Metaphorical Interpretation

With regard to your post about the interpretation of the song, I don't think it hurts to explore further than the obvious.  We have been looking at literally narrating the words and I have put my head to work over a glass of wine or two this weekend, while making my puppet, to think of other angles!

Lauren has researched that the original idea for the song was taken from a poster advertising the circus that John Lennon saw while recording their album so unlike some songs it was inspired by an actual circus!!!! My random thoughts on poster metaphors include having a puppet looking at the poster and composing the song aka John Lennon, having the poster come to life, having a lowly circus worker (maybe a carousel operator) dream of better things while cleaning.............this would tie in magnificently with Henry the Horse.
If we are narrating the song I don't see much room for metaphor unless we choose to include my excellent idea of a very well endowed man as Henry the Horse!!!!! Still not convinced????
As you can tell my head was on the Horse and I have researched a few images of styles of puppets as this will probably be the most difficult one to make.

They range from pretty basic hand puppets which would be simple to construct .......I am doing the body of my celebrity puppet in stuffed tights which is wonderful and quick to form into features which might be an easy idea for our main characters..........I digress..........but without legs might be hard to make dance.




This jointed shadow puppet however would be easy to animate and I know we all liked the idea of shadow puppets.



I also liked this balinese traditional puppet of a horse the colours remind me of carousel horses although depending on the amount of puppets we have to make this might be beyond achieving successfully.
This link is the web page for the balinese puppets it is interesting reading I think their use of background is particularily successful.

And this of course is totally out of our range in four weeks!!! However the idea is not we could always use a hobby horse on a stick and make it dance by us dancing with it (or the puppet).  Did you get to look at the web site I posted with performing objects? We could always do the whole thing ourselves with animated masks!!!!!

I keep coming back to the image of a carousel horse, of course they do dance round anyway so an even simpler idea would be to have a horse on a stick, carousel style, twirling away to the music.

I look forward to talking all this through on Monday.