Spotlight: Ronan McMahon

As part of this year’s Manipulate Festival, Tim Davies’ iconic Ocho the Octopus will be making its way around Edinburgh in a series of parades and pop up performances. In our latest spotlight, theatre artist and performer Ronan McMahon tell us about his experience of developing community participant puppets for these performances. Ronan will also participate in Articulation’s panel conversation about ‘The Future of Outdoor Arts and Visual Performance in Scotland’ at the festival’s Industry Afternoon.

Alongside designer-maker Gretchen Maynard-Hahn, I have been working with young people aged 6-12 and teenagers in Wester Hailes at WHALE Arts to devise a parade to accompany and celebrate the walkabout performances of Ocho The Octopus by Tim Davies at Manipulate Festival. 

Together, we co-created inflatable puppet-costumes, parade rod puppets, flags and koinobori windsocks. We’ve been holding a playful space and keeping the offer of engagement open to everyone who comes into the workshops on the multiple levels they might want to get involved – whether that’s bobbing about inside an inflatable puppet, joyfully swinging about a koinobori windsock to the music, standard-baring a kelp-flag for the parade march, or contributing dance moves, ideas and curiosity.

Inspired by Ocho, the young people painted gorgeous swirling bubbling sea-inspired patterns and images. Gretchen then expertly incorporated these into a bespoke fabric design. The participants drew the outline of their own unique life-sized water droplet which formed the shape of their inflatable puppet-costumes and the bespoke fabric was used to make them. They painted patterns on Koinobori windsocks and the adults at the Whale Arts’ Stitch’n’Time group stitched them together along with the kelp flags. Meanwhile the teenage group designed their own sealife rod puppets from scratch and got engrossed in the technicalities of hinge-joints and manipulation in puppetry. We adapted familiar games to introduce sea-inspired movement dynamics and ways of puppeting the inflatable costumes and built a short performance together which formed part of the parade. 

We are delighted that Whale Arts will keep all the puppets and parade paraphernalia we made together to use in future parades they have planned for the summer for the continued enjoyment of the people in Wester Hailes.