Australia’s radical large-scale puppet company Snuff Puppets are building the biggest human puppet in the world…at 26.5 metres long! The free outdoor installation, Everybody will preview with a grand intervention at Testing Ground in Melbourne’s arts precinct for 3 days only in December 2014.
Everybody is an interactive installation and roaming puppet performance that will surprise and delight unsuspecting audiences, liberating people from the ordinary and mundane.
Onlookers will be encouraged to interact with, and even sit on the huge body parts while performers/puppeteers activate the enormous living puppet at regular intervals. A multitude of giant human body part and organ puppets will break away from the body to roam freely and interact with the audience.
The company’s sold-out indoor presentation of Everybody (November 2012) featured the genesis of our giant human puppet with detachable giant parts including a mouth, eye, nose, ear, foot, guts and even poo. Now Everybody has grown!
We have been toiling away in our Footscray laboratory, where Everybody has been laid out on the slab. We’ve grown giant skin cultures to stretch over bamboo bones, pumped air into inflatable lungs and injected blood through a giant, beating heart. Intestines have been strewn across tables and shiny, soft hair has been spun from a giant loom.
“Everybody is a grand experiment, a manifestation, celebration and liberation,” says Andy Freer, Snuff Puppets Artistic Director. “I wanted to experiment with the theatre of the human body, the drama, the metaphor and the magic. I want to take our audience to a place they could never have imagined.”
“A place that celebrates the human body in all its surreal and visceral beauty, that liberates us from the banal and ordinary to the wonder and extraordinariness that is everybody, every human body, Everybody.”
Everybody
Testing Ground, 1 – 23 City Road, Southbank (just behind the Arts Centre)
Season: 4 – 6 December 2014 (between 5.30pm and 9.30pm)
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.snuffpuppets.com for details.
Image: Everybody – photo by Ponch Hawkes