The life and death and life and death of Frank

In this performance lecture I will explain and demonstrate how a life-size puppet made for a one-off performance in 2006 was resurrected for the Canterbury Players production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in Oct 2017. I will contextualise this by referring to my published article on animation and puppetry ‘Jan Svankmajer: Film as Puppet Theatre’ (Animation Studies, Vol.11) and to my current PhD research on animal guising traditions in folk theatre. It is a talk about the animation of dead stuff as if it is living … but dead. Why is the puppet called Frank? I don’t even remember. You can ask him yourself but he won’t answer because a) he is not a ventriloquist’s dummy b) he is dead.