Sarah Angliss » Swinging London (South Bank automaton show)

Swinging London (South Bank automaton show)

This mini, automatic puppet show was created on a shoestring for the South Bank Centre, summer 2007. The brief was to come up with something novel inside a garden shed that would celebrate the area and appeal to families. It features dancing puppets and a carillon (robotic bell player).

The puppet show, Swinging London, features London luminaries, past and present, dressed in go-go style. I wanted the puppets to look like a dance group on TV, in the early days of colour television. Reflecting the throw-away nature of celebrity culture, the faces are velcroed on so they can easily be swapped for new ones, according to public demand. Some of the faces are personal favourites (e.g. Kenneth Williams) and a few were chosen by the public (e.g. Lady Penelope and Charlie Drake). Jarvis Cocker also makes an appearance -- he was curating the Meltdown Festival that was taking place at the time.

Swinging London was one of seven sheds that made up this outdoor exhibition, curated by Clare Patey. The shed was put together over just a few weeks on a tight budget. I was grateful to Vivien Angliss, Helen Burtt, Jenny Cotterill, Amanda Hellberg, Emmet Spier and Colin Uttley for their invaluable help in getting it together. Thanks also to Paul and Rachel Attmere for dressing up like the puppets and animating the sheds throughout the opening weekend. The puppets were adapted from 1960s Pelham puppets, scooped up from eBay.

Ragged puppets

I was inspired to make Swinging London after seeing the very dilapidated 1960s puppet show playing on Teignmouth Pier, Devon. I was really struck by how mesmerising the Teignmouth puppets were -- and how convincingly they moved to the music -- even though they were doing nothing more than jiggling up and down. The puppets also had a slightly unsettling look, because of their worn-out clothes and expressionless faces -- this also appealed to me. So this dolly waggling (bad puppetry) is inspired by the 1960s end-of-the-pier classic. The video footage was taken at the end of a busy eight-week run and you can see that the strings have gone saggy and paint has rubbed off the puppets’ shoes, onto the stage, helping them to look suitably ragged.

Slide show images by Emmet Spier

Carillon

The carillon played two and a half octaves of handbells polyphonically, striking them with servo-driven, sprung beaters.

This was my first attempt at building a polyphonic bell playing machine. In 2009, I attempted to build a version of the instrument that put each bell in a separate box, so the instrument could be distributed widely around a space. This Mk II carillon was given its first outing at the Sonic Arts Expo 2009. When this proved too troublesome to take out on the road, I built the Mk III, which clusters all the bells on a single metal frame. The frame , an old shop fitting, is on wheels and is compact enough to fit in the boot of a large car.

See the Mk III carillon in action.