Ring Master

Last week as part of some of the updates Vivian and the rest of the team put forward for the final performance it was decided that we would have a person organizing the flow of people. Since there wasn't anything that was directly forcing people to engage with the puppet I suggested that the person directing the flow should be a Ring Master type of character that sold the puppet to their own benefit, a type of freak show director that was selling tickets or something. People seem to like the idea and since I game some examples I was given the role.

So this post is dedicated to the character, some references that were used for its inspiration and some notes that I have for myself to perform on the final performance.

Okay so the plan for the voice for me came from Aurelio Voltaire's meteorite-brain-alien character from the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy's episode Brains! 

The character is a self-centered creature that tricks Billy into convincing the rest of town into coming along, the benefit is only his own but playfully puts Billy into a position of accomplice. I wanted to take that spirit of charismatic trickery, but also the musicality on the characters voice came from here.

Asides, Vivian thought of Sub Urban's "Freak" Music Video. In which a visually more traditional "Ring Leader" character dances around touching, messing with and displaying multiple participants within a circus.

The way the character moves, its comfortability in a space in which he is clearly invading and appropriating the existence of multiple other entities is also very much present on the Ring Master character, specially considering my main job is to convince people to ignore their natural instincts and be quite mean to a person. I wanted to dehumanize the puppet character as much as I could.

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When the dress rehearsal came about, I was interested in trying stuff and see what stuck, sadly due to technical difficulties I had to perform over the piece for a chunk of our time, which meant that I ended up having to run the same character without variations for most of the night. It appeared to be successful and aside from the physical strain of talking over people and projecting my voice it went pretty well.

I'll try doing something else (dress code wise) for the real performance time, but for now the cape seemed to be enough.