Barking Spider Visual Theatre Workshops

Workshops

We have some really engaging, creative, playful and imagination-provoking workshops across a range of various theatre-arts disciplines.  Workshop lengths are flexible - to suit your needs and your desired outcomes. Each can be run for a minimum of 1.5 hours, and up to day, or longer for intensives. The workshops are suitable for children, families and adults, professional developments and even for parties. Flex your creativity muscle, spread your imagination’s wings, and leap into play – with your friends, colleagues or school mates.

Workshop: Scratch Trash Orchestra

Love inventing things? Love making lots of noise?

In this workshop, we’ll hit the scrap heap to make instruments to create our own Scratch Trash Orchestra. We’ll take recycled materials and invent new musical instruments. Then, together we will join together to create the orchestra, combining our new instruments to devise a wild musical experience.

We begin the session listening to different styles of music, from different cultures and periods, and pull apart the sounds to make sense of what the instruments might be. Then the children focus on the materials, recycled materials and natural objects, and design and construct their own instruments. They are guided to be as inventive as possible, and to consider how an instrument can possibly have multiple musical functions. Once all the instruments have been created, we see what the range is in our orchestra, and set the orchestra up – something akin to a traditional symphonic orchestra, breaking instruments into rough sections. We then compose a short piece of music together, employing musical dynamics and focusing on rhythm. This is then presented to parents & carers at the close of the workshop.

Children can take home their new musical creations!
VIEW A SOLOIST ON YOU TUBE

Workshop: Character Archaeology

In this workshop, participants enter the space to discover a series of “islands” of objects. Participants visit and explore each island and through an almost archaeological exploration of these objects, to figure out who the character might have been that left the objects behind. They choose one to three objects, and create characters from these objects.

After this, the characters interact with each other, in a series of improvisations. This workshop is engaging and entertaining. It works across all ages from primary school and up. The workshop can go for: 1.5 hours, 3 hours or a full day with a presentation/showing. You can view two different, short excerpts of this workshop on You Tube:  Children discovering curious objects and A boy talks about the character he is discovering.

All Hands On The Puppet

VIEW HERE ON YOU TUBE

All Hands On The Puppet is a workshop for children and their families, or for groups of people – adults or young people, who want to experience making and creating together. The workshop is designed to engage whole groups of people, in the making and operating of a puppet – It’s all about collaborative processes and fun!

First of all, each group builds a puppet. Following the build, using techniques of Japanese Bunraku puppetry, groups learn to operate the puppet. Bunraku puppetry technique demands that all the puppeteers must listen carefully to each other, to together become the one character, with one intelligence and one breath – through the puppet. We guide you through basic Bunraku manipulation skills: breath, intelligence and movement. At the final part of the workshop the puppets begin to interact and play with each other. It’s fantastic fun, and a real bonding exercise as you experience the pleasure of puppetry.

This workshop is suitable for any age and all levels of experience. We have run this workshop with 3-4 year olds and their families, with university theatre groups, for corporate professional developments and with professional theatre companies.

An example of the workshop we recently ran with young families:

At ArtPlay in November 2010 we delivered a workshop for younger children (3-4 year olds) and their families. This workshop was 45 minutes in length, and for puppet creation we used newspaper and masking tape. The workshop was very successful. Here is feedback from one family:

“We have been attending ArtPlay for years & invariably we enjoy it. Today the puppet (workshop) was glorious. Such a sensitive, thoughtful, moving experience. Thank you”.

Maggie, Harry Parrett’s parent.

We vary materials for the puppet build according the booking and requirements. We use also found objects, junk and other materials for puppet creation.

Workshop: Object Theatre

“Anything can be a puppet”: Peter J Wilson, Master Puppeteer.

A relative newcomer to the world of puppetry, Object Theatre challenges traditional thinking on manipulation and puppetry forms. The puppeteer imbues life into seemingly lifeless everyday objects – such as a potato, a cheese grater, a tube of toothpaste – generating personality, intelligence and drama from and with the objects. The manipulator is visible and big vocals are required. The workshop focuses on puppetry manipulation, character creation, vocal skills, play and improvisation – working solo and in teams.

This workshop is suitable for any age and all levels of experience from schools to professional theatre practitioners. This workshop is highly suitable for corporate professional development events.

Workshop: Ozraku – Co-operating puppetry

In this workshop, participants learn to operate various objects as puppets, but as a team. It is an incredible team building exercise, and while demanding excellence in skills development from participants, it also demands imagination, high level interactivity and play.

After an introduction to the basic principles and main tenants of general puppetry, participants break into teams and work together to manipulate plush toys as puppets. Click HERE to see footage on You Tube.

Participants then move into a whole new realm of creativity and object manipulation, transforming special fabric-paper into incredible creatures and characters. This also is done in teams. Click HERE to see footage on You Tube.

How to Make A Piece of Theatre from Scratch – Creative Development Processes

In this workshop we explore various methods and approaches to creative development: how to nurture an idea or vision out of your head and onto the page or floor. We look at seeking and finding clarity: generating a premise for a work. We introduce methods to experiment with and test out ideas practically, no matter what form of theatre you are aiming for. We focus on trouble shooting in the creation of a work: How do you keep going when you’re stuck? What are the practical considerations for a creative development period? How do you assess what works and what doesn’t work? How do you string it all together to make a show?

This workshop is one where participants bring an idea they want to play with, or bring an inspiring object, a dream, a line from a poem, an obsession or a picture that’s in their head, a script – anything. We tease out these sources of inspiration and build the foundations for a piece of theatre. The workshop can be structured to go over hours or days or weeks, and can have a performance outcome or showing at the completion.

This workshop is suitable for any age and all levels of experience from schools to professional theatre practitioners.

Art & Story – Visual Art & Theatre Workshops

In these workshops the participants engage in a variety of theatre games, including physical theatre and improvisation. The games are the launching points for explorations of visual arts, including paintings, installations, sculpture, architecture and landscape. The theatre play can also be a launching point for investigation and exploration of history: local, personal, site-specific or exhibition-presented.

Participants can then create installations, play-make using puppetry and other forms of theatre, create a work of visual art – either collaboratively or as individuals.

In the pictures below, you see children at Heide gallery in Melbourne collaborating on a painting, in a workshop facilitated by Barking Spider Artistic Director Penelope Bartlau. Together, the children have come up with the painting’s theme, concept, and ideas for how to execute the work.They decided on “Apples and Dragons” as the theme, drawn from an improvised story we told collaboratively earlier in the workshop. The children’s painting has been stimulated by artworks at Heide Gallery, in particular works of Mirka Mora, Albert Tucker and John Olsen.

Footage

CLICK HERE to see the children beginning their work on their independent sections of the canvas:

CLICK HERE to see the nearly completed work as they have collaborated to bring the artwork together with the “big picture” background details being finished off.