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 ! )