Travelling | scribblesandshakespeare

If I don’t leave this country at least once a year I get itchy feet. My latest adventure and itch remedy took me to Gothenburg, Sweden earlier this month to puppeteer the feet of an ageing physicist with dementia called Alfie.

Avid readers of my blog (so, basically you mum) may remember that back in 2017 a lovely company called Vertebra Theatre took me on for my first puppetry job. The show, Dark Matter, followed retired astrophysicist Alfie as the line between memories with a lost love and the present day in a nursing home blurred.

I recently had the opportunity to return to the show, and my role of animating the puppet’s feet (or the head in one scene). This is the first time I have come back to a show several years later, and although there had been a few alterations and developments since our 2017 Edinburgh Fringe run, it was familiar ground. I found there is something comforting about re-acquainting myself with the physical language of a piece, stirring the muscle memory of the body. In the same way, working with the same director several times (I also puppeteered in Vertebra Theatre’s At the Heart of Things last year) you build up a shared language and understanding. Such a relationship can only enrich the work further.

Our venue, Frilagret, on Heurlins Plats, hosted us as part of the Gothenburg Fringe. Our dressing room overlooked the river – definitely one of the nicer dressing rooms I’ve been in! This was my first time in Sweden, and although we didn’t have long in Gothenburg we managed to do a bit of exploring. We were staying on the edge of a neighbourhood called Haga, an area of pretty old buildings and the city’s oldest quarter. We wandered the cobbled streets lined with little cafes, expensive gift shops, vintage boutiques and bakeries, stopping for coffee and huge cinnamon buns called Hagabullen (we shared one between three). On our walk to the venue we passed through several leafy parks and down surprisingly quiet streets for a city, taking in a mixture of older apartment buildings and more industrial looking architecture. If you have longer than a day in the city there’s a great list of things to do in Gothenburg on the hotels.com website.

We had a very warm audience who gave us some great feedback after the show. It was a far more chilled affair than other fringe festivals I’ve been to, with very little hype around the city. After the show a few of us managed to quickly change and pop into the adjoining performance space to watch The Sparkle by De La Schmate Project. It was an intriguing piece involving puppetry, film and photography that used closed-circuit cameras to tell the story of a rat in the city of Jaffa. I love actually seeing how the performers create the world and the story that the audience is presented with, something which reminded me of seeing The Paper Cinema’s brilliant shows.

It was a flying visit but I enjoyed my first taste of Sweden. Puppetry, seeing a show, a spot of exploring and a cinnamon bun the size of my head. What’s not to like?

Puppetry is powerful. It has the capacity to make people believe in life where there is none, to see a soul in a collection of strings and wooden sticks. And it doesn’t only affect the audience. It can have a profound effect on the puppeteer.

With this in mind, for my third time teaching at the English summer camp in Russia, this time through ENgage Theatre Arts, I focused on puppetry for the whole project. At last year’s camp I ran a puppetry workshop with the students where we made newspaper and string puppets then devised short scenes. With both age groups I worked with these workshops went down really well, so this year the final performances themselves involved puppets.

My wonderful colleagues at CLASS Study and Training Centre, with whom I work in Russia, had organised a theme for this year’s camp based on virtual reality and communities. We created a world within the camp – Campus – whose ruler, VerLock, delivered regular recorded messages to the students containing instructions, comments and clues to riddles. We realised that puppetry could work really well within this theme, so I asked my students to feature VerLock as a character in their final pieces, then looked forward to seeing their interpretations of this mysterious figure.

Teachers with their puppet versions created by the first group

This theme explored community-building through the separation of the students into different communities or nations. Carrying this on into my drama sessions, I tasked the students with asking lots of ‘What if?’ questions about their nations and Campus as a whole. All fictional stories are basically the writer asking ‘What if this happened? Or this? Or that?’ then providing a possible answer to this question through their story. Working in their separate nation communities the students explored various different scenarios until they had boiled it down to their favourite, which they then built their final performances on.

They were all enthusiastic about the puppetry, even if a little daunted when I first told them they were going to create and perform puppet shows to their peers. Natural leaders emerged within the groups, and I worked with them to ensure that everyone in each community had a role, while trying to make sure the leaders weren’t relied on too heavily by everyone else. It became clear which parts of the process each student enjoyed and excelled at or found challenging. One boy struggled to engage with the devising process, but as soon as we started making the puppets he got stuck right in and his excitement and enthusiasm was wonderful! I could see him working through problems and coming up with different solutions as he tried this way of attaching the neck or that way of creating a shoulder joint.

The final performances were an absolute delight – a little rough round the edges, as to be expected, but utterly charming. What stood out for me was the teamwork involved in the process and the final piece, and the level of creativity the students showed. All four groups I worked with created their puppets in a slightly different way, and all four stories were different, though interestingly there were some moral themes that ran through all of the ideas.

I love what I do. Travelling to interesting places, experiencing different cultures, sharing my passion for theatre and puppetry, and working with students who are discovering their own creative potential is immensely rewarding. Like every performer or creative, what I don’t enjoy is constantly worrying about money, the job insecurity and the rejections. At the end of each creative project there’s the necessity to get a day job back in an office for a bit, returning to a life I thought I’d left far behind when I set off to drama school (oh how naïve!). But when I’m feeling glum and I start wondering whether this career change really was a good idea, and isn’t it about time I said: “Well that was a lot of fun and I’ve had a great time, but now I really should get back to something sensible”, I remember what one student said to me at the end of a puppet-making session on camp: “I love doing this. I wish we got to do things like this at school”. Heart strings suitably torn, I realised I have to keep going, to keep creating and making and sharing. The joy I witnessed as I saw that boy delighting in the chance to be creative – that alone is enough to keep me going.