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To explore our Creative Programming, click the Rune Stones and sneak behind the scenes to discover what's happening in each of our fantasy production realms!
Visit the friendly
Realm of
Kin
Visit the Healing
Realm of
Earth
Visit the inventive Realm of
Water
Visit the adventurous Realm of
Air
Visit the Dynamic Realm of
Fire
To explore our general company activities and ongoing programming, start discovering what we're doing right here!
KINETICS
Our Research and Development Programme forges dynamic industry leading partnerships to help us innovate the creative production process and improve inclusion for puppeteers and performers with mobility difficulties.
As we're still updating our website, this button will temporarily open a new window to Jon and Staci's Kinetics blog on our project partners website at Furrifingersco.uk
PREVIOUS KINETICS PROGRAMME ACTIVITIES INCLUDE...
PHASE ONE:
Researching how we can make street performance/festival & 'walkabout' style puppetry more accessible to artists with mobility difficulties...
One of our favourite things to do is live, interactive puppetry at community events and festivals - so when our chronic illnesses began to affect our mobility and cause difficulties for us getting around on foot, let alone doing so while 'wearing' a walkabout character, we began to devise new ways of building puppets that could adapt to our new means of transportation.
The biggest challenges by far were a) the realisation that the world at large is simply not designed to be accessible on wheels, and b) that we needed to seriously reconsider our approach to this style of puppetry performance if we wanted to continue doing it - which of course we did!
To find out more about what we learned in the initial phase of the Kinetics Programme, check out our 'Roadtrip blog'.
For updates on current Kinetics Projects, please click the button above to visit the Project blog over at Furrifingers.
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Andy Brunskill
Marie Rogers,
Jimmy Grimes &
Clare McCarthy
BARBICAN THEATRE
MAY 2019
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Jimmy Grimes &
workshop participants
LAMBETH WORKSHOP
FEB 2019
PHASE TWO:
Workshopping ideas for Mobility Scooter based adaptations to create mobile puppetry performance rigs, with Puppetry Directors and Mech Specialists Brunskill & Grimes...
After attending a 2 day workshop run by Brunskill & Grimes in their base in Lambeth, South London in February of 2019, we decided to invite them down to work with us for a week-long intensive, at the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth, Devon.
We spent 5 days exploring 2 critical aspects of the kinetics project's ambition to create an accessible pop up performance rig/mobile stage and a prototype puppet that could be comfortably manipulated by a solo puppeteer from their mobility scooter or wheelchair.
PHASE THREE:
Visiting Rusty Squid in Bristol for an introduction to Animatronics Workshop; to investigate how robotics and new technologies might help us overcome some other mobility challenges...
PHASE FOUR:
Enlisting the help of our local Animatronics and 3D Printing Puppet Workshop, Furrifingers...
We originally approached Furrifingers in October 2019 with a proposal to collaborate on our Kinetics Project, because we wanted to investigate the potential of integrating their emerging 3D Printing and Animatronics technologies into our character designs - to create a series of accessible puppets that would specifically enhance the performative experience for our disabled artists - many of whom have mobility difficulties or chronic/invisible illnesses that either prevent or restrict their abilities to puppeteer without causing their symptoms to worsen.
We wanted to explore how we could use technically advanced puppetry design processes to reduce or remove the physical barriers we faced as disabled puppeteers, and discover new ways to develop our production processes in a way that would showcase our adaptive techniques rather than trying to hide them.
To this end we embarked on a number of creative workshops with our group of over 65 diverse artists and were then able - thanks to Arts Council Funding - to select the first 3 adaptive puppetry design briefs to pursue further, which has led to a fantastic partnership between Broken Puppet Theatre Company, our 'Broken:Live' emerging artists group and the Monster Lab at Furrifingers.
We're really looking forward to seeing the first of our 3 prototype 'hybrid' puppets come to life as this project progresses, and can't thank Jon and Staci enough for all of their hard work and always going the extra mile to support the aims and ambitions of this project. We're thrilled to be continuing this work with them despite the complications of the pandemic and excited to discover even more ways to improve inclusion through the innovative R and D we are doing together in this feild.
