Results tagged “mac” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

I am here to proclaim once again the puppet gospel.

It's very much a niche area of the performing arts, woefully underfunded (like almost anything worthwhile) and fighting for its very existence in some places. For more on this topic visit http://www.theatre-of-widdershins.co.uk and click on to the blog section.

Makes depressing reading, but it's heartening to see another puppet organisation as committed as our own redoubtable Clive Chandler and his Puppetlink group and equally prepared to stand up and be counted.

And as the sun (and snow) sinks slowly in the west, we say goodbye for 18 months to our very own Midland Arts Centre.

The three-day farewell was very low key, in truth, but hugely enjoyable in classic, laidback mac fashion, a manifestation of the centre unassumingly living up to its community ideals.

Saturday's workshop to make and decorate bamboo butterflies was great fun for all the kids and hovering parents and ended with a real bang. Lots of them, actually, as Brum samba band Bloco Louco led a parade of butterflies (and more ambitious flowers) and a giant caterpillar round the park.

Today (this is being posted on Sunday evening) the highlight was a very short but amusing encounter with a sailor trapped in the body of a shiny silver whale with a maximum audience of two at a time. I went in with a grandchild and exited with a blue origami whale.

But the highlight of the weekend, indeed of my year at the mac to date, was PiggeryJokery (above). Go to www.handtomouth.co.uk for a full breakdown. Legendary Punch and Judy man Martin Bridle literally carries the show on his shoulders as partner Su Eaton provides hurdy gurdy accompaniment, medieval references and postmodern irony.

The Green Man presides over a tale of the seasons, involving a brilliantly realised bucolic everyman, the dance of life, growing, dying and tasty sausages. It's a style of perambulating theatre as old as puppetry itself, with the Jack in the Green updated by his nifty green wellies.

The kids laughed hysterically at the knockabout fun and the grown-ups picked up on all sorts of folkorish and archetypal references - including the pigs with the voice of Punch. A fantastic, magical, mythical and multilayered show that you must catch if you can.

It was a privilege to have the Green Man and his Traipsing Woman in Saturday's parade with us.

With the mac closed, the samba band will now be setting up their workshop at Moseley's Jug of Ale. See www.blocoluoco.co.uk for details. Take your own earplugs and green hair dye.

*To see the news story generated by this post click here.

A storm in a teacup (or perhaps a tiny mug, as will become clear), but I feel that my rather pretentious "cultural commentator" tag gives me licence to open up a bit of a debate.

Tomorrow (that's Sunday, March 30 as I write this) at the mac there's an auction of hundreds of puppets which have been hidden away in a basement for 15 years. I've previewed it in an earlier blog and the Post has done the same in good old fashioned newsprint.