{"id":11406,"date":"2019-05-17T05:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T09:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/?p=11406"},"modified":"2026-03-31T20:53:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T00:53:32","slug":"lifes-work-part-xxxv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/lifes-work-part-xxxv\/","title":{"rendered":"Life’s Work, Part XXXV"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mark, Puppeteer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first began emailing around to find interesting subjects for this project in London, I was given the names of two puppeteers.  The email included an interesting warning: Sarah Wright and Mark Down are \u201cPuppetry Royalty,\u201d and you shouldn’t really expect to get them.  To my delight, they both kindly said yes.  Sarah was in the last post, Part XXXIV, in this series.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Down is one of the world\u2019s leading puppeteers, and the artistic director of Blind Summit, a London-based, internationally touring producer of puppet-based theatre. You can find out more about him and his work on his website, here: www.blindsummit.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I love performance and particularly acting. I trained as an actor and I came across puppets by chance along the way. I had this idea to try and make puppets act. It\u2019s such a strange problem because a puppet cannot really act. Acting is pretending to be someone else, and a puppet can\u2019t do that because a puppet isn\u2019t someone in the first place. Puppetry separates the actor into two parts: the puppeteer does the pretending, and the puppet does the action. A puppet can look like it\u2019s acting. We can pretend that it is acting. But it can\u2019t actually act. There’s a sort of separation of body and spirit. Making performances out of this has fascinated me for twenty years and continues to fascinate me, so I keep doing it for now. I don\u2019t think I meant to do it for this long. I originally trained to be a doctor.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Down, puppeteer, London<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Puppeteer<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"London-based<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Behind<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Puppeteer<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"London-based<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

You can see Parts I-XXXIV of Life’s Work here: http:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/lifes-work\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark, Puppeteer When I first began emailing around to find interesting subjects for this project in London, I was given the names of two puppeteers.  The email included an interesting warning: Sarah Wright and Mark Down are \u201cPuppetry Royalty,\u201d and you shouldn’t really expect to get them.  To my delight, they both kindly said yes.  Sarah was in<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11414,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[34,14,21,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifes-work","category-personal","category-portraits","category-projects"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11406"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21680,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406\/revisions\/21680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maundymitchell.com\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}