Fools, monsters and cereal boxes

Paper Cinema bring Homer's Odyssey to the stage. Artist Nicholas Rawling says it is a live silent film, with monsters.

Travelling troubadours bring their biggest show to date to New Zealand audiences utilising visuals and music.

Ten years ago, three artists who met through the Bournemouth music scene piled into a small car and embarked on a micro-tour of London, Newcastle and Edinburgh showcasing their blend of paper puppetry, live animation and music.

It was The Paper Cinema's first tour and its three founders - artist Nicholas Rawling, movement director and puppeteer Imogen Charleston and musical director Christopher Reed - never thought they'd be touring 10 years later.

Rawling still uses paper, pencils, Indian ink, dip pens, brushes, photocopies, glue, cereal boxes, wooden drink stirrers, plastic milk bottles and chocolate wrappers to craft intricate illustrations and cut-outs which are manipulated in real-time by puppeteers in front of a live video camera and projected on to a big screen alongside live music.

But, says Charleston from her home in Dorset, some things have changed over the last decade.

For starters, Reed no longer gives Rawling the music to listen to on cassette tapes and they need aircraft and a lot more luggage to transport their bespoke pieces to far-flung locations such as Brazil, China, Indonesia and North America.

Now they're about to arrive in New Zealand with their biggest show to date: a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. It will be Charleston's second visit to New Zealand. She was last here in 2007 to work with potter Juanita Edelmann.

"That's the great beauty of what we do; we can go off and work on our own projects, then come back to The Paper Cinema.

"Moving from music and the visual arts into theatre opened up lots of new opportunities for us all."

Even so, she acknowledges it was a challenge to take an epic like the Odyssey and reduce it down to 70 minutes. The result is a live silent film which unfolds before the audience's eyes and keeps the action, characters and monsters, and themes of love and understanding that have made the ancient Greek tale a cornerstone of Western literature.

Throughout its existence, The Paper Cinema has worked closely with London's Battersea Arts Centre, renowned for making boundary-blurring theatre. Battersea staff encouraged The Paper Cinema to adapt the Odyssey, saying they were good at monsters and travelling.

"Our shows usually come in at around 40 minutes so this was the longest piece we've ever created but we still had to condense it because a lot of people know the story and have certain expectations of it, like the monsters - there are still monsters."

Rawling says their main focus is looking at family and their relationship: a husband's efforts to get home to his wife and a wife's efforts to hold out until her husband returns while their son grows up.

All in all, it took two years to create the show but Charleston says the learning has been invaluable, not to mention the opportunity to tour the world.

"We create our own little worlds where anything is possible," she says, "but we're able to transcend a lot of barriers because we tell our stories with visuals and music, rather than by words, which means we don't have the language barriers other shows may have."

Nevertheless, they do reveal their tricks and techniques in post-show talks. In Auckland, The Paper Cinema Revealed is on October 30, free to ticket holders.

Performance

What: The Paper Cinema's Odyssey
Where and when: Lower NZI, Aotea Centre, October 29-November 1.