When your young family becomes the main focus of your life, how do you, as an artist, manage to maintain your practice?

For long term, inspired Tasmanian Puppeteer/Performers Mel King, Mel Mills-Hope and Kirsty Grierson the answer was to create their own company – Extended Play. Through the establishment of Extended Play they found they could negotiate around their own time frames, whilst still keeping passionate in puppetry, utilizing their extensive skills to create new and exciting work.

Having worked together with Terrapin Puppet Theatre for many years, they initially reunited to re-stage a show to perform at UNIMA 20th Congress and World Puppetry Festival April 2008. Since then Extended Play have been on a roll – initially creating a short puppet-based work (as part of Terrapins Articulate program) that was inspired by popular culture obsession with food and television shows like Iron Chef. This was so well received that earlier this year they were able to continue the development of the work through the new Artist In Residence program (AIR).

AIR is a wonderful new artist in residence program developed by arts@work Tasmania, in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts. The program has seen a number of artists from a variety of art forms placed in residency at High Schools across Tasmania for the first time in 2010. U…