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| Dixon rehearsing for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance with his puppets |
Barnaby Dixon is a stop motion director turned full time puppet maker and puppeteer based in the United Kingdom. Dixon’s work started out with small stop motion shorts with creative uses of handmade puppets. It was these puppets that caused Dixon’s work to stand out as he continued to use them for online video creation. The puppets that Dixon would highlight and use on his YouTube channel “barnabydixon” were created in his room with whatever materials he could afford to use. This makes all his puppets one of a kind and unique to him. Dixon’s work has now appeared in several live stage productions, music videos, and even the most recent Netflix adaptation of The Dark Crystal.
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| Dabchick! |
The unique creativity and skill of Dixon’s work can be seen in the first ever puppet that he created who is now a main character on his YouTube channel: a small bird that goes by the name of Dabchick. Dabchick has gone through some updates in his design but originally took Dixon two months to create in his room with various materials. Only one hand is needed to puppeteer Dabchick as the puppeteer's ring and pinky fingers control his legs while subtle movements from the wrist create expressiveness in the rest of his body. Most of Dixon’s puppets are of a much smaller scale; controlled by two hands at the most going no further than the forearm, if that far at all. Due to their small scale and mechanics, it takes a very dexterously skilled puppeteer to use these puppets due to sometimes very complex hand coordination. This causes Barnaby Dixon to stand out not only as a puppet maker but as a puppeteer himself as he is able to portray very expressive emotion and fluid movement in relatively awkward hand positions.
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| Dixon's puppet singing "The Song of the Siren" In Augustin Fuentes’s The Creative Spark there is in-depth discussion of storytelling, art, and aesthetics. Fuentes makes the argument that one of the most fundamental forms of human creativity is storytelling. Storytelling can appear in a multitude of mediums from to dance, to song, to words, and much more. Barnaby Dixon is a masterful storyteller who uses music, movement, dialogue, and lighting to bring his puppets to life to tell a story. On page 224 of The Creative Spark aesthetic is described as a “necessary precursor to being able to create art, but it is not the same as art, at least not human art”. Barnaby Dixon is a strong example of using aesthetics to enhance art. In 2019, Dixon presented an incredibly complex puppet that had real time projection of his mouth for the puppet to speak. The concept can be unsettling to the eye but he used that to push a more eerie aesthetic to the puppet for him to use in a video where he sings an original work titled "The Song of the Siren". The puppet’s projection of Dixon’s mouth not only makes the puppet extremely expressive but also achieves in creating an unsettling feeling that adds to the aesthetic of the project. |
As you mentioned, Dixon was involved in a Dark Crystal adaptation and sought to induce an eeriness with his Song of the Siren puppet. Both of those projects appear to have strange, otherworldly aesthetics and atmospheres. Blending the human body with those of inanimate, yet animated, creatures yields an uncanny effect, thus making puppetry the best medium (in my opinion) for creative products with an unsettling quality that never dwindles. I've always been intrigued by puppeteering of all kinds, so this was a cool read!
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