Shadow Stage & Shadow Light Productions

I was pointed towards the work of Shadow Stage Production by my tutor, Penny, who went and saw one of their recent productions called "If Ever". It is no longer showing but there is THIS brief video of it on YouTube which roughly shows some of their techniques, although it seems very abstract.

Their website shows videos and pictures of other past shows, and it seems to be a mixture of different colour lighting, depth perception, shadows formed from their own bodies and props. It seems to be simple and lo-budget techniques with sometimes effective visuals, unfortunately the website doesn't really give much away as to what it woud look like on stage and their precise production methods.

Click HERE for the page with their video tests/ examples on.

Shadow Light Productions is an american based theatre company who specialise in the art of shadow theatre with seemingly more depth than Shadow Stage, probably because of a higher budget, but also there seems to be more grounding with the traditional aesthetics of the eastern oriental establishments to shadow puppetry. What makes them unique is that they use performers for the shadows, with embellishments on the to create the 'look' of the character.

Click HERE for their trailer about their production "The Wild Party", which shows some of their techniques and story lines and which first alerted me to their work.

Shadow puppets isn't the material I originally planned to use, and I'm certainly leaning towards producing something that is outside of the theatres rather than in them, but the elements of shadow could help me tackle the problem of using things like projection in light. If I have to produce something for night time anyway, then shadows are another obvious form I could consider, and which look more 'deliberate' than perhaps projection would?