Apparaten, is a collaboration between crafters and artists At Not Quite in Fengersfors lead by me Karl Hallberg. It is an attempt of combining Sloyd, craft and performance to experience the craft techniques in a new setting, we started with an idea of using the expression of the materials and visible traces of making in actual storytelling or in stage perfomances. Construction of the set: Our starting point became the factory we all have our studios in, the story it tells, the afterlife after a factory town looses the major income, and an ambition to give hope to the young inhabitants about their possibilities of a future in this place. Our method was to make. At Not Quite in Fengersfors we have experience in traditional and contemporary making and creating in materials like wood textiles and Metal. We used what we could source in our close surroundings, wood from the forest, metal from the scrap yard and used textiles from our homes, the factory and some leftovers from production of clothes. We made characters, puppets, both based on a story and based on the materials we used and the techniques use making them. We wanted a raw feeling, where the audience would be able to understand or at least get a feeling of how the puppets were made and in that way be able to relate to them and maybe give impulses to the audience to create something of their own. The set was constructed with an old weaving loom, in a way that we could roll up different scenes where the story takes place. The main parts of all constructions are visible also a way of giving attention to the craft and materials involved. Working with the puppet format: We went into a collaboration with Frölunda Kulturhus in the fall of 2018, when we were offered to host a Finnish puppeteer, Laura Sillanpää, as part of an Artist in Residency project organized by Figurteatercentrum in Frölunda. Laura came to work with us on a number of occasions from November 2018 to may 2019. Together we “tamed” these raw and quite stiff pupets that were not build with the manipulation of puppeteers as their first priority. This fact of the way our puppets motions where a result of how they are crafted was a challenge at first, but as we put time into manipulating them, their motion pattern helped develop scenes and the story with them. We learned a lot of basic puppet and object manipulation for stage which is different from material manipulation in the workshop, but there was a definite relation of the material knowledge of a crafter and the understanding of how material behave on stage. The Show: In the end we had a 30 min puppet theater performance, it is a dystopic environmental tragedy that takes place on the banks of a stream, with an ending that gives us the possibility to act differently in the future. We have played it on approx. 20 occasions in our province of Dalsland and in Gothenburg. Craft on stage: We have been working on using craft in new ways for as long as we been working with the Not Quite project – that’s soon to be 14 years now. The idea to bring craft on stage origins in the desire to show an alternative to the perfectly made illusions of TV –series and other highly produced productions. We want to show our ways of seeing materials around us as ways of being capable of creating and inspire to using materials as wood from the garden, textiles from old clothes, and other recognizable objects used in new ways. A puppet theater setting was a great way to use them all. After each show we have had great response and always a big interest of how the sets and puppets where made, for us it´s obvious that the well displayed materials and objects sparks the interest in the audience and give inspiration. Specifically people active in the craft field are very positive and have expressed great interest in developing their work in new ways. We think that this format can work in two ways when it comes to the two disciplines craft and Puppeteering. In puppeteering we have a raw and innovative approach – this we have seen in participating in a puppet theater festival in Frölunda in November. In craft we can inspire to cross disciplines, this time craft and puppeteering, actual storytelling and in a performance setting. We also bring the qualities of craft to a younger audience by touring in schools around Dalsland and around. For Next project: We are now in process of touring and developing “Apparaten” but also of developing a new act. Some things would be made differently. For example we spent a lot of time understanding how the properties of our crafted puppets and props could build the storyline, in a new project this would be something we could develop further, giving craft and it´s properties take more space. Due to time pressure we found ourselves using maybe a little too many traditional puppeteering trix and techniques to connect to the audience. The story, for our next project we would like to develop another way of creating the story, we imagine another approach where the craft process would be more present in the creation of the narrative as well. There are possibilities in puppet theater that are not the same as in regular theater, and the craft is a major part of it, although traditionally puppet theater is about the illusion, and hiding the craft part. See the attaced PDF for images Thank you for reading / Karl Hallberg