Shadow Puppet Figures
Mark ‘Spoonman’ Petrakis and I are developing a shadow puppet show we call ‘Ubu’s Dreams’.
This short series of sketches stars Père Ubu, the hero of Alfred Jarry’s surreal plays at the turn of the last century. In this show, Ubu is constantly dreaming, interacting with archetypal characters from our collective unconscious.
For this project, we are creating a variety of wooden figures with a laser cutter: big faces, music notes, dancers, street lamps, umbrellas trees and graveyards, to name but a few.
We will then attach our puppets on thin vertical sticks, and wave them across the stage to bring them to life, with a projector over our heads projecting them onto the screen.
We plan to continue this experiment through the summer and perform a first puppet show during our Dada exhibit at the Canessa Gallery in North Beach, from Nov. 3 to 12, 2016.
I also plan to use some of these techniques with our lower and middle school students, for the Maker Art courses I will be teaching this fall.
From shadow puppets to poetic robots, these interactive storytelling experiments have the potential to engage us at a deeper level and help us learn about ourselves.
View more pictures of this Magic Theater project on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/fabola/albums/72157664637863884
Learn more about Ubu’s Dreams:
Learn more about the Magic Theater project (originally called Théâtre Mécanique):
Shadow Puppet Figures
Mark ‘Spoonman’ Petrakis and I are developing a shadow puppet show we call ‘Ubu’s Dreams’.
This short series of sketches stars Père Ubu, the hero of Alfred Jarry’s surreal plays at the turn of the last century. In this show, Ubu is constantly dreaming, interacting with archetypal characters from our collective unconscious.
For this project, we are creating a variety of wooden figures with a laser cutter: big faces, music notes, dancers, street lamps, umbrellas trees and graveyards, to name but a few.
We will then attach our puppets on thin vertical sticks, and wave them across the stage to bring them to life, with a projector over our heads projecting them onto the screen.
We plan to continue this experiment through the summer and perform a first puppet show during our Dada exhibit at the Canessa Gallery in North Beach, from Nov. 3 to 12, 2016.
I also plan to use some of these techniques with our lower and middle school students, for the Maker Art courses I will be teaching this fall.
From shadow puppets to poetic robots, these interactive storytelling experiments have the potential to engage us at a deeper level and help us learn about ourselves.
View more pictures of this Magic Theater project on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/fabola/albums/72157664637863884
Learn more about Ubu’s Dreams:
Learn more about the Magic Theater project (originally called Théâtre Mécanique):