Hello Friends and Flying Box Theatre Supporters!  We are so happy with how our stage-raiser campaign is going.  We’re hovering around 80% of our $1200 goal, and there are still a few days left until the September 1st deadline!

Donations continue to trickle in, and we are at 17 online funders in total as I type.  We also hosted a fundraiser barbecue in the park last weekend, which gave Debbie and I a good excuse to throw a performance together and which also raised another bit of cash to put towards building our stage.

It’s time for the last sprint to the finish line!  If you’ve been thinking about donating, now is the time.  Even a few dollars will go a long way in our thrifty puppeteer’s budget.

We’ve made plenty of projects with nothing but scavenged cardboard and love, but we are stepping it up a notch this time with a custom designed, portable, versatile, sturdy and beautiful puppet theatre.  We plan to use this little flying home to tell many stories and to entertain and enchant people all around our city and beyond, beginning in a few short months.  Help make these plans a reality by donating this weekend!

❤ ❤ ❤ Thank you so much for your support ❤ ❤ ❤

Debbie and Jesse

Thank you to everyone who came out to our barbecue fundraiser event last Saturday in Montreal!
Some very sweet children and adults watched (and assisted!) Debbie and I perform a crankie show (a story-on-a-scroll), and the two girls pictured above left had some things to say.  “She is the sun,” the girl in pink declared, “and I’m the moon!”  They also gave us sage advice for future show-creation:  less talking please, and more puppets!My talented cartoonist friend Meghan Lands did us the honour of illustrating her time at the bbq!  Check out her work here!

Photos courtesy of another talented friend: Peter Nevins.

I am working on a Flying Box print …but can I manage to have it printed and ready by the Flying Box Theatre BBQ Fundraiser this Saturday August 23rd 2014?

It’s anyone’s guess!  This and other answers await you at the barbeque in  the Champs des Possibles, 5-8pm.  There will be musical guests, a brand new crankie show, and homemade sauerkraut!

By the way–tonnes of other stuff is happening tomorrow in the -des Possibles world, which we are totally crashing:

Bioblitz in Champs des Possibles from 10am – 4pm

The Marché des Possibles has loads of events all day!

These 19th century German Engravings are very inspiring to me, and they give a great idea of architecture and design of the era of Schönwerth.

Half of my family tree originates relatively close to Bavaria, in the Alsace region, and this is a big part of the reason I’m fascinated by the old oral traditions of Germany.  I’ve read about the jack-o-lanterns that would guide a lonely hikers through the woods; the mermaids who, finless, would dance under the surface of a stream;  the spinstress who now lives on the moon;  the giants who ruled over mountain castles… I wonder if my great great great great grandmother had similar tales? And what happened to them if she did?

Delving into these European roots I am also acutely aware of my place in the colonization of North America.  These Schönwerth tales and all other folk traditions are tied closely to place, and seeking my family histories takes me far from the land where I live.  I haven’t untangled this knot or truly figured out what decolonization is for me, but the knot is there!

Family History, collage. J Orr 2013.

I’ve been working out the puppet mechanics for the title character in the story Hans Dudledee, beginning with modeling his hip and knee joints in clay. Young Hans is an unlikely hero whose humility and kindness win the day. He sits down at the shore to fish at key moments in the story, and so his body must be designed with this in mind. I see Hans plunking himself down directly to the ground, dropping easily into a splayed-knee position. Today I made it to the basic mechanics of the posture; my next step will be to add refinements to the shapes of the joints in a firmer material. With luck we’ll end up with a puppet that moves as only Hans Dudledee could!

As I mentioned earlier, when Jesse and I first started looking at using these exciting new fairy tales for our traveling puppet show project we got a little bit stuck because most of them were only available in German – which neither of us speak. Some very kind friends and family helped us out with the translations, but while we were waiting we decided to spend some time researching the idea of Fairy Tales in general. Where do they come from, what was their original purpose, and what role do they play in our contemporary world?

Well, not surprisingly, although we’ve come across many interesting theories and ideas, there aren’t really any definitive answers to those questions. One thing that we can say for certain though, is that fairy tales are certainly present in modern culture – once you start looking for them you find them everywhere! I’ve found references in songs, novels, news stories, tv shows, blog posts, podcasts…

One of my favourite finds has been this series of photographs by landscape photographer Kilian Schönberger. He captures the mood of 19th century fairytales in photos of German forests that somehow manage to feel both sinister and enchanting.

For any of you who are interested in jumping down the rabbit-hole of fairy tale research with us, here are a few more links to get you started:

• Fairy Tales are Women’s Tales (article by Anne Thériault)
• Once Upon a Time (video lecture by Maria Tatar, fairy tale scholar)
• The Uses of Enchantment (podcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge)

Ornamentation and pattern will play a big part in our puppet theatre design. Beauty is not dead! I’ve been playing with a pattern taken from a 1850s Bavarian garment, pictured below right. I love translating the 160 year old pattern through my pen because it feels akin to learning a story… Where are its twists and turns? Which elements appear, and what are their relationships to one another? What gets lost if I begin to improvise and stray from the original? Then there is the matter of medium: making my loose digital sketch is an utterly different experience than making an embroidery. Similarly, our performance will be in the medium of puppetry while the stories were recorded as a part of a shared oral literature–seeing our show will surely be different than hearing the stories by the fireside, perhaps for the 10th time! There is a lot to be learned by imagining, remembering, and investigating this gap, I think.

Erika Eichenseer discusses her discovery of the Schönwerth archive in the video below. Skip to 58:00 for her description of a dramatic scene from a fairytale puppet show she made with a group of children!

The Flying Box Theatre was encouraged by Erika’s obvious interest in puppet adaptations of the Schönwerth fairytales, and sure enough when we reached out to her we had a warm response. Hopefully we’ll get to fly over to Germany one day and show her our work!

Erika and her husband Adolf were among the founders of The Schönwerth Institute, created in 2009 to promote Schönwerth’s work and manage his estate. Her collection Prinz Roßzwifl und andere Märchen is our main source of material.

When Jesse and I first started talking about creating a puppet show from the exciting new fairy tales she had found, one of our first considerations was “what kind of puppets and what kind of stage will best fit these stories?” In the beginning it was a bit of a guessing game, as we only had access to three stories that had been published on the web in English. But we knew for sure that we wanted the theatre to be sturdy, beautiful and most of all PORTABLE. Our goal is to be able to perform these stories anywhere and everywhere, at festivals, in parks, schools, community centers, maybe even in the metro or on the street.

So, last January, while I had a little bit of time between other jobs, I sat down with Google Sketchup and started dreaming about a theatre in a park. Here’s what I ended up with:

Of course, it’s easy to build a virtual stage – a bit harder to make it a reality! We started out making a “junk” version out of cardboard and found materials, in order to make sure that the dimensions would be right for our puppets. We’re incorporating these refinements into our revised designs, and with a little bit of help we will soon be well on our way to building the portable stage we’ve been dreaming of!