Wonder

The final performance from the 2021 Performance Making Graduates was part of the 40th birthday celebrations for Spare Parts Puppet Theatre. It ran for just two performances on the day of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s Puppets in the Park Celebration.

Wonder was the 7th collaboration between SPPT and WAAPA’s Performance Making students, and became a celebration of Spare Parts’ 40 years of production. Under the direction of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s Associate Director Michael Barlow, students developed a unique promenade style performance, that had audiences moving to various locations in and around SPPT’s rather iconic Short Street location.

Students used puppets from a myriad of shows throughout the forty years of Spare Parts, sometimes reimagining them and combining puppets from different productions. Over a series of nine vignette performances, the audience enjoyed a variety of performances from the openly reminiscent, through mesmerising almost balletic performances, horror comedy and modern satire, culminating in a beautiful retrospective piece in the auditorium. 

Puppets came from a myriad of productions and from designers Beverly Campbell Jackson, Petr Matasek, Cecile Williams, Zoe Atkinson, Bryan Woltjen, Iona McAuley, Jane Davies, Jirka Zmitko and Leon Hendroff. They included many familiar puppet faces that regular SPPT recognised either from the production itself or from their places on display in SPPT’s foyer. Other puppets, not in this production, joined the promenade audience in the auditorium for the final act.

The puppets were of a variety of styles including marionettes, rod puppets, body puppets, worn puppets and a myriad of others, with the WAAPA students operating and characterising with skill, joy and precision.

Congratulations to the graduating class Delaney Brooklyn Burke, Nathan Calvert, Phoebe Eames, Will Gammel, Asteria Gao, Josh Koios, Lindsay McDonald, Lucia Merriweather, Lilly Murrell, Jefferson Nguyen, Clea Purkis, Leah Selwood, Jacob Sgouros, Eliza Smith, Ben Sullivan, Ray Teakle, Shae Watkins, Beth Wilkinson and Lucy Wong. I wish you every success in your field.

Kimberley Shaw