The Red Yarn Beard

This weekend I began working on Red Yarn's beard! All along, one of my ideas for Red Yarn the character is that he has this giant beard made of yarn. I thought it would help make him larger than life, like a huge puppet himself.

I've been collecting balls of red yarn for the last few months, and went to SCRAP for the other supplies: plastic embroidery screens for the structure, yarn needles, elastic bands, etc. I set to work yesterday and it all came together.

Introducing, Red Yarn, the Bard of Beards:














I wear a headband under that hat to keep the beard in place.














The beard is in two pieces. A movable chin strap...

















...and the sideburns and mustache.

Big Day for Red Yarn

Today I (as Red Yarn) submitted an application to join Young Audiences' roster of teaching artists. Young Audiences (www.ya-or.org) is an awesome organization committed to enhancing arts in schools. They organize a catalog of artists who can provide performances, workshops, and residencies in school settings. YA also helps schools raise money to host these teaching artists. While YA teaching artists aren't guaranteed work in schools, YA seems to be the go-to organization when schools are looking to enhance arts programming. On my path to becoming a professional teaching artist, this seems like a clear next step.

Whether or not I am accepted, this was a great opportunity for me to clarify my ideas about the creative and educational work I want to do. I submitted outlines for two programs. First, a performance similar to what I've done with the Red Yarn Puppet Band, weaving together several animal folk songs into a cohesive puppet show. Also, a residency in which I would work with a class to learn a folk song, build puppets of its characters, and adapt it into a show.

Of course, I do hope to be accepted! Cross your fingers for me, I should hear in a month or so if I've made it to the next round.

More RYPB pics

Here are some more pictures from Saturday, courtesy of Tony's and Stef's much nicer camera.

Jessie and Corinn (one of the leaders of Trip the Dark Fantastic) helping me and the skeleton out of the green room:

Corinn helping the skeleton stand up:

The skeleton puppet in its full glory:

Stef's precious owl and Tony's lascivious cat:

Red Yarn Puppet Band & Pancake Breakfast

On Saturday the Red Yarn Puppet Band had its second legit performance, this time supporting a great Portland band called Pancake Breakfast at their album release show. I met Mike Midlo--PB's leader--through mutual musical acquaintances, and we immediately connected over our appreciation of animals in folk music. Mike saw pictures of a 15-foot puppet I made for my friend's birthday last year, and asked if I could do something similar for his album release show. We chose two PB songs that lent themselves to puppetry--"Pedro Infante," about the ghost of an old Mexican actor, and "Pea Green Boat," a play on the nursery rhyme about an owl and a cat in a little boat.

The Red Yarn Puppet Band set to work building puppets. Tony and Stef made an amazing cat and owl; Jessie built a fish and a seagull on rods; I spent the last two weeks constructing an 11 foot skeleton puppet (the bones of Pedro Infante). For the spinal cord and support piece, I mounted a PVC pipe on a backpack and bicycle helmet. The arms were made of cardboard and bicycle tubes. The fingers were small plastic tubes with a wire and rubber band trigger operation system. I made quite a mess of our sun porch.

We had our puppets and props mostly built by Saturday, the day of the show. Tony came over and we put the finishing touches on the skeleton and a backpack-mounted pea green boat (a kind of mobile puppet stage with a cutaway bottom... Tony wore it and Stef stood right in front of him so the owl and cat could sit in the boat).

We headed to the venue early, to make sure our puppets would actually fit in the door. The puppets got friendly with the band backstage. It was an amazing line-up--a great folk/soul band called On the Stairs opened, then a dance troupe called Trip the Dark Fantastic cleared the stage and performed a 30 minute dance piece. The crowd ate it up.

Finally Pancake Breakfast took the stage--all 12 of them--and launched in to a rollicking set that blended folk, rock, mariachi, truck-driving songs, even a bit of polka. At the end of Act I, Mike summoned the bones of Pedro Infante. Jessie and a few of the friendly dancers led me out of the green room and into the crowd...
It was interesting to study people's reactions to the giant puppet. I think a lot of folks go to shows to passively observe the action, and some seemed disconcerted to have to interact with the performance. It was in their best interest, considering that I might have collapsed on them at any point, or smacked their faces with Pedro's jangly finger bones.

Pancake Breakfast closed their set with "Pea Green Boat." Stef and Tony emerged from the green room in the boat, followed closely by Jessie with the bird and fish.
During a soft, spooky breakdown, the skeleton reemerged to dance with the boat. Neither Tony, Stef, Jessie or I could see what was going on from beneath our puppets. At some point the skeleton's rib cage fell off... as the song ended I collapsed on the floor in a pile of bones.
All in all, it was a great performance and a huge learning experience. Tony, Stef, and Jessie blew me away as usual with their puppet-building and operating skills. I was happy that no one, including myself, was hurt by the giant skeleton in the room. Mike and the rest of Pancake Breakfast seemed pleased with the puppets, and I hope that it added a little bit more magic to an already magical night.

Red Yarn Puppet Band!

It's been too long since my last post! Much has happened between April and September. As far as Red Yarn is concerned, the most important development is the creation of the Red Yarn Puppet Band. If you have followed this blog, you'll know that I've been dreaming up an Epic American Animal Folk Puppet Musical. But, given the scope of my visions, it's been difficult to realize them. Back in the spring, I decided that making stop motion videos would be the easiest way. Well, have you ever tried making stop motion videos?? IT'S NOT EASY!! And more importantly, it can be a pretty isolating process. I decided that rather than hole up in a dark closet for the next year, manipulating small puppets frame by frame, I wanted to take this project to the streets, to build community around creativity, puppetry, and folk music.

So, back in July, I put out an email to many of my creative friends in Portland to see if anyone would be interested in starting a musical puppet troupe. I had just enough takers--my old friend Jim would find time in his busy med school schedule to play banjo and try his hand at making puppets; my new friend Tony, who used to work at Laika (the stop motion movie studio that made Coraline), would build and operate puppets; my friend Nina, who is a master knitter, would knit and sew little creatures in her free time; finally, my fiancee Jessie got enlisted in to sing, craft, and handle puppets (a generous contribution of time and talent considering that she is starting an intense new job as a middle school teacher!). The Red Yarn Puppet Band was born!

I introduced the group to some of my favorite animal folk songs--"Mr. Rabbit," "Raccoon's Got a Bushy Tail," "Who Killed Cock Robin," "Froggie Went A'Courtin'." Everyone chose a character and we started building puppets (mostly with materials from SCRAP, an amazing craft store/educational organization that specializes in recycled art supplies). Jim worked on Uncle Rat; Tony built Mr. Raccoon; Nina worked on a snake and a nest full of baby birds; Jessie made Ms. Mousie; I finished a possum puppet and started working on Froggie. After a month of work, we had a large cast of characters to animate many of these old American animal songs. Jessie, Jim and I arranged the songs with guitar, banjo, and three-part harmonies.

We had our first show on Saturday at the Slabtown Community Festival in Northwest Portland. It was a huge success! We led a parade of costumed kids from a nearby park to the festival site. Tony and I played drums marching band style. Jessie and Tony's partner Stef worked puppets and led chants. Once at the festival site, we played a set for a great crowd of children and families.

We wove six old songs into a narrative about our hero, Bob Rabbit, traveling through the Deep Woods looking for adventure. I played guitar, sang, and narrated as Mr. Sun, looking down on all the action and interacting with the other characters. Jim played banjo and sang.
Jessie sang and operated Bob Rabbit, Mr. Mousie, and Snake.
Tony kept his hands full with Farmer John, Froggie, Uncle Rat, Mr. Raccoon, and Mr. Possum.
Stef made a rousing cameo appearance as the cat that chases Froggie's and Mousie's wedding party into the lake.

We received great feedback from the kids and parents watching. "I loved the dark Appalachian sound!" "Way to weave the theme of death into a kids' show!" "You guys are going to be as big as Raffi!" (Is that a compliment?) It was a wonderful inaugural show and got me very excited for the future of the Red Yarn Puppet Band. It feels so good to be working with a group of such creative people. They bring talents and ideas to this project that I could never achieve on my own. And they have imbued their puppets with amazing personality that brings new color to these songs and stories.

Our next project is building several puppets--one large-scale and four hand-and-rod or stick puppets--for a friend's CD release show in two weeks. If you are in Portland, come to the Pancake Breakfast CD Release at the Doug Fir on September 25. I'll post pictures after the show.

Hurray for community! Hurray for the Red Yarn Puppet Band!

Bob Rabbit 2.0

Meet Bob Rabbit, my first stopmotion puppet. As I have alluded to before, I have dreams of creating an epic American folk musical based around animal folk songs and tales. During the 2008 election season, I was reading Br'er Rabbit stories, listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and other music from the '60s folk revival, and thinking about the election of Barack Obama as a culmination of civil rights dreams. I began connecting Br'er Rabbit characters to real figures from the civil rights movement and folk revival--the famous trickster rabbit shared the wit and wile of a young Bob Dylan; old Br'er Terrapin, the wise turtle who could outsmart all of the other animals in his own, slow way, seemed a perfect gospel preacher; Br'er Fox and Wolf took on the personalities of smarmy southern politicians.

I started making hand puppets to explore some of these character connections. My first was Bob Rabbit, the trickster/folksinger amalgamation of Dylan and Br'er Rab. Sewing a two-foot hand puppet was a long process for an amateur seamster, so completing Bob took me the better part of a year. Once he was completed, I started using him in my Jelly Jar shows (Jelly Jar is my fiance Jessie's and my kids band). Meanwhile, I was exploring old animal folk songs that featured characters from the Br'er Rabbit tales. I discovered wonderful songs like "Mr. Rabbit," "John the Rabbit," and "Possum in the 'Simmon Tree," and decided that more urgent than my goal of creating an epic tale with all of these characters was my desire to breathe new life into these classic songs.

As I thought about what it would take to realize my vision with hand puppets, I realized I would either have to assemble a 10-piece puppetry troupe/musical group or scale down my ideas. It occurred to me that it might be time to re-explore the artform that dominated my adolescence: stopmotion animation. From 5th-7th grade, I was a stopmotion nut. I built whole cosmos in my bedroom with homemade Sculpey figures and popsicle stick sets and shot stopmotion videos on VHS and Super 8. Then I started playing guitar and that obsession took over.

Fast forward almost 15 years. My musical explorations led me to folk music and folk tales, which led me to hand puppets, which are leading me back to stopmotion. For my first stopmotion puppet, I built a 15 inch wire armature with wire of various gauges to facilitate fluid movement. I constructed a head, hands and feet out of Sculpey clay. I mounted foam on the wire frame for the torso, thighs, and upper arms. Finally I handstitched clothes for the character. This is only the first step. Next I need to make possum and raccoon puppets, buy a nice camera and some stopmotion software to make movies, and record animal folk song soundtracks. My goal is to produce a series of music videos with my puppets animating these classic songs. It will be a long process, but I will keep you posted!

The evolution of a song

Now that I'm done Lomaxing for a while, I'm looking for other ways to keep practicing the creative discipline that my January project forced. Luckily, I'm in the early stages of starting a new band with my friend and longtime bandmate Peter, so I have a good reason to write new songs. The most exciting part of our new collaboration is the opportunity to explore different methods of songwriting and arrangement. In our old band, Bark Hide and Horn, we often fell into the same pattern: I'd write a bare-bones song, with set chord structure, melody, and lyrics, and we'd flesh out the arrangement at band practice. The end result was always a collaborative creation, with instrumental melodies, rhythms, and sometimes entire sections that I never would have dreamed of myself. In the later days of Bark Hide and Horn, we were experimenting with other ways of writing songs--sometimes coming up with a chord progression as a group at practice, then developing our own parts at home. But I had a hard time feeling as connected to these song structures as I would with a chord pattern I developed on my own. Writing lyrics was tricky, because the chords and melodies didn't necessarily carry heavy associations in my head.

In Peter's and my new band (still nameless... do you have any ideas?), we've been trying more and more to develop song structures together. Pete has come up with chord patterns and melodies that we'll develop at practice, then I've been trying to write lyrics at home. I'm finding myself more able to connect with these song ideas and to uncover the lyrics buried within the music. "Don't Be Afraid of Me(at)" is a good example. Peter wrote the chord progression and melody to the verse and chorus sections, and we came up with most of the instrumental bridge together. I sounded out some lyrical ideas at practice and landed on the refrain, "Don't be afraid of me." I wrote one set of lyrics from a ghost's perspective, but scrapped that idea. This week I started playing around with lyrics about a predatory animal feeding on his prey, and hit on some lines I really like. I spent several hours today fleshing out the structure on Garage Band. This recording is just me, but I imagine that Peter and I will start working on a new (better) recording soon. We'll translate some of these ideas, come up with some new ones, and then Peter will work his magic on the recording and take it to a new level of sonic inventiveness. I can only guess that the final recording will sound very little like this one. I'll post it as soon as we finish so you can hear how the song continues to evolve.