I created this piece of street theater with Familia de la Noche. I wrote for it, designed and made the props and puppets, designed and made the costumes (with Hollie Miller), and created soundscapes and audio media for it. I also played the role of Peter Potts on occasion.
It tells the funny and touching story of a charmingly dorky potting-shed enthusiast trying to fulfill a lifelong dream, getting it slightly wrong and eventually discovering something far more wonderful.
Well here is a little excerpt from the audio I made for the moment that the egg begins to speak. Pop it on and keep scrolling for more pictures…
Peter Potts is an amateur entomologist, inventor and collector of pin badges. All his life he has dreamed of winning the coveted Affleton Entomology Societies annual contest – (not to mention the seven-pounds-fifty voucher for Felicities Books Shop – lovely Felicity). But no matter how many ‘long-pointed iridescent chin beetles’ he finds, chloroforms, pins to a board and puts in a tin, Dixon Mandrake – local adventurer and mustache wearer – always pips him to the post.
But not this year – this year he has found something really special – a gigantic insect egg: beautiful, strange and fascinatingly hairy. Using his sophisticated tracking machine made from an old radio and a colander he has discovered the whereabouts of the giant insects it belongs to…
Meanwhile the Lupervarians – two giant shimmering worker beetles from the planet Lupervare – are desperately seeking their lost queen egg that fell to this planet. They need to find it soon or their whole colony is in jeopardy… well they would be seeking desperately if there weren’t quite so many distractingly new and marvelous things to play with on this planet… what will happen when they finally meet?
This show was created as a new commission for Blysh Festival 2014 and was funded and supported by the Welsh Millenium Centre.
It was a Familia de la Noche production – find them here:
To get in touch with me about any of this have a look here
PS As part of this project I made some intricate little beetles from junk materials to form Potts’ entomological collection – have a look at them here
Oliver Wallace 