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A Digital Puppetry Show for the Family

When The Pictures Came is the next show in Terrapin’s exploration of digital puppetry. It is a collaboration between Terrapin and the Children’s Art Theatre of China in association with the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham UK, and Reckless Moments. It will premiere in 2010 in Shanghai on Friday 28 May and run through toInternational Children's Day on 1 June. Australian audiences will have the chance to see it at The Come Out Festival in Adelaide in 2011, with other Australian, UK, European and Chinese cities to be confirmed.

The surreal and poetic narratives of Finegan Kruckemeyer will be brought to life by the inventive and comic techniques of digital puppetry, originally developed in Terrapin’s Explosion Therapy. When The Pictures Came will blur the distinction between theatre and cartoon with a seamless merge of projection and live action. Puppets and performers will walk in and out of animations using projection and precision timing. The projected worlds that the characters enter are fraught with danger lacking any laws that govern the normal. Worlds collide, people merge, double, shrink or explode. Nothing is fixed or real.

When The Pictures Came will employ techniques that are at the forefront of puppetry innovation. It will use a mixture of miniature hand-held data projectors and larger fixed projectors. There will be black light theatre, object manipulation and physical performance creating a world where what is only possible in the madness of cartoons becomes a live theatre performance and an animation all in one.

A Chinese and Australian artistic team, along with an English composer, will create When The Pictures Came, with performers and puppeteers from both countries. It will also undergo development stages in both countries, producing a unique aesthetic as the team merge different artistic voices and traditions.

Synopsis
by Finegan Kruckemeyer

Four people sit in four rooms and try to make themselves better: the opera singer wants to sing louder; the strongman wants to be stronger; the martial artist wants to be more artful; and the kid wants to play with them all.  But one day, two deliverymen arrive. 

And in their arms, is a box.  And in the box, is a machine.  And in the machine… are the pictures. 

When the pictures came, they sucked in stories, and secrets, and four characters with no idea what they were in for – they spat out revelations, and magics, and impossibilities.  Now the pictures are here, tastes can be heard, sounds can be seen, heads will roll (literally), and shadows abandon their bodies.  Now the pictures are here, once upon a times will happen twice, and happy ever afters are gone in the blink of an eye. 

For four characters, the inside world will mash with the outside, and the mess create a flood big enough to wash all rules away. 

Hold your breath – we’re going in.

Director: Frank Newman
Writer: Finegan Kruckemeyer
Production Designer: Kate Davis
Costume Designer: Shi Lei
Animator: Zeng Yi Gang
Composer: Matt Marks

Producers: Cai Jin Ping (CATC) and Kevin O'Loghlin (Terrapin)
Executive Producers: Barry Plews and Hu He (Reckless Moments)
Associate Producer: Shona Powell (Lakeside Arts Centre)