The Creative Act

Who’d-a-thunk it? A committee can write a play. This puppet play will (ideally) be in the 2010 Fringe Festival. We’ll see how that goes.
What follows here is the records of what we’ve done in the past 6 months. The Fringe is in early/mid July of 2010, so we’ve got under 12 months left, with just 6 until we have to submit for the Fringe.

So we decided to do a play. How does one do that? Having put on 2 before, Asa wanted to do less work this time. So he decided “I’ll write it with Dan and Erik, and then they’ll do some of the production stuff! And as we write it, we’ll do puppets!”
Poor, naive Ace.
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But it’s okay, this is just part 2. Part 1 was “The screwed up first attempt”.
This is what I do to reward myself for progress on my Thesis.
I apologize that this is more discussion of what I’m doing/have done than showing, but I made it a little more entertaining to watch.
I’m also doing this to get an idea of timing in videos/play. Apparently that’s crucial to making things interesting.
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Let me start by apologizing. I read most of the other work put up on the site, but my literary background is non-existent. I don’t have anything productive to add to your works. I likes ‘em though, for what it’s worth.

So, Puppets Put in Plaster, Pantomimical Pastiches of Present P….
Stuff.
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Macho Mondays
Ride the wave
Manly smells
stubbled shave
hunky muscles
grecian holds
homoerotic
body folds
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Mache Mardis!
Imagine an accent there, so that it’s Mach-EH Mar-dees.
So, my puppet pal and I have conspired to turn Tuesdays (the titular Mardi) into Paper Mache (ditto, for Mache. I.E. the titular Mache. Geez, keep up) Tuesdays. Or Mardi Mache. Geez, keep up.
This is/was mostly an experiment in the medium, to see if we can make puppet features (heads, mostly, but why not hands, feet and torsos?) that are, at once, light, durable and reproducible on the cheap.
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For those of you following my few sparse posts, I’m doing a puppet play sometime.

So,  it came in a flash that I’ve been thinking too hard about the play as a serious topic.  I’m not too serious a fellow, so there’s really no point in doing it straight.  I’d just be fighting myself.

So, instead, it’ll be (I pray) funny!

I’m writing this here because I’ve essentially got the whole plot in my head (time in production after the flash of insight: 30 seconds), but I’ve been in a slump for a couple of weeks (not working on a thesis can do that!) so I hereby pledge, by the honour of greyskull, that I will have a draft script for your enjoyment next week.

Maybe sooner if the ‘puppetry’ category gets a capital p.

So, my mediocre accomplishments are going to be posted!

Oh, and there’s an update to The Puppet Plays. It’s very short.

I can now Grab Juggle. This is a big step from just normal juggling. Grab juggling you have to actively seek out the ball/whatever with your hand, not just throw pretty well to it. Consequently many miscues result in balls being thrust quickly and authoritatively away from the juggler, as if in a try for freedom. My place-prefere for doing this is about 15ft from one of the busiest streets in Winnipeg, so a particularly bad miscue will result in the loss of my bean bag or my life.

Good bean bags are hard to come by.

Now I feel bad about writing this. Someone will have to write something more appropriate to make it go away!

Don’t mean to startle you, but there’s a minor update to the Puppet Plays post I did a while back.

And an idea – How many of you would, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, stop by an outdoor puppet theatre for the latest installment of some serialized puppet play.  1$ for entry, maybe 1$ for popcorn… What do you think?

- What about a serialized Web Puppet show?  I guess it would depend on the quality, but …

Me buds and I are trying to figure out how to not lose money doing puppetry.  One has a particularly… Ambitious vision.  I’m trying to think small potatoes.  It may end up being big potatoes, the way I do things.

It started dirtier in my mind, but nothing rhymes nicely with ball gag and chain. The metering I intend it to be read with is a bit weird. Imagine a slight pause/break where there’s the hyphen, and a bit of an upswing on the following syllable.

Johnny was a world war vet-eran,
who came back a little bit queer.
Couldn’t make love with out fett-erin’
and that’s how he made his way here.
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So I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this, but my goal is to work on a play through this blog. This may turn out terribly intrusive, or simply fall behind all the other entries. We’ll see. New things will appear italicized. Should save some time if you’re interested, but not so devoted you’ll compare the entirety of the post to the previous (”Ah hah! He changed the spelling of Analyze to Analyse!!”).

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