Comments,
corrections, clarifications
In response to Penny Francis’s
feature in our Festivals special focus in the last e-dition
of Animations (>
Puppets,
Puppets, Everywhere >
AO15),
Peter Charlton writes:
“I was amused by Penny Francis's discourse on Festivals
(no prizes for guessing which ones she attended!). She cites
the Skipton Festival as 'the only one with a woman at its
head'. The Buxton Puppet Festival, of which I am co-director,
has as its 'co-head', Chris Agnew (a woman). Chris lives in
Buxton and as any one who has ever run a festival will know,
it's the one who lives in the town that does the most work.”
On another point in the same feature, he says: “Penny
also asserts that despite my 'eclectic' taste, ‘undiluted
puppetry’ is to the fore. What does this mean? Peter
Wynne Wilson is a story-teller who cleverly converts bits
of his scenery, props and costume into the puppets which feature
in his tale; Nori Sawa mixes mime, physical theatre and masks
with his puppetry. Several of the other companies we featured
mix humans and puppets, sometimes in equal proportions. It
is true that I don't book companies that either don't include
puppets at all or ones that only use them in an incidental
fashion - but, after all, this is a puppet festival and I
think the audience expect to get a decent smattering of them.”
Clive Chandler of dynamics05 also contacted us to point out
that there were a number of factual errors and omissions in
this same piece, for which we apologize and offer the following
corrections and clarifications:
In the report Clive Chandler provided to Penny Francis he
described dynamics 05 as ‘the largest event in England’
not as quoted the ‘largest of the year’s events’,
which implies a UK-wide evaluation; that dynamics 05 took
place in venues across the West Midlands, not just in Birmingham;
that the phrase ‘audiences totalling 15,000 in 100 venues
over three weeks’ should have read ‘100 performances’
not ‘100 venues’. He would also like to make clear
that dynamics 05 International Puppet Festival was organised
by The International Festival Consortium which included mac
as the core venue, PuppetLink as the lead organisation for
the West Midlands, and PUK as the national networking organisation,
and that we had omitted to credit PuppetLink in the feature.
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