Poster for ArtPlay workshops

In April and September 2010, the City of Melbourne has funded pianoBoat to run workshops at ArtPlay for 8-12 year olds. The workshop running 28th September - 2nd October will be a voyage into the future, explored through storytelling and shadow-making. This intensive will culminate in a short show for the public on Saturday, 2nd October, so come and check out the creative machinations of young minds!

Stills from the animation in Howard Grey's Unsame Day

The animation is mostly drawn (using a graphics tablet), and imported into flash, where I tween the heck out of them. The two main characters are filmed silhouettes (see Howard below) which are then inserted within the drawn layers. A whole lot more editing, but I really like the juxtaposition. On top of all this will be live puppetry, which I can't wait to start playing around with.

A promotional image as we work towards performances of Howard Grey's Unsame Day in September. A work in progress. Shows the illuminated fabric boat, with musician (Raku), shadow-puppeteer and animation (Freya). This image is actually a combination of several photos taken in our new warehouse headquarters. The intention being to give the general gist of what the pianoBoat project is all about, as we gear up for festival shows in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Stories From The Ground: Wild Dog

dear Wild Dog, I miss you. When I was younger I was frightened of you. Now that you are far away & I am grown up & living in the crazy big city, now I wish I could be with you. I hope this reaches you in good health, for I suppose you are an old dog now. When we were both much younger I used to hear you howling near our tent. I used to see your footprints in the black sand. We must have been strange to you. But my mother had an old dog called Tzigane (Gypsy). She died when I was 3, & you never visited us again – perhaps you loved her? Although I never set eyes on you, you made a big impression on me, & for many years you came to me in my dreams. I was terrified of you at the time. Now I find myself wishing we could meet as friends to share our different stories. Best regards, x Raku

[© 2005]

Wild Dog was first written to be exhibited in Albany for a show called Unravelling Country. The 25 postcards tell the story of my relationship to Wild Dog through text, etchings and digital collages. Subsequently exhibited and performed in Fremantle in 2008, it became a key bridge between my former wanderings as an artist and my current path with Freya as the pianoBoat project.

Back when I first visited Melbourne in 2003, I met an eccentric and phenomenally enthusiastic young designer called Stephen Mushin. I also met a brilliant young lady called Olivia (Mei Lai Swan) in another friendly Brunswick sharehouse. When I actually moved to the city the following year, Steve was one of my housemates, and Mei Lai a collaborator co-producing the art program for Students of Sustainability 2004 (SoS). By 2005 I had also made fast friends with Carolina Cordeiro, Emily Smith and Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman. While all of us were active in a typically wide variety of counter-cultural activities, a common passion for illustration and storytelling had become apparent.

Stories From The Ground was first dreamt up as a giant exhibition where every room would use a different creative medium or method to tell a story through words, images, and music. It was also hoped that the group could assist each other to navigate through the notoriously treacherous waters of bringing an illustrated story project to fruition. When a tiny derelict space became available in 2006 to be rebuilt as a studio, I decided that it should be not just my personal studio, but a kind of clubhouse for Stories From The Ground, a place where we could get together and give each other feedback and encouragement.

The space was so appealing when we'd finished fixing it up, that the idea of a 'Microtheatre' was born – an opportunity to invite 20 friends over to cram into the old laundry for a private show. The idea being that if we put ourselves on the spot in the same sorts of ways that we were using to creatively engage youngsters, we could jump-start the stalled creative processes with a mere 12 hours of creative development. With the invitation put out a couple of weeks in advance, the group would meet at 9am, and no matter how reluctant we were by the evening, there was nothing we could do by then to put off the audience arriving at 9pm.

No published books – illustrated or otherwise – came out of these essentially theatrical adventures. But the appetite for down-home shadow-theatre and improvised storytelling was evident from the beginning, and the shows quickly outgrew the tiny studio, first to the stables, then the Boite, the Northcote Town Hall and beyond. Steve went on to found Split-pin Limbs, especially notable for innovative productions accompanying the music of alternative pop-star Lior.

I went on to eventually found the pianoBoat project in partnership with my sister Freya, inspired by the success of a collaborative exhibition called Shadow Me Home at the Moores Building in Fremantle. It featured the two of us together with our mother Kati Thamo, a high-profile West-Australian printmaker. The exhibition included a shadow-play performance of Wild Dog (first adapted as a microtheatre with Steve Mushin, Emily Smith, Myfanwy Alderson, Amadis Lacheter and David Henry, at the Stables in Brunswick East.)

raku pitt