green ginger
Green Ginger makes award-winning theatre for both streets and stage and offers accessible educational workshops tailored to suit any age group or ability. The company was founded in 1978 with the aim of creating innovative and accessible theatre for all ages and to tour its productions and workshops throughout the UK and abroad. Since its formation, the Company has had a commitment to puppetry in the widest sense and its practitioners animate sets and props, light, shadows and special effects to realise its surreal and absurd imagery.
Green Ginger acts as an umbrella organisation under which freelance theatre makers work together to write, design, teach and perform. Its members regularly collaborate with organisations such as National Assembly for Wales, Welsh National Opera and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and the Company receives invitations for commissions and consultancies for stage, TV, film and community projects.
The Company has its roots in the spontaneity of street theatre. 25 years of outdoor performance all over the world has informed the accessibility of the Company’s indoor theatre work.
Green Ginger is excited by the confirmation of its core-team line-up for RUST. Director Flick Fernando from Company F/Z, performers Marc Parrett of Stuff & Nonsense, Vic Llewellyn (a regular Desperate Men performer) will join Green Ginger regulars James Osborne & Chris Pirie.
Green Ginger receives funding from Arts Council England and Arts Council Wales. Plus touring support from British Council.
...the story so far...
Terry Lee's formative years as a young theatre maker came during a pivotal era in Performing Arts history. During the 1970s Terry was able to gain valuable experience working in London with seminal experimental theatre companies TOC, Doggs Troupe and InterAction.
In 1978 he was awarded one of the very first Puppetry Bursaries from the Puppet Centre, which allowed him to travel, work and see puppet theatre across Europe, much of it under the creative wing of the late Barry Smith and his Theatre of Puppets. Fired up with possibility and energy, he then took a straight line into the sunset and West Wales, where he founded a small, self contained portable puppet enterprise called Land of Green Ginger Puppets.
Sensing creative stagnation in most traditional seaside entertainments, Terry began to create half-hour solo shows and perform them to family audiences on the beaches and in caravan parks around the region. The shows were delivered with manic energy from within a booth crammed with puppets from hand to life-size and a delightful mix of high and low-tech staging and special-effects solutions. Before long, the 'reluctant rear wall' of parents in every audience found themselves laughing at the rapidfire one-liners and subtle political undertones within each bizarre mini-adventure. The absurd endings also left nigglesome questionmarks hovering; bits of brainfodder for holidaymakers to chew on as they left the show, knowing that they had just seen something very different, decidedly leftfield yet well executed. The children just smiled knowingly...
Terry supplemented this work with film and television puppetry, notably as a manipulator and voice artist for ITV's successful satire Spitting Image and as a puppeteer for Jim Henson's Dark Crystal (1982), Labyrinth (1986) and Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors (1986).
Meanwhile, his own live puppetry productions were beginning to take him into Europe with exposure at major international festivals and particularly, the first of many successful appearances at the World Puppet Festival held every three years in Charleville-Mézières, France.
Late in the summer of 1986, Terry was visited by illustrator and theatremaker Chris Pirie who responded warmly to a suggestion that a little collaboration might be mutually beneficial...
... to be continued ...
