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Fun on strings
Maritime Marionettes perform two classic folk tales in the NWTAdrian Lysenko Northern News Services Published Friday, March 4, 2011
For 25 years the Maritime Marionettes have performed thousands of shows across Canada and abroad, keeping their form of theatre alive.
The duo, made up of married couple Darryll Taylor and Heather Bishop Taylor performed in Fort Smith and Hay River last week. "It's just such an amazing world." said Bishop Taylor. The couple said travelling the country and performing marionette theatre is more important now than ever. "Technology has gone in leaps and bounds and has left all these things in a cloud of dust, but actually people are very taken by these little figures," said Bishop Taylor. "We've handmade them so they have a certain energy to them like any work of art that attracts people and it may not be something they're consciously aware of. But, when they're watching, it reaches them in a different way than our electronic media." The couple performed two classic folk tales -- the Bremen Town Musicians and Rumpelstiltskin. "They were both stories that my mother told me as a boy so they kind of stuck with me," said Taylor. "That was the big thing and we like the Rumpelstiltskin story because there's so many things that happen. For the Bremen Town Musicians, we chose it because we know how much people like the animal marionettes." The couple are involved in every aspect of the production, from making the marionettes to writing the soundtrack to lighting. Taylor said pre-production for one story can take anywhere from two to six months. "A lot of it is the amount of work we put in our productions and try and really make them enjoyable for the whole family and not just focus on the kids," he said. This was the couple's first visit to the Northwest Territories. "We have been to a lot of remote places. We've been to the Yukon twice and we've been to Labrador a number of times," said Taylor. "We go to a whole lot of small places and we really enjoy it."
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