Building Beasts
Volunteering with The Herds
Sorry, it has taken me a while to sort out photos for this one - because this post covers several sessions over a few weeks. I wanted to add some more on other things I did during the last month, but the pictures already make this quite a long post, so to not delay this any further, I’m splitting this up and will tell you about the magical afternoon tea I had next time - make sure you are subscribed, so you won’t miss it!
Pepakura - a revelation
The Manchester International Festival is back this year, and by far the most interesting project this time round (for me, at least) was The Herds - a public arts project that raises awareness of the climate crisis by sending animal puppets made out of cardboard on a journey from the Congo basin to the Arctic Circle (via Manchester). Animals native to Africa started, and as they travelled North, trying to escape an environment heating up, one herd was joined by others, growing as a group.
I was fascinated by this project from the first time I heard about it, and knew I was going to be there when they reached Manchester on the day the Manchester International Festival opened. I was also delighted when I found a link to puppet-building workshops in my inbox, thinking this would be something I would quite like to try. If it would not be too expensive.
Turns out it wasn’t, as it was free - because basically the workshops was people building the animals that would join The Herds in Manchester! I signed up to one the day before my students’ deadline (yes, some of you know what that means, my last free day before getting buried in a pile of marking).
Hidden away in one of the railway arches near Mayfield Park, here was a wonderland of animals in different stages of assembly (and when I got there, it was the first week of building, so we are talking the skeleton equivalent of puppets). Us volunteers got a little tour and talk about how this works and basically invited to find a table we liked and get stuck in. We were constructing three types of puppets: wildebeasts, wolves and red deer, and they were all using laser-cut materials (a great way of getting people all over the world to help in the building effort, as only files needed to be sent). There were tables where the plywood “skeletons” were put together, some people were starting to work on the mechanisms that would allow the people to puppeteer the creatures, and others were papier macheeing a layer of ‘skin’ onto plywood. Some people cut out multiple layers of cardboard antlers to glue together into a three-dimensional shape, and others made tails for the wolves that seemed almost fluffy.
But I was magically drawn to a table where nobody was working on yet. It just had making tape and paper on it (heavy paper, but still, just paper). Paper cut into crazy shapes with lots of little numbers going around the edges. A fascinating puzzle, that turned out to be the start of the faces of the animals in the form of pepakura.
As I understand it, pepakura is a software that transforms a digitally drawn (or maybe 3D scanned) shape into a 2D pattern that can then be cut out and assembled in three dimensions. A great way to make animal heads that are shaped the same in different parts of the world. The problem (or should I say challenge?): we didn’t really have an image of what the finished result would look like. But no matter, I was hooked and (with some other adventurous souls) set out to find matching numbers on different pieces (and sometimes the same piece) to join them together, ending up with half the head of a wildebeest.
Honestly, I had so much fun, I came back three times, also putting together our ‘first’ wolf and red deer head, working on finishing up all the faces, and then at my last visit I helped papier machee some of the heads, some of the bodies, and painted some of the hooves.
Now this is my kind of volunteering - giving time for a great project that raises climate awareness, working with lots of different people, actually using my practical skills for once (it felt like I hadn’t really built anything performance-related in forever!), and having lots of fun to boot!
I could have also signed up for the puppetteering workshops, but I was worried that would be too physically demanding and instead just watched when The Herds arrived at Manchester Cathedral Gardens last week, drawn by a performance by Manchester Camerata (one of the local orchestras).
It was magic! Seeing the giraffes at a distance, or the zebras in touching distance, watching the wolves roaming around the Arndale shopping centre, always drawn by music, a flood of cardboard shapes, that seemed like real animals, even though they clearly were not. Beautiful!
It was sad to see them go, on their way to Denmark, Sweden, and then up to the Arctic. I wish them luck!
