CATCH YOUR BREATH. To 3 July.
Young People
CATCH YOUR BREATH
Theatre Rites Tour to 3 July 2004
Runs 55min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 June at The Door, Birmingham Rep
Crème de la crème theatre for young people.Theatre Rites is a company with a growing history of young people's theatre involving a full visual vocabulary here is puppetry, projections, objects being constructed and adapted. There is a story, in one sense: that of a wolf blowing down a house where a young girl lives. But it's less a narrative than a reference point for audiences, something to anchor the rich procession of visual moments.
These puppets are no dangling marionettes or finger-end excrescences. A young girl is manipulated in details by performers, giving a complete sense of a living individual created especially through her facial reactions largely a matter of head angle - and a close sense of connection with human operators who focus attention on the puppet's supposed response.
Tactile sense is emphasised at the opening, performers offering audience members the chance to feel the long bags they carry around. From these emerge the material that develops into a house. On one wall of this window shapes are projected, where the child appears, looking out, closing or opening curtains.
There's a simple playfulness to all this, alongside the sophisticated making of things and images. And timing aimed at absorption by the 3-6 age range. Our puppet-child moves and regards with a young child's absorbed concentration. Sometimes as when she encounters the huffy-puffy Wolf the action may be slowed down from real-time to express the inner-time' a sensation seems to last. It always works to create a feel of reality for young audience members.
And the Wolf's windy destruction of the carefully-assembled house becomes quite spectacular. Finally, the company assembles a wavy tunnel with its own airlock-style entrance, where audience members are invited after the show to meet the characters.
The human performers are not actors; they facilitate the creation of characters through objects precisely provoking audience imaginations. Nearest to conventional performance is probably the actor in wolf's clothing, though even here the emphasis is on the actor inside creating a wolf object' rather than acting an animal character.
The entire thing has and ought to be seen to be believed.
Performers: Emilie Feron, Stewart Fraser, Noriko Sakura
Director/Puppet Design: Sue Buckmaster
with Installation Artist: Sophia Clist
Lighting: Phil Supple
Composer: Nigel Piper
Animated Film Director: Lizzie Oxby
Video Editor: John Taylor
2004-06-22 07:25:39