Puppet Catch-up: Clive’s Posts

19th century Italian glove-puppet show

…

Over the past months there’s been much written about puppets at the Artlog by way of offering encouragement to those taking part in guest curator Peter Slight’s Puppet Challenge. In fact between us Peter and I have written so much, that I’ve decided to offer links for easy access to posts that may have been missed first time around, plus links to some puppet-themed items from my archive, written before the challenge. To save crowding, I’ve made two posts. Today we kick off with my collected puppet posts, and Peter’s will follow on Friday.

…

Clive’s Posts

…

Guide to Types of Puppetry (ongoing)

Glove-Puppets

Shadow-Puppets

Marionettes; Part 1

Marionettes: Part 2

Bunraku

…

The European Tradition

The Puppets of Palermo

The Royal Toone Theatre, Brussels: Part 1

The Royal Toone Theatre, Brussels: Part 2

The Royal Toone Theatre, Brussels: Part 3

The Guignol Puppet Theatre of Alexei Romanov

…

20th century artists and puppetry

Dada and Constructivist Marionettes of the 20th C.

Luigi Veronesi’s puppets for The Soldier’s Tale

The Marionettes of Aleksandra Ekster

Paul Klee

…

Contemporary puppet-makers.

Czech puppet-maker, puppet maker Bára Hubená

Interview with Czech puppet maker Jan Zalud

Interview with Julian Crouch

Jan Svankmejer

…

20th Century puppet-makers.

Richard Teschner

DoLores Hadley

William Simmonds

Walter Wilkinson

…

Puppet Performances

69 Degrees South, Phantom Limb

Spartacus, Théâtre La Licorne

The Devil and Mr Punch

How the Hoggler got its Name

…

…

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Cyclops Glove-Puppet

Modes of Locomotion: one puppet, two techniques

Born

The Puppets of The Mare’s Tale

Audrey II

…

…

jan svankmajer

…

As I prepare the animated Mari Lwyd sequences for the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra commission of The Mare’s Tale (music by Mark Bowden and words by Damian Walford Davies), I’m recommending to Artloggers examples of  films from the animators I most admire. Yuri Norstein was the first, and today I suggest you take a look at the work of the man sometimes called ‘The Magician of Prague’, Jan Svankmajer.

…

…

The work I’m recommending is the 1966 short, Punch and Judy.  Svankmajer is not for the squeamish. His work is undeniably visceral, and for Punch and Judy he takes a typically anarchic approach to the subject in a hybrid-blend of puppetry and partial-animation. (He often uses filmed footage with occasional frames removed so that persistence of vision is undermined by an unnerving jerkiness.) I love the dirt and grittiness of this artist’s world. And don’t worry, because nothing bad happens to the remarkably sanguine guinea pig!

Click HERE for Punch and Judy.

I also highly recommend Svankmajer’s feature-length Alice, the most inventive and true-to-the-spirit-of-the-original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece to be committed to celluloid. It lulls at the beginning with a bucolic live-action conjuring of the riverside, but the stop-motion, when it comes, is an imaginative tour de force.

…

Many years ago Peter, knowing that Svankmajer was a great hero of mine, acquired an original drawing by him of what I believe to be a design for a shadow-puppet. Peter managed this sleight-of-hand without my knowledge when we met the great man, not in Prague… where one might normally expect to find him … but in Swansea!

…

Frottage drawing by Jan Svankmajer

…