Students have the opportunity to learn from the masters at Dead Puppet Society when their puppetry workshop comes to the Bundaberg School of Arts next week.
Nominated for six Helpmann awards and an Olivier award, Dead Puppet Society is an Australian-based theatre production house and design company with international reach.
Through traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology, executive producer Nicholas Paine said Dead Puppet Society aims to create deeply imaginative visual theatre, public art and sculpture.
Experiencing this first-hand, workshop participants will learn the fine art of puppet making in addition to puppet performance skills.
“We will spend a week with the young people of Bundaberg, teaching them our approach to puppet design and manipulation and ultimately work towards creating a reef-inspired movement work which will be shown at the end of the intensive,” Nicholas said.
“We love inspiring the next generation of arts makers. Puppetry fuses performance with visual art, so it’s very accessible to a wide range of young people and aspiring makers.
This is not the first time Dead Puppet Society has visited Bundaberg and Nicholas said the team is eager to return with a community-inspired project this time around.
“We always love the visit,” he said.
“We have never worked on a project that draws on the local environment though, so we’re very much looking forward to that.
“We get the opportunity to travel to regional towns a couple of times a year, both with our productions and education programs and extending our reach beyond the metropolitan areas is a vital priority of the company.”
In addition to their newly acquired skills, participating students are contributing to a much larger project, with the finished product set to feature in this year's Milbi Festival.
“This is step one of an extensive creative process,” Nicholas said.
“Later in the year, Dead Puppet Society will return to Bundaberg to deliver a large-scale parade that heralds the start of the nesting season and celebrates the annual miracle of the hatching of the turtles.
“With the community, we are creating large-scale marine creatures,” he said.
“Puppets can do so many things that a human performer can’t! They leave so much open to the imagination.”
The workshop commences on January 11. Click here for more information and to secure your spot.
The project has been made possible with the support of the State Government through Arts Queensland, the Regional Arts Services Network and the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF).
The RADF is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Bundaberg Regional Council, Fraser Coast Regional Council and South Burnett Regional Council.
