in response a provocation from Mark Drakeford and the TUC we were tasked with responding creatively to the poems in The Angry Summer by Idris Davies.

We created a puppetry performance to mark the 100-year anniversary of the General Strike and the Welsh Miners' strike.

I made 2 of the puppets used in the show; Shinkin Rees the Tailor and Dan the grocer. Both of which were based on designs by Dora Croally. We performed the R&D of the performance under stage conditions for industry benefactors and members of Royal Welsh. We have since presented the project and performance in conjunction with a puppet making workshop at the Idris Davies school in Rhymney. We have made the show into a short film for educational distribution. This film was shown at the V&A Museum for a one-day installation during which myself and fellow makers demonstrated our puppets and interacted with the public.

A take away from this project was to focus on the particular movement required for each scene as determined by the story board and designing the puppets accordingly. I chose characters that took on a slightly more comedic role in the poems and had more exaggerated, caricature-ish movement. This allowed me to experiment with interesting mechanisms which deviate from the typical bunraku style puppet such as the tailors extending base and grocers gesticulating hands.

The Angry Summer - Making Of

It was interesting working with the ideas created by the designers and fabricating the puppets based on scale drawings and story boards they had provided. the style of the puppets was based on a lino print style, inspired by artist and political activist, Paul Peter Piech. rendering this graphic style in a 3D form was a fun challenge. I was working alongside other makers who were creating the other characters from the poems, we had to ensure the puppets had stylistic uniformity so that they read as from the same world.