Puppets rock!

I've actually managed to make it to a gig in which I was neither playing nor working. I don't know how long it's been since I've done that; several years.... Last week I had a ticket for something Rob Curgenven was doing at the Others in Stoke Newington, but I just couldn't make it. Tonight I had a little nap at the office and went to St Leonard's Shoreditch to hear Hannah Marshall with Veryan Weston and Ingrid Laubrock and Lol Coxhill with Roger Turner. It was a wonderful evening. I had a sense of the music progressing - that there are places for it to go and it's being taken there by many loving hands and ears.

At one point Roger Turner was sort-of flicking the tip of his drumsticks off the cymbals and it reminded me of something I couldn't place immediately. I thought it might be something to do with a child or with Harry Potter, but then I got it...

When I was working with 'Hooray for Hollywood' there were two, three, sometimes four people operating each puppet, yet, every now and then, the puppet would do something utterly actor-ly - like banging its head against a wall when something was taking its time to come right. These off-stage gestures were utterly beguiling and created the characters of the main protagonists for me in a magical way. The boy (puppet) had a gesture he used to do 'when no-one was looking' - never 'on stage' but only in those inevitable gaps in action that arise in rehearsal. He would kind of flick his hand up from behind his head in a gesture that said, "Hands off! Leave me alone!" but which was also fiercely joyful and life-affirming. It was this gesture that Roger's drumstick flicks evoked for me. I'm so glad to have remembered it and also the way in which the puppets are actors too, with off-stage lives of their own!