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Gavin Skerritt & Jonathan Watkins at the Royal Ballet

A New Collaboration Between Puppetry And Dance

The Innovative creator of puppet theatre, Gavin Skerritt, begins a period of "Research and Development" for his forthcoming production collaborating with Jonathan Watkins of The Royal Ballet.

This "Research and Development" period, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, will focus on the experimentation of materials, aesthetics and design to create a life-sized object/puppet forming the centrepiece of this new work. The research will also include a two-day workshop taking place this autumn at theBroadway Theatre in East London, giving young people aged 8 – 19 a rare opportunity of handling and operating one of Gavin's newly constructed life-sized puppets. After experiencing this, they will then be asked to create their own moving object/puppet, which, through the help of Gavin's expertise, they will learn to bring “life” to, looking at movement and manipulation and how dance and choreography can be applied to a moving object/puppet.

  

“The initial concept for this new project was first planted whilst developing my production "Y Weledigaeth". The main puppet explored its movements through the outside static tensions of its strings. This developing technique gave a quality very different from a puppeteer’s hand manipulating stings, offering me a new vocabulary from which I could choreograph and animate an object/ puppet.”

Gavin Skerritt

  

This project is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

To find out more about the Arts Council visit www.artscouncil.org.uk