the mare’s progress

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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conjuring an apparition

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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catriona urquhart and ‘the mare’s tale’

Some anniversaries pass by un-noticed because our lives are such a hustle and bustle of  work, play, duty, deadlines and all-sorts. One passed me by yesterday, so deep into preparations was I for the forthcoming presentation of The Soldier’s Tale with Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra at the Hay Festival. Odd that I missed it, because in so many ways an unease underlay the day for me, and I realise that while on the surface I may have been pushing away the recollection of a loss, at a deeper and unconscious level, something was definitely playing out.

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On May Day 2005 my close friend Catriona Urquhart died, and with her went a large chunk of my heart. In 2001 The Old Stile Press had published The Mare’s Tale, a sequence of poems Catriona had written examining my father’s early experience of the Welsh Mari Lwyd mumming tradition. It was not a happy recollection for him, but all that has been examined elsewhere both by me and by several more eloquent writers, and so I won’t recap here. Suffice to say that Catriona, after his death, produced her poems from accounts my father had shared with her of growing up in rural Monmouthshire, of his terrifying childhood encounter with a Mari and how he carried the experience with him throughout a long life.

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Catriona’s poems and my large Conté drawings were shown together at my 2001 Newport Museum and Art Gallery exhibition The Mare’s Tale, and though the artworks have now separated into many public and private collections, and the Old Stile Press book… which I illustrated… stands alone as Catriona’s sole published collection of poems in her lifetime, I think no-one would deny that to a significant extent the poems and drawings have become inseperable from each other.

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In 2012 the artistic director of Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra, James Slater brought together composer Mark Bowden and librettist Damian Walford Davies to create a new chamber work inspired by my Mare’s Tale drawings. My only stipulation at the start of the project, had been that without Catriona present to collaborate on any examination of the themes, the libretto would have to be a new text,  based on the drawings alone with no direct reference by name to my father or his experiences. This was not in any way, as far as I was concerned, to be a biographical exploration of what underlay the Mari Lwyd drawings, but a fresh approach using them as the starting point of a narrative structure for Mark Bowden’s music.

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Above: a drawing of my father made for the original Mare’s Tale series.

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And that’s exactly what Damian has delivered. A new tale as dark and terrifying as the source material, though constructed  as a fiction steeped in the literary tradition of recovered memory as the catalyst of a central character’s psychological disintegration. But Damian is a great admirer of the poems, as was clear from his chapter in the 2011 Lund Humphries monograph about my work, and I can see a number of echoes from them in the libretto, layered in to enrich it.

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Mari Lwyd puppet

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Mari Lwyd maquette/puppet

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Out of the old springs something new, and as an artist I must follow it. The drawings that were the origins of this have been set aside as I create fresh ideas tailor-made for the emerging creation. (See the two images above.)

Long ago I thought I was done with this subject, but it would seem not. The Mare’s Tale as realised in my drawings and Catriona’s poems, and The Mare’s Tale as it now evolves into a new chamber-work for ensemble, while separate, seem to me conjoined in a way that will be quite unique in terms of creativity. The same seeds grew them and the same title unites them, and yet they are separate. I find that strangely haunting and complete as an idea.

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mari lwyd puppet mark II

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Since the tests run with the table-top puppet ten days ago, and after consulting with the-lead puppeteer on the project, Ann Prior, I’ve extensively reworked the first Mari Lwyd. The original shroud was quite flimsy and limp and difficult to control. While struggling to use it expressively, I recalled the way in which the kimonos of Bunraku puppets are so extensively padded that when skilfully and boldly manipulated, audiences get a strong impression of dynamic movement beneath them. The sleeves particularly are most expressive, and with female Bunraku  puppets, which have no legs, a sense of motion is conjured by operating the garments to suggest the kick of walking feet against their hems. In Bunraku, the costumes act as much as the puppets!

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With those ideas in mind, I started by removing the puppet’s pelvis and legs, leaving only the ribcage to centre the figure and to make a tension between it and the head when both are controlled by the puppeteer. A new shroud, much bulkier and padded, creates the height of the figure, and  a second puppeteer simply operates the lower part of it to suggest legs and feet. In this way the Mari convincingly walks, lunges, kneels and crouches with legs akimbo. An observer would never know that the effect is created by a puppeteer’s hands alone.

The Mari puppet was built with no arms because basically a Mari Lwyd is a skull on a stick carried by a man hidden by a sheet. (Not that I want to reproduce the historic appearance, but rather create a dramatic reinterpretation of it.) However on a visual level, the puppet’s lack of arms hindered what we were able to achieve with its performance, and so the shroud has been remade to suggest arms beneath it, hands folded together under the layers of obscuring gauze. The puppeteer will be able to manipulate the costume, suggesting arms, and in this way introduce more potential for expression into the performance.

With the large, heavy Bunraku puppets, one puppeteer operates the head and right hand, a second operates the left hand, and a third works the legs. (Or in the case of legless female characters, the kimono.) With our small and lightweight puppet, the lead-puppeteer operates the head with one hand, and with the remaining one grasps under the ribcage to angle the spine and create the diagonals of dynamic upper-body movement. By releasing the second hand from the ribcage and repositioning it to suggest the folded hands under the shroud, with a little juggling a single puppeteer can operate the functions of two Bunraku operators. With careful choreography the puppeteer can even use that same second hand to suggest the motion of the puppet’s non-existent feet, though we’re going to have a second puppeteer dedicated to that function.

I’ve added strands of hemp string knotted into the shroud. It has a life of its own, springing and coiling and creating a sense of the ribbon decorations of the traditional Mari, without representing them literally. They look really interesting and catch the light like a horse’s whiskers.

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The following photographs were all taken this evening, by me, one-handed as I played with the puppet in the dining-room mirror. They’re all out of focus, but they’re certainly atmospheric. The camera seems to love this Mari, shambling along in its new shroud.

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Like something out of an M R James ghost story.

Now we need to film a second test.

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You can see an explanation of how Bunraku puppets work in THIS short film (there’s a demonstration of a puppet being operated minus the costuming) and experience a masterclass in puppetry HERE, where the portrayal of almost unhinged grief is staggering. Performance art of the highest order.

mari lwyd mark II

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Currently making another version of the table-top Mari puppet. The first… shown above… was thrown together quickly to get a ‘feel’ for the character. Operating the trial puppet with Ann in front of a mirror, with contributions from James, clarified what worked and what didn’t. (A short glimpse of the session may be seen in Pete Telfer’s film, HERE.) However, some of the most effective movement sequences we achieved are not on view in the clip, and they were ones in which the motions of  torso and legs were created by manipulating the shroud.  Less was more! The absolute best was when we worked a sequence of the Mari crawling forward, a bundle of rags with the head only just visible. To this end I’ve a plan to make a more bulky shroud, to aid such moments. I’m mindful of the effectiveness of the padded kimonos in Bunruku puppetry, the garments skilfully handled to suggest the movements beneath them.

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Above: artistic director of MWCO James Slater, and lead puppeteer Ann Prior, take a break from puppet duties.

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Above: the pelvis and legs of the new puppet under construction, whittled from pieces of firewood salvaged from a stack in our barn! Nothing very refined here, but the joints are directional and have enough resistance to hold positions unsupported, which will help the puppeteers a lot.

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My overall notion is for the puppets in the production to look and feel quite roughly made. I’ve given the wood a first coat of black emulsion, and now I’m ready to construct the spine, ribcage and head. The head is to have a moveable lower jaw, so that our Mari can gape! Like this!

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second day of tests for animated maquettes

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Today Pete Telfer and I worked together to produce three sequences of stop-motion footage featuring some of the Mari Lwyd maquettes. This was by way of comparing the quality of stop-motion movement to the movement created in ‘real-time’ with puppeteers operating a maquette through wire control-rods.

(See the real-time test made on Monday, HERE.)

It was quiet, intensely concentrated work. Animating a bipedal Mari Lwyd so that the movement while nightmarish, nevertheless remained plausible, took some doing. I didn’t make an animation sheet to guide me, but busked the whole thing. Head, jaw, neck, chest, pelvis, tail and four legs… each leg with three moveable sections requiring different movement cycles and directions… almost blew the wiring in my brain. Nevertheless, the result isn’t bad. Quite different to the real-time animation, and yet of a quality that has many merits. In the light of these tests I’m quite sure we’ll use both techniques to make our repertoire of moving images.

Do bear in mind when watching the sequences that they are just tests. They’re  not the sequences that will appear in the production, and the stop-motion figures aren’t yet ‘in character’ for the piece. (To me the sequences are rather like those clips of actors making wardrobe tests for films.) I’ve also decided that in the finished puppet sequences, I’ll make something more like the background seen in my original Artlog photographs of the maquettes, as in this image:

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Click HERE to see the three test sequences made today.

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Above: the lights are bright to be under all day, so dark glasses help protect my eyes.

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first test for an animated maquette

Above: me, lead puppeteer Ann Prior and producer James Slater. An out-of-shot TV monitor helps us keep the puppet in frame.

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The first tests were made today on the technique of using control-rods to bring a skeletal horse to life for The Mare’s Tale. Pete Telfer was behind the camera, and Ann Prior and I were the puppeteers. (Ann was on head and neck, and I was on the body and legs.) We still need to do much tweaking. We think we can use a combination of matt paint on the rods and adding more black to the contrast to pretty much hide the mechanisms. The trailing threads will be removed. They were only added to help me control the puppet, but in the event I didn’t use them. While this is definitely to be viewed as work in progress, I’m really encouraged by how elegantly creepy the effect is. And three cheers to Ann, who hadn’t had a chance to work with the puppet for very long at all before turning in a great performance for the camera.

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To see the test at Culture Colony, check HERE.

(It takes a moment for the animation to get going, so hold on there.)

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mari-in-my-pocket!

My very good friend Anita Mills has sent me a glow-in-the-dark Lego Skeleton Horse all the way from N Carolina, and I took some photographs of it last night.

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Thank you, Anita, for sending this little gift. It gives me pleasure out of all proportion to the size of it. I’m wondering whether I might turn it into a Mari ‘group’ like the one you sent photographs of last month. But for the present it sits talisman-like on my bedside table, the last thing I see before tumbling into sleep each night, and the first on awakening each day before heading off to do further work on The Mare’s Tale.

Below: Anita’s Lego Mari Lwyd group.

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Hunting about online I’ve found a glow-in-the-dark paint I could use to make a night-glowing sheet for the Mari. Oh Anita, Anita… what have you started?

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graphic explorations for The Mare’s Tale

 In these versions I’ve opted for a black on white horse’s skull, in contrast to yesterdays white on black.

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Below: compare with yesterday’s more densely-worked approach.

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Below: reducing the skull to the bare minimum with simple collage.

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Above and below: I like this dark-eyed version the best.

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Above and below: in these versions I’ve tried to make the eye look like a livid moon.

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Above: in a drawing I try out the black on white idea before making the collages.

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Above:  preliminary sketch

the mare at ‘theatr brycheiniog’

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Theatr Brycheiniog in Brecon is the home base of the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra, and as such the theatre is a producing partner on The Mare’s Tale. Thanks to the support of the Director at Brycheiniog, Paula Redway, in August we have a clear fortnight of rehearsals scheduled on the stage, leading to an invited performance for the funding bodies who’ve supported the commission.

The Mari lies on a chair backstage, awaiting its on-screen debut. (Many thanks to Geraint Thomas for the image.)

Yesterday James Slater (artistic director of the MWCO) and I spent an afternoon on the Brycheiniog stage, working  through some visual aspects of the production with Technical Manager Geraint Thomas. Geraint and his team will be crucial contributors to the way we intend  to present The Mare’s Tale, and the session was an opportunity to live-stream images of my recently completed Mari Lwyd puppet to a back-projection screen. In the absence of a puppeteer (I had to sit in the auditorium to see how things will look to an audience) James proved surprisingly deft in animating the Mari, though he won’t be doubling up his conducting duties with puppetry once we get into rehearsals!

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Discussions with Paula Redway have confirmed that the Mare’s Tale stage-set is to be constructed by the Brycheiniog team under the supervision of Geraint Thomas, and before too long I’ll be posting more here at the Artlog on the stage-design aspects of the production.

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The auditorium at Theatr Brycheiniog