Traffic – Athens
Shadow Puppet Workshop – Saturday 27 January 2018
I teamed up with my good friend and musician Vagelis Alexopoulos to run a shadow puppet workshop in at steki in Petralona, Athens. We invited folk to come and add even more cars, bikes, pedestrians, traffic lights, etc. to the streets of Athens – with shadow puppets!
Making workshop: 4pm – 6.30pm – Show starts at 7pm
Venue: Eκδήλωση: Ταξίδι χωρίς Χάρτη (Journey Without Map)
Αριστόβουλου
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We had a busy workshop with adults and children who made terrific traffic-puppets and played in the evening. Vagelis sang songs and poetry while I directed the puppeteers! It was a lovely event.
Photos from the evening shows
Puppet taffiic jam
I made some puppets before the event. I thoroughly enjoyed making traffic-themed puppets, once I’d started it was difficult to stop! We took the puppets out onto the streets and photographed them in the sunshine. Fantastic fun.
Open highway
I thought it would be fun to open up Traffic to my friends and folk that can’t attend the workshop in person, by sending invitations out: ‘Send us your vehicle (or other traffic related thing) You can do this simply by drawing your traffic-puppet design (a sketch is fine) and posting back. Then we can copy your design onto card and transform it into a shadow puppet for the show.‘
Great to see what traffic pulled up!
Mark’s funky shull Beetle from Sheffield
Lois’ rickshaw from Vietnam
Dean’s Holden from Australia
Ashlee’s cars from Israel
Hedgehog and school bus by children at Dreams on Wheels after school project, Bulgaria
Gary’s wubble car from the Marshmallow Motor Company, Mars
Sarah and Caleb’s truck
Caleb’s bus
Leeza’s button van – made by Vagelis
Angela’s Ho, ho truck from Wales
Ian on his motorbike from Bangkok
Robin’s truck with refugees
Eyob’s plane from Ethiopia
Dodgem car from Athens
Pitsmoor Adventure Playground tour bus
This well travelled bus was made by children at the playground I work at in Sheffield. It travels with me and last December in time to for a performance by children from ‘Dreams on Wheels’ after school project in Sofia, Bulgaria. Then it meandered over the Balkans for a special new year’s eve show in Plovdiv. After a long journey south and it arrived in Athens in time for the Traffic show!
We made these short stop motion videos
Puppets I made inspired by 1960′ Greek tin toys
Traffic teaser!
Motorway bridge
Starting at Kifisou, under the bridge of the M1 that runs from Athens to Thessaloniki to Evzoni, I reconstructed a bridge last night for our show. With layers of blue and green coloured transparencies from the art shop in Exarchia.
After the show we arrange the traffic into compositions
2CV Road trip with Vagelis
Travel log
Ethnarchou Makariou, Peristeri I went for a walk down the local dual carriageway on afternoon, sitting in the sun on the church steps studying the traffic – sketching, snapping away and having Heath-Robinson brain-waves while listening to Deep Purple on Greek rock radio station on my headphones. Bliss.Then I started looking at the infrastructure – the palm tees, power cables, all the other things that make this scenario typically Athenian and specifically here, this district. I was in my element!
Peristeri: photos and sketches
