Photography by Paige Tea
Walkabout Act
The dancing bear is a magical creature that makes any heart sing. With beautiful dance and enchanting interaction, the bear invites us to join her merriment and make a fairy tale-esque performance with them! But you don’t have to be a child to fall under the spell of this beautiful performance, it’s fun for all ages!
The bear is a symbol of our connection to the earth—a reminder that we can all dance freely if we choose to do so. The bear doesn’t need chains or forced obedience; it only needs love, music and sunshine, and it will dance for you!
Willow the bear is a beautiful willow woven bear puppet. She dances and interacts with audiences, encouraging onlookers to come interact with her on her journey around a festival or event.
I designed this puppet to look plucked from the natural world, made from flora and fauna alike while still seeing the performer inside. This puppet blurs the lines between puppet and performer signifying mankind’s spiritual connection to earth.
Available for bookings, for enquiries please email me at yatesrhianna@gmail.com
Willow the Bear is a puppet I originally designed, made and performed with for our summer show of Puppet Perspectives 2021 at the Royal Welsh Collage of Music and Drama. The full show was devised by us as a response to the Artist Mundi exhibition held in Cardiff. The artist we were given as a stimulus was Dineo Seshee Bopape a South African artist who’s works with socio-political notions of memory, focuses on the memory left on the land and weight that hold many years after the act. Her work often utilises a diverse range of commonplace, elemental materials such as soil, bricks, timber, with found objects and archival images, video and sound, to develop dense and powerful installations.
We decided as a group to focus our response on the idea the land holds memory and what wondrous or tragic tales the Earth could tell us if it could. With this, we each designed an animal puppet that would look plucked from the natural world, fauna made from flora.
Below is a few of my favourite images of the bear in action from one of our final performances
I chose to use wood and willow to create my bear, a natural material to re-iterate our concept and leave the performer exposed through the ghostly form to draw a connection to man-kinds place with in the natural world.
Photography by Paige Tea
Here is short clip of the bear after her last show in summer 2021,
↓Click to view ↓
Here a few of my favourite moments from me performing other characters. The fisherman and the judge general. As well as an image of the shoal of fish and water spirit puppets I made for the same performance.
Performance and puppets in the making
To construct the bear I used soldiered copper piping to act as the base of my puppet. Then I built the wooden internal mechanism onto the metal base. Once I was happy with the range of movement and ergonomics, I used a fibre glass rod for a spine to attach the withy, building up the bears body.
Heres a few short videos from the building process, I use videos while making to look at movement, silhouette and how the puppet reacts to the performer.
↓ Click to view ↓
Once I was happy with the body, I started the head of the bear, using a ply wood shape as my base to start forming withy around.
For the jaw mechanism I used a threaded bar as the pivot point and cord and Worbla from the ply wood as a trigger.
Below is a couple videos of the movement of the shoal of fish puppet I also made for the same performance before rendering.
↓ Click to view ↓
Below are some photos from the devising process all the way through rehearsals into final shots of the cast after our final show! It was such an amazing process, being so free with the devising gave us so much room have fun and play with our puppets and explore their potential. I thrive in these experimental movement stages pushing a puppet to its limits to draw out its character, and bringing it to life is the highlight of the whole process for me.
