Evening all, sorry to be late posting here...having serious informatica problems...

Thanks for all your hard work last Wednesday. Next Wednesday, the plan is to try out a couple more things with the OHP - coloured gels, different liquid effects maybe - and try out a few other lighting instruments, just to see what happens. Then we choose a story and get cracking designing, scripting and building. We'll test out the idea that the new flat, with the window, might make a good space for working.

Source material for dreaming up shadow plays can come from anywhere. I think anything which started life as stories to be read aloud works well, and poetry. Having said that,  browsed through our school library last week expecting to find lots of stuff, and finished up falling back on things I've had for years, so maybe it's not so simple.

The stories I brought in ( and I'll bring the books in next week ) came from :

One Moonlit Night, by T. Llewellyn Jones, translated by Gillian Clarke ( Pont books 1991 )

Russian Gypsy Tales, by James Riordan ( Canongate, 1986 )

Earthtales, Storytelling in Times of Change, by Alida Gersie ( Merlin Press 1992 )

The Sandman : the Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman  ( Titan Books, 1999 )

And of course, Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales, which are public domain and available through many internet links, for example here.

                           



The music we've been backing the work with so far comes from a variety of places. The poem Lord Baker I passed out to Mech and Jess is actually a song lyric from an Irish band called Planxty, which I fell in love with the moment I heard it. Isn't it just crying out to be dramatised, or maybe it's just a masterpiece of storytelling.

It's no secret I'm into harp music, and a few of the tunes I've used to create atmosphere include Lisa Lan , a sweet love song with a traditionally sad ending ( it's a rule of all Welsh traditional songs that even if you start healthy and happy, fairly soon you'll be lying in your cold mountain grave while a pale-haired maiden wanders the seashore alone. ) Lots of Delyth Jenkins as well. The music from other parts of the world is either lifted from a couple of Realworld compilations, or a cheap CD of Chinese music I got in the Fnac a few years back. Like a lot of Guiris new to Spain, I went for the folklore big time, I spent a while a few years back poking around sephardic and al-andalucian stuff, and came across Rosa Zaragoza and some of her CDs of sephardic lullabies.

 


 Finally, a thought from Neil Gaiman. He was asked once by a fan what quote he would like to see written on the wall of a library. His reply was the four words which are at the heart of all storytelling, what you want any audience to want to know :

"And then what happened ? "

First session !

Thanks to everyone who came along on Wednesday night; I had a great time ! As promised, here's a summary of the first session, with some useful links, the idea being to leave that folks might be interested in going in the different directions we barely touched on, and if anyone wants to teach similar kinds of workshops/units, the resources are here.

There's a LOT of stuff, and I'm really putting it up for reference, if you want to dig deeper, and, well, because I'm an obsessive freak.  It's absolutely not necessary for the course. If you're interested in the specific puppet templates we used, scroll down to the bottom of the page.

The session consisted of 3 distinct sections : a short "history" of shadow theatre; a practical session playing with the shadow screen and the OHP, working out the possibilities; and making a shadow puppet.

We started with the Chinese legend of Wu Ti, which I learned from Alessandra Esseveri of Asombras. The version on the Wikipedia reads like this :

Shadow puppetry originated in China two thousand years ago. The legend of its creation tells of the Emperor WuTi and his favorite courtesan, Lady Li. Lady Li died an untimely death which sent the Emperor into a depression so deep that he would not govern, eat or sleep. His court magician was summoned to him and asked to bring LadyLi back to life. The magician had an idea: by cutting out the figure of Lady Li and casting its shadow on a candle lit screen, he retold the courtship of the lovers. Emperor WuTi was lifted from his depression as he saw his love come to life. The Chinese believe that the spirit is manifested in the shadow and brought to Earth through the art of the shadow puppetteer. Emperor WuTi declared Shadow Puppet Theater a High Art form to be brought to all corners of his empire. And so it was.

By far the best place on the web I've found to research Chinese shadow theatre are the blogs of Annie Katsura Rollins, a Montreal postgrad researching shadow theatre. Her blog  http://www.chineseshadowpuppetry.com/  includes a great DIY section, including three of the templates we used on Wednesday; but her blog about her fieldwork in rural China is truly amazing.  For an idea of what a Chinese show feels like, have a look at this film from rural China in 2007.

  I think I briefly mentioned Indonesian shadow theatre, and I'll try to bring a Javanese puppet I have next week. Wayang Kulit, the name in Javanese, means apparently "shadow skin" or "imagination skin", referring to the buffalo skin the puppets are made from; plays are very long, lasting six hours or longer, and accompanied by gamelan music. This is a short documentary piece ( which also shows how one puppeteer works a three-stick puppet ! )

For the Karagoz and Karagounis, the Turkish and Greek versions, the best website I can find is ( appropriately enough) http://www.karagoz.net  . This 2-minute clip gives an idea of what it looks and sounds like - a lot more singing than I'd imagined !

Finally, Here's a link to the Lotte Reiniger film  I showed a brief clip from my tablet. It will bring up links to lots of her other films.

The templates we used for puppet-making :

Chinese puppets for a man, a woman, a warrior

More Chinese puppets : a dragon, a rat, an emperor and our oxen !

Another dragon, a man, a woman

Various Indian characters - don't think we used these.

Thinking about teaching resources, if you google "shadow puppet templates" and then a topic or story, there's a lot of downloadable stuff out there. These Halloween puppets look like things Year 1 and 2 could probably cope with : a lot of templates might be a bit fiddly for younger children, but it's not that difficult to design things which they can trace and cut.

Homework : please bring in a couple of things which we can use to project out from the OHP : anything with a pattern, which lets light through, will produce an effect. And be thinking of possible stories you might like to use.

See you next Wednesday, same time, same place !

                                                 ( Thanks to Merche for this amazing photo ! )

Madrid Players Shadow Theatre Workshop

This is the blog for Madrid Players Shadow Theatre workshop, which I'll be organising. The idea is to meet once a week, on a Wednesday, initially  from 8.30 - 10.30, at the Clubhouse, Plaza Perseo. The first session will be Wednesday May 6th.

Shadow Theatre is an ancient form of storytelling which is still popular in many parts of the world. It's mostly associated with the Far East, particularly Indonesia and China, but also became popular in the eighteenth century in France and widely throughout the Ottoman Empire. The principle is pretty simple : put up some form of screen which allows light to pass through it, put a light behind it to cast shadows, and away you go.
 

My own interest in Shadow Theatre was kickstarted by an Indonesian-style show I saw in 1998, and I spent a good few years experimenting by throwing kids on stage, equipped with shaky fragments of The Tempest and a shadow theatre set-up ( I might have claimed this was "teaching" at some point ). However, I actually got some proper training with Asombras theatre group, who are based in El Escorial, on a couple of courses they ran at the Casa Asia in Madrid in 2010. This gives a flavour of their live show., and an idea of what's possible.

Course Contents

The focus would be on both learning techniques of shadow theatre, and using these to draw out the storytelling skills and general all-round creativity of the participants. It will be very hands-on, active time : there's no rulebook for Shadow Theatre, and you learn how to do it by doing it. It's an activity which draws on a variety of skills, so actors, writers, artists, crafty folks are all needed and welcome.

Each session will run for 2 hours, and in my head, a rough plan is this :

Session One will be a short ( 10-minute ) historical/cultural introduction to shadow theatre, followed by some warm-up, movement games to get a feel of the properties of shadow and shadow theatre. We’d probably finish by starting to design a puppet.

Session Two would start with some narrative, story-telling games, followed by working with an Overhead projector, looking at different techniques and scenery; then finishing off the puppet from session One.

Session Three would focus on the different types of lighting instrument you can use, and the different qualities of light offered; then we'd play around with bits and pieces from the props cellar, working on character and movement. Probably a bit more work on storytelling, different qualities of voice, etc.; and then either giving each group a choice of stories to work on, or inviting their own contributions.

  Now we’d need a decision from the group : do you want to work with puppets ? Live, human shadow ? Or some combination of the two ?

From here, it turns into a theatre workshop. Ideally, we break the group into 3 sub-groups, each working together on a different story, to produce specific piece of shadow theatre, developing storyboard, backgrounds, puppets ( if needed ). This would take between 2 or 3 sessions, building up to a final, presentation session.

The idea group size would be 8 – 10, although I think we could squeeze in up to 12 – really, 4 people per group works quite well.

The course is not specifically designed for teachers, but shadow puppetry can be used very effectively in schools as a cross-curricular activity, and is great for developing groupwork skills. The puppet images here show off the work of year 8 students ( 12-13 year-olds), in an Art/English/History/Science project. 

Finally, Shadow Theatre is both a great tool for drawing out people's creativity, and also works well for anyone with an interest in theatre, but who maybe is a bit shy about stepping out in front of an audience. All Madrid Players members are welcome to take part.

If you want to know more, or if you want to sign up, please e-mail Andrew on andrewdes4@hotmail.com. 
The ideal group size would be somewhere between 8 and 12 people; if there's a stampede to sign up - and who knows, shadow puppetry could turn out to be the new rock n'roll - we'll assign places on a first come, first served basis.

That's all folks !