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Shadow Puppet Theater

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 french poet Alfred Jarry’s surreal plays. In this show, Ubu is constantly dreaming, playing 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, trees and graveyards, to name but a few. We then tape our puppets on wooden sticks, and wave them across the stage to bring them to life, with a projector over our heads.

 

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 more 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:

bit.ly/ubu-dreams-page

 

Learn more about the Magic Theater project (originally called Théâtre Mécanique):

fabriceflorin.com/2015/01/10/theatre-mecanique/

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Uploaded on July 9, 2016
Taken on June 28, 2016