About the Company
Wattle & Daub Figure Theatre is a Bristol-based puppetry and visual theatre company. We play with strange structures, striking visual imagery and the interconnections of puppet and puppeteer. Through exploring the ways in which humans bring life to puppets, masks and other performing objects, we are committed to creating theatre that audiences find magical, inspirational and transformative.
The term 'figure theatre' was coined in Germany in the early 1900s, born out of a desire for puppet theatre to be seen as a theatrical form for adults. We use the term because we feel it covers a range of performance styles, from rod puppets to shadow and object puppetry, to mask and visual theatre.
Company Members
Tobi Poster trained at Bretton Hall and the Ecole Philippe Gaulier and has also studied clown with Mick Barnfather and Butoh with Tetsuro Fukuhara. Aside from his work in Wattle & Daub he is cofounder and co-artistic director of Lost Spectacles, appearing in their debut production Lost in the Wind. He has also appeared in Pirandello's Henry IV at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage and In Manus Tuas at the 2007 Festival of Emergent Arts, London, and has run workshops in physical comedy for the University of Minnesota.
Laura Purcell Gates has designed puppets in Los Angeles, with Michael Sommers of Open Eye Figure Theatre in Minneapolis, and with WDFT in the UK. She trained with Giovanni Fusetti and the Ecole Philippe Gaulier, and has been a lecturer on university drama courses as well as leading workshops in theatre, voice and puppetry in the US and UK. She has directed and performed throughout the US with such companies as Shakespeare and Company, Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company and Jon Ferguson Theater, and was a founding member of Stilettos and Straps Cabaret.