it un-dyed.

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Above: I like these materials so much, I’m thinking that I may well make another version of the first Mari puppet using them.

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Above: I’ve made a tail in micro-thin opaque plastic that yields a very pleasing movement when flicked.

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]]> http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/the-mare-progresses/feed/ 3 clivehicksjenkins http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/conjuring-an-apparition/ http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/conjuring-an-apparition/#comments Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:53:36 +0000 Clive Hicks-Jenkins http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/?p=18415 ]]> The Mari Lwyd puppet currently under construction is being made from materials intended  to create an effect of translucence, as though it’s more apparition than corporeal beast. I don’t want to disguise its component parts either. I’m happy for it to be seen for what it is: a construct.

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Plastic mesh is malleable, taking curves and folds well. I’ve made it hold its shape by stitching it over a wire armature. Because the material takes light well, I think it will create interesting effects when viewed through the medium of the camera.  I’ve blurred the image below to make it more ghostly. The light coming from the window throws into silhouette the wire armature inside the head. Lighting from the front will make the wires vanish, but I favour a lighting state that has the puppet changing from solid to transparent as it moves.

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Below: adding a neck of plastic hose, which lends a marvellously sinuous quality to the animation. I could only find dark-coloured hose, and so I’ll use car spray-paint to make it pale.

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Above: this is just the upper part of the skull. The lower jaw has yet to be added.

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Over at her blog site Zoe in Wonderland, Zoe Blue has been posting about the healing powers of music, illustrated with images of her maquette of Santa Caterina playing the fiddle as she dances ecstatically. Zoe was the very first visitor to the Artlog to write to me about the techniques of making maquettes, and although she was already confidently on her pathway to being a painter, I could see that the practice of making maquettes might serve her very well in compositional terms. She started hesitantly and I wondered whether she’d stick with the technique, but suddenly she was off like a racehorse, not only mastering the art of the maquette, but additionally using the paper figures to extraordinary effect as models for her paintings.

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Zoe absolutely ‘got’ the notion of the posable maquette as a tool to explore positive and negative shape, and almost overnight her paintings acquired an exhilarating compositional boldness. Moreover although the construction of her figures pretty much mirrors my own practice, Zoe has evolved ways of using them that are uniquely her own, with results that are most impressive in pictorial terms.

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So today I post images of Santa Caterina giving herself up to the power of the music and the dance. She positively crackles with life. Well done Zoe! (I have to say that Caterina is really working that hair and those heels! I’m betting she dances a smoking hot tango!)

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2013 – mixed media – 56 x 76 cms

I’m pleased to announce that my next exhibition with Martin Tinney will be at Oriel Tegfryn, Menai Bridge, during May/June 2014. The title of the exhibition is Two Tales, and it will comprise thirty-five new paintings on the themes of the two productions I’m collaborating on this year with the Artistic Director of Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra, James Slater: the Stravinsky/Ramuz The Soldier’s Tale, and the Bowden/Walford Davies The Mare’s Tale. The recently completed Flight, which Artloggers have been watching in progress here over the past few weeks, is the first new work off the easel for this project, inspired by a scene in the animation I produced for The Soldier’s Tale at this years Hay Festival, in which Joseph and the Princess float over the palace garden.

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All enquiries to the Martin Tinney Galleries.

There are so many things to write about at the moment that I’m not quite sure where to begin. Let’s start with the rather nifty storage boxes I acquired yesterday on a shopping-trip with my friend Philippa in Cardiff. For too long my maquettes have been stuffed into large vintage box-files that need to be emptied in order to find anything. These new slim translucent boxes can hold 1 – 2 maquettes, and the contents can be immediately seen. I plan on getting a stack more of them so that my entire collection of maquettes can be properly housed. I love the way the figures look through the plastic. Dreamy!

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Above: seen through the bottom of a box, the backs of maquettes and the spread tails of the many ‘brads’ that joint them.

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Above: maquette for Equus (half horse/half man used on the cover of the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of the play) and the very first maquette I produced, a hermit made for The Temptations of Solitude in 2003.

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Above and below: two maquettes produced  for the series of paintings I made on the theme of Saint George and the Dragon in 2007.

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Above: the Princess in her finery from The Soldier’s Tale.

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However the true purpose of the day was to source materials for Mari Lwyd puppet-building, something that Philippa had such an unerring instinct for that the trip was a triumph of hunter/gathering, and the work-table is now practically buckling at the legs under the weight of treasures I’ve returned with to Ty Isaf.  (Brava, Philippa. You are a a star, and so is the arty/crafty scrapstore we visited in Cardiff, which turned up such a staggeringly good cache of unexpected materials!)