THEATRE: Canadian-born performer Jeff Achtem plays with rubbish.
It might seem like an unusual and potentially unhygienic hobby, but he’s so good at it that people pay to see him on prestigious stages in New York City, Berlin, Dubai and right across the globe.
The former clown and self-confessed gadget geek pulls together a bizarre collection of random household items – think toilet brushes, mop heads, fly screens – and creates shadow puppetry that has been blowing the minds of audiences for more than five years.
Achtem will bring his second production – titled Swamp Juice – to the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre after we were treated to Sticks Stones Broken Bones in January last year.
Starting out in clown school and then studying film, Achtem grew to love unusual story-telling and shadow puppetry seemed to fit the bill.
He spent many hours locked away in a room playing with different objects, dreaming up contraptions and experimenting with shapes to create the perfect props.
Sticks Stones Broken Bones was created and toured across the globe until it came time to tackle the next project.
“I was sitting in a cafe in New York City after an Off-Broadway performance and I committed at that point to the next production,” Achtem said.
“I locked myself away, decided on some strict rules and worked around them – for example, everything had to fit into a suitcase and there was to be no dialogue, I needed to be able to tell the story with just the characters.
“Puppets are always singing and dancing around, but I didn’t want that in my show.”
Achtem described Swamp Juice as “Doctor Seuss meets Southpark” with plenty of fuzzy bits and other unusual textures thrown in.
The end result is the audience sitting intrigued as Achtem manoeuvres a weird-looking collection of junk with bits sticking out everywhere and then the lights drop – and a breath-taking character emerges on the screen.
“What you see before you is 50 ideas that worked but you don’t see the other 500 that didn’t and were binned,” he said.
And if that doesn’t draw you in, wait until the finale when the audience is passed 3D glasses and find themselves in the middle of a chase scene which takes the production to a whole new level.
“It’s a very imaginative, clever journey – it’s more of a Pixar or Disney animation than a puppet show,” Achtem said.
Audiences of all ages will never forget this experience, coming to Bunbury on Friday, August 22.
Go to bunburyentertainment.com for more information.
