Sam Hale Interview Part 10
Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.
Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.
PJ: Talk about the puppets you recently designed and are currently building for the show The Fox Lantern. What inspired the look of the characters?
SH: The Fox Lantern came out of discussion with Leslie Gray, the director of a show I worked on last year called Pink Dress. We wanted to tell an antiwar folktale and use a design idea we started developing more than a year ago. The idea was to build Japanese doll-like puppets that could be performed with one hand. In order to do this, I developed a spring mechanism in the head, neck and shoulders that would allow the puppeteer to either hold the puppet with one hand and be able to swivel the head with their thumb, or operate the torso and head separately with two hands.
We call these kinds of bunraku puppets “spring-yos,” combining the word spring with the Japanese word for puppet, ningyo. There’s a cool demon puppet in the story that has a second spring mimicking the spinal column and supporting the weight of the puppet while allowing movement in the upper and lower torso. I’m pretty pleased with this design innovation.
The puppets are about 18-20 inches tall and generally require two puppeteers -- one for the torso, head and hand(s), and one for the feet or hands. (We’ve basically eliminated one puppeteer from the traditional bunraku trio of performers.) The puppets are a mixed-media blend of paper clay, foam, wood, handmade paper, stretch mesh and metal. I sculpted heads out of paper clay and then molded them with silicone gel in a plaster mother mold to be able to duplicate them. I got a lot of materials and advice from Burman Industries, including paper clay directly from the Japanese company’s website at www.paperclay.com. (I discovered paper clay, or kami nendo, when I lived in Japan -- kids there love the stuff! And it’s made with volcanic ash!) The Fox Lantern is primarily performed with modified tabletop bunraku puppets and embellished with marionettes and shadow puppets.
The look of Fox Lantern: Overall, I’d say the style is my style, which is influenced by the works of El Greco, Tamara de Lempika, Thomas Hart Benton, Mike Mignola and Yoshitoshi. It’s a flowing style balancing soft and hard angles and hard shapes with soft shapes, all pushing and pulling against each other. For the projected backgrounds (slides made in Photoshop on a Mac), I drew heavily from classic woodblock artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. I also referenced many Yoshitoshi woodblock prints composition and costume ideas. I would design characters and costumes and then pass them on to Leslie Gray, an accomplished designer and builder who made gorgeous costumes for our puppets.
Last year I got a chance to study Japanese bunraku puppets up close when artist Masaya Kiritake toured the West Coast. She was an immense resource for this project. A lot of ideas came out of our one-on-one exchange, especially the idea that the base of a traditional Japanese puppet, the kashira, is what the rest of the puppet is built around. The torso is actually hollow in traditional Japanese puppets. I used these ideas, but rather than carving the kashira out of wood, I built it from an industrial base of PVC pipe, springs and epoxy putty. I wrapped that in L-200 foam and finished it off with a well-sculpted paper clay head. I’m really happy how well the springs contribute to the head movement overall -- it’s smooth and controllable. The research-and-development period was quite lengthy to get the right balance of materials, durability vs. flexibility, etc. But now that I have the process down, expect to see me making more of these kinds of puppets!
Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.
PJ: Talk about the puppets you recently designed and are currently building for the show The Fox Lantern. What inspired the look of the characters?
SH: The Fox Lantern came out of discussion with Leslie Gray, the director of a show I worked on last year called Pink Dress. We wanted to tell an antiwar folktale and use a design idea we started developing more than a year ago. The idea was to build Japanese doll-like puppets that could be performed with one hand. In order to do this, I developed a spring mechanism in the head, neck and shoulders that would allow the puppeteer to either hold the puppet with one hand and be able to swivel the head with their thumb, or operate the torso and head separately with two hands.
We call these kinds of bunraku puppets “spring-yos,” combining the word spring with the Japanese word for puppet, ningyo. There’s a cool demon puppet in the story that has a second spring mimicking the spinal column and supporting the weight of the puppet while allowing movement in the upper and lower torso. I’m pretty pleased with this design innovation.
The puppets are about 18-20 inches tall and generally require two puppeteers -- one for the torso, head and hand(s), and one for the feet or hands. (We’ve basically eliminated one puppeteer from the traditional bunraku trio of performers.) The puppets are a mixed-media blend of paper clay, foam, wood, handmade paper, stretch mesh and metal. I sculpted heads out of paper clay and then molded them with silicone gel in a plaster mother mold to be able to duplicate them. I got a lot of materials and advice from Burman Industries, including paper clay directly from the Japanese company’s website at www.paperclay.com. (I discovered paper clay, or kami nendo, when I lived in Japan -- kids there love the stuff! And it’s made with volcanic ash!) The Fox Lantern is primarily performed with modified tabletop bunraku puppets and embellished with marionettes and shadow puppets.
The look of Fox Lantern: Overall, I’d say the style is my style, which is influenced by the works of El Greco, Tamara de Lempika, Thomas Hart Benton, Mike Mignola and Yoshitoshi. It’s a flowing style balancing soft and hard angles and hard shapes with soft shapes, all pushing and pulling against each other. For the projected backgrounds (slides made in Photoshop on a Mac), I drew heavily from classic woodblock artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. I also referenced many Yoshitoshi woodblock prints composition and costume ideas. I would design characters and costumes and then pass them on to Leslie Gray, an accomplished designer and builder who made gorgeous costumes for our puppets.
Last year I got a chance to study Japanese bunraku puppets up close when artist Masaya Kiritake toured the West Coast. She was an immense resource for this project. A lot of ideas came out of our one-on-one exchange, especially the idea that the base of a traditional Japanese puppet, the kashira, is what the rest of the puppet is built around. The torso is actually hollow in traditional Japanese puppets. I used these ideas, but rather than carving the kashira out of wood, I built it from an industrial base of PVC pipe, springs and epoxy putty. I wrapped that in L-200 foam and finished it off with a well-sculpted paper clay head. I’m really happy how well the springs contribute to the head movement overall -- it’s smooth and controllable. The research-and-development period was quite lengthy to get the right balance of materials, durability vs. flexibility, etc. But now that I have the process down, expect to see me making more of these kinds of puppets!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home