Pauline Venables
When giving talks and demonstrations Pauline is often asked "When did you first become interested in puppets?"
She can remember from the age of nine, when she made a model theatre in a shoe box. The scenery moved across the back on rollers, and she performed to her friends and their younger siblings at the garden gate.
Pauline’s life in puppetry seems to have come full circle!
Later, she loved the animated films of Lotte Reiniger and the illustrations of Jan Pienkowski, and whilst at college she made a shadow show of the Russian tale Baba Yaga the Witch whose house roams the forest on hens’ legs.
One of the puppets she made was a frog, which was a firm favourite with the children who saw the show. Her own children repeated the show to their friends until sadly the frog and the other puppets fell to pieces.
Pauline loves shadow puppets and attended a workshop given by Madam Souhami at the Puppet Centre.
Pauline had been a member of Educational Puppeteers since college days and received Animations, the magazine of the Puppet Centre. It was in this publication that she saw Ray and Joan DaSilva’s’ festival at Marsham advertised, and there Pauline joined the Guild.
Pauline feels enormous gratitude to those members she has had the privilege of meeting over the years. There are so many wonderful puppet shows to see and puppeteers to encourage and assist with ideas and productions!
She has tried to make a new show annually, either a Shadow Show or a Model Theatre production. The shadow shows are either tales from Aesop or the Anansi stories from the West Indies. These are done with a traditional screen and light, but she has also used an OHP for a Nativity. Pauline loves to see the angels flying around the ceiling of the hall or church where she is performing.
Pauline’s Model Theatre is based on Robert Poulter's book and has been adapted over the years. Her productions are inspired by traditional folk tales from around the world and she loves the poems of Edward Lear and Lewis Caroll. The show she worked on during 2021 lockdown was a poem by Hans Christian Anderson. One of the first performances she did with the Guild was Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussy Cat. It is still one of her favourites and has been performed many times as she loves the nonsense rhymes and likes to make puppets that do unexpected things to make the audience laugh.
Pauline produced several stories from Alice including the Jabberwocky and The Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Together with James Bradley, she made a set of almost life sized characters for a project with actors which sadly didn't happen. However, the figures were displayed at several Guild events and used at a friend's café when they held a Tea Party event. In October 2021 Pauline and James went to the Japanese Cultural Centre and saw a performance of Kamishibai, Japanese story telling. They were both enthralled and are now contemplating ways to marry the styles of Kamishibai and Model Theatre together.
