Blog #3

In reading the chapter four of our puppets book, what I found amusing was that the Royal de Luxe theater company made huge giant puppets for their shows and works.. The Sultan's Elephant was a show created by the Royal de Luxe theatre company, involving a huge moving mechanical elephant, a giant marionette of a girl.  Francois Delaroziere was a Frenchman who designed the huge elephant. It was made mostly of wood, and was operated by 22 manipulators that were using a mixture of hydraulics and motors. It weighed as much as 7 African elephants, which is around 50 tons, and also it is 20 feet tall.  The elephant had hundreds of moving parts and scores of pumping pistons, just to give you an idea; there were 22 pistons in the trunk of the elephant alone.  The giant elephant had more than 56 square meters of reclaimed poplar was combined with steel ribs to create the elephant's sturdy skeleton.

I found this really funny fact about the elephant you might not think its all that funny but here it goes, The elephant no longer exists: Helen Marriage of Artichoke, the company that produced the London performance, said "Royal de Luxe were so fed up with being invited all over the world to perform The Sultan's Elephant, they just destroyed it.”  The reason I really like the puppet production group Royal de Luxe is that they strive to make these huge puppets that people want to see all over the world, and they had to destroy the elephant puppet because it got too popular.  It gave me a chuckle, but yes their puppet work with the giant girls that they made, and also the giant man they made for the puppet show called the A Giant Dropped from the sky in Nimes, France, in 1994.

Blog #2

The movie we watched in class brought up a lot of different cultures and interesting things about them.  While watching the video I saw a lot of different people wearing masks out of wood.   Some of the masks reminded me of what maybe an African tribe would be wearing during a celebration, and the other masks were just of other faces.  I just thought out of the box and came up that puppets actually brought the United States of America Halloween.  I thought that since all the masks were used people picked up on it and started to derive a holiday from masks from other countries used in puppet shows.

Another part that I found interesting in the movie we watched was the puppet parades, and the place where puppet parades are most famous to me is in China.  You always see the all the people out in the street watching the big puppet dragon in the street weaving from side to side of the street.  Puppets derive from a lot of culture’s celebrations and traditions.  The people of China take a lot of pride in what they do during parades of there culture.  So, from China we as Americans picked up the idea of the puppet parade, along with the puppet dragon.  It is used in America just as it would be in China for our American traditions and celebrations.

Gymnastics is a crazy sport, and a lot of Americans participate in the sport but do they know where it comes from?  In the video it showed Romanian people doing gymnastics during a puppet piece put on this huge stage.  They were on this huge jungle gym deal doing different acts of gymnastics.  The Romanians take a lot of pride in their home sport and love doing it and sharing it all around the world.  I bet they are proud, because such many more countries are participating in the sport and are encouraged to compete in events.  It is just funny that gymnastics is such a big hit in America because it originated over seas and it has come across the ocean to explode in America.