Saturday, February 28th, The High Limit Room
Your lover lies restless in the dirt. Can nothing be done to bring them back? Genderbomb has found a way. Come together with enough abandon, try to invoke...something. If it doesn't work, all you need to do is try again. And again. And again. Enter our gallery and dance with the dead.
Dead Lovers Revival is a punk show with puppets and performance art mixed in.
Made for Genderbomb, with puppet co-builders:
Puppetteer: Gwyniver
Puppetteer: Gwyniver, Performer: Nočnica
Puppetteer: Gwyniver
Puppetteer: Gwyniver
Puppetteer: Gwyniver
The plan, created together, was to make a puppet that could be performed by one person, and easily manuever among the crowd at the show. We determined the hips and legs would attach at the performer's hips with a belt, and the ribcage directly to their check with a harness. One arm and the head would have rods for puppetteering.
Build day one. We started with a plastic pose-able Halloween decoration skeleton. All the bones were held together with screws (surprisingly, I would have expected a piece of cheap decor to all be snapped and melted together), so we sat down to unscrew and free all of the joints. After taking all the joints apart and seperating the limbs, we took them outside to drill holes at the ends of each and cut off the excess pieces of bone (including the entire spine).
Nočnica took the scrap fabric, and made a bunch of fabric guts for us.
Through the holes, we used a bent wire threader to pull long pieces of red paracord, tying the joints back together much looser than the pose-able prop was initially.
Drilling new holes in the hips
bones re-attached at the knees
re-attached elbow
resting after her surgery
testing the leg placement
The head already had a small peg where it had been attached to the spine. Jack discovered that the peg sat loosely in the PVC control rod and made the head move around loosely in a fun way. We drilled holes in the PVC pipe and uhsed more paracord to tie the end of the peg inside it, keeping the movement but stopping it from escaping.
And that was the end of the first day. Gwyniver took the ribcage home to create the harness to hold it. The harness and belt for the puppet were both made from scratch via proper leatherwork by her!
I took the rest of the puppet home, and added paper mache grocery bag skin to the skull and parts of the body.
Build day two. Jack created a design for the spine with pieces of angled cardboard packing material, connected with zip ties. The spine is extra long to give the head full movement, and up the uncanny factor. As they cut out and assembled the spine, we re-assembled the other limbs and tested them with the new harness.
We prepared the space, and Presely joined us to dry-brush some detail and blood onto the bones.
preparing the body for painting
dry brushing
Day three! Time for guts!
We had collected a hoard of scrap fabric, lace, ribbon, shoelaces, yarn, leather, and the guts Nočnica had made previously. Most of the guts were attached with zip ties inside and to the bones, tied on with ribbon and yarn on top, anything to add detail and make sure it was connected.
Guts test after painting
Finished guts
Zack brought some glowing red wire to thread through the skull and ribcage. Gwyniver did a try-on with the full puppet, and we went on a stress-test by walking down the block and back to take some promo photos.
