I am so proud to announce that our first presentation of In Shadows premiered at the Pacific Northwest College of Art last Thursday to a crowd of friends, family, and PNCA professors. This presentation was also my senior thesis. Everything went swimmingly except for a moment when we had to turn our volume down. We are a bunch of rock stars remember, so we express ourselves a little louder then most sensitive artists. One panel professor said "it was a joy", another seemed a little disturbed by the dark ending. It seems younger age groups have a kind of claim to shadow puppets so it may be in my favor to lighten the theme and story lines to future productions. It is my intention to make people cry a little in these plays about our abuse of nature. We have been bad...very bad. These plays will not be aimed at children. I do mention children in In Shadows as our only hope for the future, but it is not a happy ending, rather an ambiguous one, and I wouldn't want to change that.
I followed my aunt and uncle's narrations through puppetry and also had my good friend, Paul compose beautiful music for the intro, the underwater scenes, and the outro. Here are more pictures:
Scene One:
Scene Two:
Scene Three:
Scene Four:
I'm very proud of this production. It was a great collaboration with wonderful friends such as Paul a.k.a Verne Sheaperd (music man and sound expert) Jessie Dettwiler (puppet builder extraordinaire, and assistant director) Stirling Myles (puppeteer exacto knife ninja and best boyfriend eva!) Andrew Moore (puppet builder and scene composition) Katie Leaper (puppet builder and lighting director) and Ann Heideman (puppet builder and tea ninja) Thank you all!!! Love you mucho! Last but not least I want to thank my aunt and uncle who let me expose their lives through shadow puppets. They are very inspirational people who have lived on big beautiful wooden boats for 20 plus years and have brought up my two cousins, Alyce and Darby, on these boats as they sailed the oceans blue all over the world. ...these oceans blue aren't so blue in some areas of the world. I speak specifically about the great pacific garbage patch that floats in the Pacific, but there are other garbage patches in the the Atlantic and oil stains all of the world's oceans. It's sad. I'm not one for preaching but it's good to be aware of these problems that face us all.
My puppet troupe is called Shadow Slang, and I will blog about future productions.