Daniel Wishes and Seri Yanai shine a light on Book of Shadows
This year the Edinburgh Fringe once again hosts some of the most extraordinary shadow puppetry there could be, created by Mochinosha/Book of Shadowz. The inimitable team of Daniel Wishes and Seri Yanai famously elevate the art of combining paper, sticks and lamps to an impossibly inventive level, delivering exceptional performance and spellbinding storytelling in their hilarious shows. Their puppetry and animation has grown-ups gasping and children cheering (can you tell I’m a fan?), so with a brand new production coming to the Underbelly at Edinburgh Fringe, I can’t be more excited! We called up the team to ask them to shine a light on Book of Shadows.
Hi Daniel and Seri. It’s so exciting to hear you have a new show coming. What can you tell us about the story?
The story is an occult-themed mystery comedy. Our hero is a teenage girl named Vi who has an extremely overactive imagination. At times, this makes it difficult for her to tell what’s real and what’s not, so she compensates by being very sceptical of everything. Vi is sent to live with her grandmother who claims to be the mystic Madame Blavatsky. They join forces to find a group of missing kids by journeying through the strange world of magick.
What inspired you to write this play?
For many years, we have been interested in making a series that explored actual real-world occult beliefs about magick rather than the way it is portrayed in fantasy. Daniel had been working on the world building and characters for quite some time and had enough material for a dozen shows. We think of this story as our Hobbit. It’s a self-contained story but also part of a much bigger one. We also thought that this show would be a good chance for us to experiment with some new puppetry techniques that we haven’t tried before.
Mochinosha’s work is usually hugely intergenerational, appealing to adults easily as much as children. Who’s the intended audience for this new production?
This show has some very dark themes and strong language so we recommend it for ages 14+.
What’s been the devising process for Book of Shadows?
Daniel write the story, Seri makes storyboards and designs all the shadow puppets. Daniel cuts the puppets and makes the joints and controls. Afterwards Seri paints them to add colour. Then we have to rehearse and choreograph the puppetry. Our shows always use an excessively large number of puppets, but we’ve broken our own record with this one with over four hundred puppets. For this show we’ve started trying to document our process and have been posting videos online for people to see. You can find them on Instagram and Youtube.
Your shows are famously impressively intricate, using hundreds of pieces in the puppetry, and you and Seri perform all the many characters while simultaneously puppeteering. Does this complexity help your storytelling or is it a terrifying challenge on every occasion?
It is a terrifying challenge, especially with a new show like this. Every show we make, we push ourselves to have more characters and more complex puppets, with a very intense creation process. And every time we worry if this time, we’ve gone too far and crafted a show that’s so complicated that it will be impossible to actually perform.
What do you feel is the value of creating analogue art such as yours in a world where AI is so readily available?
I think almost everybody hates AI slop at this point. The human imagination is the most valuable resource we have and trying to replace it with a bad imitation made by a computer is like trying to replace our freshly grown food with chemical sludge made in a factory. Theatre is a way for humans to communicate ideas, experiences and emotions to other humans to create a cathartic experience. If you take humans out of the equation it loses all value.
You’re premiering Book of Shadows to the Underbelly at Edfringe in August, but do you have plans to perform it anywhere else after the festival?
Not yet, but we will keep developing the show and try to bring it to as many places as we can.
Thanks so much to Daniel and Seri for taking the time to enlighten us on this exciting new production. Book of Shadows runs as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Underbelly until Sunday 30 August.
