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Jungle drums, cogs and sprockets

There’s a lovely little volume called the London Jungle Book by a Gond artist called Bhajju Shyam, all about his trip to London (to decorate an Islington Indian restaurant). The Gonds are native jungle artists from central India who have a particular take on the world, whereby everything is seen in terms of their jungle domus – their dogs always know where they’re going, as do London buses which are seen as large red dogs, for instance. Londoners are pretty miserable during the day, but very jolly in the evening in pubs, when – in Islington at any rate – they tend to wear black. Rather like bats, thought Bhajju.

Well all this appealed to a certain Dr Stephen Guy, a historian turned devotee of mechanical automata. He is also a tutor and decided Bhajju’s publication would be a rather good project for his students. They could bring it to life by creating machines around the images of bats, dogs, buses etc. So they did, and created a remarkable show that was performed at the Horniman Museum in June, and gets a new lease of life when it appears in the CMT exhibition in Granada in November.

Now, you’d be excused if you guessed that Dr Guy was teaching at an engineering college or even an art school, but he isn’t. His seat of learning is the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (let me call it the Rose for short), as it’s known as of this term. His students are into Scenic Arts and he tells me that the Rose has has had a growing interest in mechanical theatre, so that a couple of years ago they appointed him to teach it.

Steve Guy’s own provenance is interesting, incidentally. Twenty years ago he was a history PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London, making ends meet by working part-time in Covent Garden at, you guessed, CMT. Almost needless to say the history was forgotten and mechanical theatre took over.

He joined the Rose in Sidcup in 2006 and the first major project was to create a mechanical version of Aristophanes’ classical classic The Birds. The students had to find out how to make machines that mimicked the actions of birds. They learned about the usually non-theatrical pursuits of drilling, grinding, welding and riveting, used plumbers’ pipes and scooter parts, scrounged cooking oil from a local Chinese restaurant, and in short showed a deal of ingenuity. They had a parade of their creations through Sidcup, when several of their creations had to be carried back to the drawing board in dismembered parts. But they persevered under Dr G’s genial guidance, and got it so right that they were able to take their birds and created a performance for the international showcase the Prague Quadrennial, and were a hit. ‘Wonderful set of students, wonderful;’ says Steve.

It was a new set of students, just as wonderful it turned out, that put together the London Jungle Book – to the delight of Bhajju Shyam to whose home village in Uttar Pradesh Dr G introduced the mechanical theatre of the book, and did workshops with kids there as well as performances.

‘The point is that ‘mechanical theatre’ is being recognised as a legitimate part of puppet theatre, (that was the section of the Prague Quadrennial that we were part of), and there’s enormous enthusiasm for it among the students and audiences’ he says.

Term has started again, and a new project is under way. Next June the Horniman Museum has an exhibition called Myths and Monsters. I think we can safely leave the rest to their imagination.

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Look out for Paul O’Grady on his TV show at 5pm on October 19. He will have taken on a rather alarming aspect until you realise that it’s not actually him chairing the frolics, nor even his alter ego Lily Savage. The show will open with RoboThespian in his place – created by Will Jackson’s Engineered Arts which I told you about back in June. Mechanical theatre is to be he theme of the programme.

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And keep a watchful eye on this website from November 12. Each evening for 40 nights something will be happening. Precisely what is a closely guarded secret, which means I’ve no idea,  but each night there will be some new manifestation of the Magic of Cabaret, the series title. The spell lasts until Winter Solstice, December 21; don’t miss it.

Hundreds of people arrived around 11 a.m., and were treated to the sounds of steel drums before entering through the Drifting Apart sliding doors into the exhibition hall. Walter Ruffler and Falk Keuten were guests of honour and curator Hans-Gerd Kaspers welcomed us all with a talk about the history of automata.

You can see some more pictures of the exhibition here. As well as a great article about the show here (English translation).

DASA is well worth a visit, and has very informative permanent exhibits on the theme of the workplace. You can take a ride which extols the dangers of operating a fork-lift truck, learn how an electricity power station works, and children can construct their own buildings and try out a pneumatic drill.

Viva Carlos!

It happens. Struggling artist in a strange country just about making ends meet working in a warehouse by day and painting by night pictures that he can occasionally sell, gets a creative block. Can’t paint any more. Disaster. Body and soul threatening to fall apart. Loyal and loving wife goes to London, to Covent Garden, and discovers Cabaret. Comes running home to New Cross armed with a leaflet. ‘This is what you should do, Carlos,’ she tells the painter, and the rest is…

Well, a fairy story, isn’t it? Doesn’t really happen like that. Except that in the case of Carlos Zapata it is exactly what happened, and today his work is in private collections and galleries all over the world, and he even had a piece in the RA’s Summer Exhibition a couple of years ago. And in November Cabaret is opening a show with some new, unexpected, work by the Colombian-born Carlos at El Parque de las Ciencias in Granada, Spain. All in ten short years.

It was in 1999 that he plucked up the courage to walk into the Cabaret shop with some of his drawings after his English rose wife Penny’s discovery. Sue was out but he left his portfolio and the next day she contacted him, said she liked his ideas and suggested he work for her for the same money he was getting at the warehouse with time for his own work, and pick up a few tips. He spent a year sweeping up, dealing with customers, mending broken automata and working his own ideas. ‘It was the best school I could have had, meeting people, artists, and learning the art’ he says. Then when Cabaret decided to close when the rent went vertical, he was at a loss. ‘I said to Sue that I didn’t know what I was going to do. She said “You’re a professional now, you’ll sell your work”. And I did.’

Self-taught Carlos Zapata came to London to escape the civil war that has been raging in Colombia all his 46 years and more, but its the folk art of not only South America but of Africa and Asia that inspires him. His early piece, Transpacifico, is a delightfully comic bus, 18 inches high and laden with exotic fruits and comestibles on the roof and equally colourful passengers happily entertaining themselves inside. The passengers on the London bus he made at about the same time are altogether more sinister…

He also gets inspiration from old-fashioned museums like the Museum of Mankind that used to be behind the Royal Academy, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and the Horniman in South London. ‘I like the stories and the way they’re told,’ he says. He’s had commissions from a number of museums, including the Natural History Museum this year.

Family is important to him, though he can only rarely get back to Colombia. The critic he pays most attention to is Thomas, his nine-year-old son, ‘who tells me exactly what he thinks, whether a piece works or not, if it’s funny”. Despite being a native Spanish speaker, having his work on exhibition in Spain will be just another adventure – the Unites States felt much more like home. When he exhibited in San Francisco he met his late grandfather’s sister for the first time; in Baltimore he found a lost cousin. He doesn’t know what to expect from Granada, where he will be showing much larger work than before, some of the pieces six feet tall, ‘really big guys’.

He’s not afraid to tackle political issues, either, and one recent one is of a sweatshop. He’s working on a large elephant now, with a comical array of Europeans safari-ing on its back, but in his mind is a much darker piece with a theme of African child soldiers.

‘Mostly the Granada pieces are not political, but an artist cannot ignore what is happening around him,’ he says. Something of the revolutionary about this Zapata, and I don’t mean turning handles.

For those who will be in or around Granada this winter, the exhibition opens at El Parque de las Ciencias from November 1 to January 31.

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Adam & Eve ride again! Yes, the surviving element of CMT’s great Ride of Life extravaganza, Ron Fuller’s Adam & Eve Public Bar, is to get a new lease at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock. In January it goes on display for three months. A&E is the only complete tableau left of the 25 that were created in 1989 for the Meadowhall Shopping Centre in Sheffield but never installed. The project management of centre changed, most of the scenes were lost or destroyed and there were only this and elements of pieces by Tim Hunkin and Paul Spooner left when CMT finally extricated the remains.

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Interesting that the people behind the Fourth Plinth are the same as those that brought us the Sultan’s Elephant in 2006 and last year La Machine, Liverpool’s giant spider. They’re called Artichoke. They admit that the Gormley business is a bit out of their territory, but it seems to me that it needn’t be. Why is there no automaton scheduled for an hour in the spotlight? Come on, boys and girls, we’re only just over half way through the 100 days of the project so there’s plenty of time.

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Sarah had what we coyly call a significant birthday last week – see Gary’s gorgeous pic of the gorgeous creature - and, still seven at heart, she needed an entertainer to go with the jelly, cake and fizzy drinks (OK, small concession to adulthood, Prosecco) at her party. But who? No contest. Step forward Matthew Robins and Tim Spooner, fresh from their successes performing on top of the National Theatre’s fly tower. They gave, of course, the piece Sarah herself had commissioned, Cabin Doors to Manual (‘an adult fairy tale’), and it had the audience giggling and clapping their little hands. Good job there were no kids, they wouldn’t have got it. You can watch it here Cabin Doors to Manual on Vimeo

Our friend, the Egyptian God Anubis, is suitably attired in a beautifully painted tartan kilt.

The text reads,

‘Since his heyday in ancient Egypt, Anubis seldom has a chance to show off his shapely calves. He takes the opportunity in this Highland manifestation, but his pleasure is impaired by his young relatives’ lack of aptitude as a sheepdog.

145 mm x 118mm x 240 mm
Excluding handle - which makes 145mm into 200mm

Delivery - December 2009.

50% Deposit payable with order
50% Payable on shipping

Price: £785.00 | $1,065.60

Click here to buy from our shop

The human side of Paul Spooner

If you ask Paul Spooner to fit a project brief don’t expect anything, because whatever you expect isn’t going to happen. What you can be sure of is that whatever does happen is going to be a delight. He thinks the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw were looking for something ‘pretty didactic’ when they asked for a narrative of eight models to tell the story of Humans and the Environment. ‘I’m rather bludgeoning them into my ideas, hope they like what they’re getting’. Well, you know Spooners: there’s nothing not to like, even when we’re talking about pollution and natural selection in a country that has the most polluting power station in Europe and an education minister who’s a militant creationist. Doesn’t matter to Paul. ‘I just like to keep myself amused’ he says, and a few million others on the way. ‘What I’m doing is going from as big as you think to smaller than you can see, with human scale somewhere in the middle, that should cover it’ he says. So he starts with the universe, of course, and a superior life form with eyes on the tops of their heads and a telescope mounted on a jelly mould. A jelly mould? ‘It’s their basic design style’, so their rocket looks as if it might be rather sweet to the tooth as well as they fly to Earth and its environment, its pollution, its gravity. And you’d be excused if you thought he’s just taken an actual jelly mould and adopted it, but he doesn’t work like that: he hand-made the jelly mould.

And with all Paul’s humour and ingenuity, this story is real science told through art. The earth eases itself into contents; a tree of life produces all the least prepossessing of creatures, including human; a rather startled looking gent opens his own chest to examine his innards; a kind of animated collage reminiscent of Kandinsky and Calder tells about bacteria; and we come to the tiniest of objects we are only aware of by the larger things they displace, a bit like a billiard table you might think -0 well, you might not, Paul Spooner does and that’s what works. What’s just as amazing as the Spooner take on the most complicated of tales is that he finishes it at the end of this month after barely six months conceiving it, designing and making it. It will be a centrepiece for the Copernicus Science Centre which opens in June next year, and over the winter it will all be tested for the mechanics and electronics to make sure it’s going to go without a hitch. What’s sad for us is that this particular life story will probably never be seen in this country. It’s to be a permanent installation in Warsaw, and like any work of art it’s unrepeatable. And even with a work of art, nothing always goes according to plan. ‘Blind alleys? There’ve been a few, and at the end of a project you have the problem of clearing all the failures out and wondering what to keep’. Keep it all, Paul, you never know…

Mewsings…

If you’re passing the National Theatre in the South Bank on a Friday or Saturday this month at around 10pm, look up. No, further. Right up to the top of the fly tower. Yes, there. Last Saturday that particular starry venue – that is, closer to the stars the most others – saw the world premiere of the first CMT (well, Sarah) commissioned drama. Created by Matthew Robins, Cabin Doors to Manual is part of a kind of puppet show double bill.

If you haven’t been yet don’t miss the Rowland Emett exhibition that opened at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury last week. It’s sheer delight, not just to those of us of a certain age who knew the Emett whimsicalities that adorned Punch in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and from which he created the famous Far Tottering & Oystercreek Railway for the Festival of Britain, but to anyone who likes examples of creative mechanics that are fun. It’s a great evocation, not just through his cheerily impossible drawings but the engines he built from them, like the extraordinary contraptions made of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang film.

And talking about inventive mechanics, it can’t be nearly a year since the Corpus Christi clock was unveiled, but it is. That unbelievable mixture of Gothick horror and inspired artistry with no hands or digits cost its creator John Taylor £1m to make, with steam of engineers, artists and designers on his team, based on the last great clockwork of invention, John Harrison’s grasshopper escapement of the 1760s, hence the grotesque grasshopper that rides the five feet diameter timepiece. The good news as it approaches its first birthday is that you can have your own, custom built according to your specifications. The cost? The £1m is cost Taylor in the first place, no more or less.

Artists Johnny White (Ride of Life veteran) and Amanda Wray have created a fantastic new exhibition currently at Scarborough Art Gallery
The exhibits are created from junk -surplus nutcrackers and redundant fire extinguishers, amongst other things.

August 6th 11 - 4 pm Kinetic Creations Workshop.
August 14th - 12.30 Lunchtime talk with Johnny White and Amanda Wray and arrival of new exhibit “Storm in a Teacup”.
August 15th - (all day) Wiggly Wires Workshop with Johnny White - booking essential.

Click images to enlarge.