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• W4313560642 abstract "It was February 2022 and I was standing in a crowd in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse watching an elegant performance unfold: a three-dimensional, 20-inch-tall, faceless figure, manipulated by the hands of three people, walked silently across a suspended tabletop while interacting obliquely with a picture frame, also suspended in mid-air. From behind me, I heard a voice quietly exclaim, “That’s not what you think of when you hear puppetry.” Indeed, I thought, the legs and flats of the feet were being manipulated from the hips with some sort of inte­rior mechanism. Typically, the foot puppeteer holds them near the ankles. But I don’t think that’s what my fellow spectator had in mind.I began officially referring to myself as a puppeteer twenty-four years ago. I was “raised” by a Bread and Puppet-type, cardboard and spectacle puppetry, and then moved on to add the bunraku-style, three-person manipulation of humanoid figures, performing scenery, full-body costumes, toy theatre, shadow puppets, tabletop, as well as a bit of hand and rod puppetry. I see puppetry everywhere I look. I constantly meet new puppeteers. I forget that people have limited experience with the artform. Many people I meet tell me they’ve never seen a puppet show. When I remind them of The Muppets, Mr. Rogers, the Chucky horror franchise, Yoda from Star Wars, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, or Broadway’s The Lion King, they begin to recognize they have seen more puppetry than they think. But there are many more styles of puppetry than those presented in popular media. I’m not sure whether my fellow audience member’s puppetry experience was with foam Muppet-style puppets, marionettes, a playful children’s theatre, or a television show like Crank Yankers. I might, however, field a guess that his concept of puppetry is dominated by those that talk as humans do and are animated by hidden, unseen puppeteers. The three-person manipulation of a puppet in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse, inspired by Japanese bunraku, with the puppeteers in full view and performed in a performance art context, was not what he had expected.This essay covers four puppetry events across New York City in the winter months of 2022. The performances are so unique in form and style, one might wonder how each fits inside the field of puppetry. What connects them are some definitive traits of the medium. First, each featured inanimate objects as an essential component and focus of the storytelling. The objects performed with varying types of puppet liveness: be it a conscious human or floating table. Many reflected on the nature of consciousness and the human condition, natural topics for a medium that offers the opportunity to imagine an object’s interior life. Transformation, another natural ability of puppet objects, was utilized both literally and dramaturgically across these works. They also took advantage of the metaphoric power of objects and the capacity of the audience’s imagination to “fill in the blanks.” All the works required the presence of secondary performers: the puppeteers. Finally, many of the performances employed something not definitive to puppetry, but commonly taken advantage of by practitioners of the art form: non-narrative visual storytelling. Below, I offer my observations on these puppet performances.The piece I recounted above, which I observed in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse while I waited for the Puppet Lab to begin, was Chris Green’s The Rest of It. This would only be one of many puppet shows I witnessed that day. The Lab is a long-running residency program that supports experiments in puppetry by both seasoned puppeteers and puppet-curious artists. Each year, the Lab supports the development of eight puppet projects. At its completion, there is a performance of works in process presented with very high production value, something not often attainable for low-budget puppet artists.Although the Lab is always very well-attended, this year’s performance was bustling like none I had seen before. Due to the Covid pandemic, residents had been developing their projects for more than two years. Unconventionally, Bill’s 44th, a surreal tale about one man’s lonely birthday, had premiered and toured before its presentation at the Lab. However, most remained short works-in-progress no longer than twenty minutes. Most striking of these works was Strange Bird by Rosa Douglas and Ben Elling. In this piece, a stunning installation of what appeared to be sacred branches greeted the audience and functioned as a kind of altar on which the live musicians performed. The main puppet character was collapsed on the ground—in front and to the side of this established centerpiece. The strange and unusual design of the puppet was contrasted with its simple actions. A full-body creature with an antique book for a face slowly came to life, discovering itself and its surroundings as it attempted to communicate. Performed by Kasper Klop and designed by Douglas, the creature is a mix of physical theatre and puppetry. The body was humanistic, but the book-face looked like a haunted disfigurement trapping its owner in solitude. Able to close and open with a hidden mechanism, the puppet’s book-face harbored a heavy dose of the uncanny—a staple in puppetry as a medium.The ability of inanimate objects to perform various types of liveness was explored further in Outside In by Jenny Lai, presenting a series of moments with human-sized and giant fabricated objects. A solo pair of pants playfully danced in front of the audience. Headless pajamas inside a trench coat sat quietly and crossed their legs. A long chain of expanding and contracting tule, the fabric of a wedding dress or ballet tutu, was manipulated into various compelling shapes by two visible humans. Without agency or consciousness, the tule was my favorite object in the show. Its abstract nature allowed my imagination to imbue it with life. This form of liveness is different from that of Green’s humanoid figure or Douglas’s book-face creature; it is the kind of liveness we might perhaps recognize in a plant.Remedy by Yuliya Tsukerman explored both metaphoric objects and the relationship between text and image. In the short performance, Tsukerman appeared as an actor telling us about a family heirloom, a book of remedy recipes from her grandmother. While reciting these strange recipes, she presented a series of puppet tableaux and short scenes, effectively using the relationship between word and image to draw out the audience imagination. While we heard the words “Bread gets its heart broken and laughs at its own jokes,” we could see a foam loaf of bread turn into a baby, which was then sliced up and fed to ducks. Anthropomorphizing the bread with both words and image, in different ways, leaves space for the imagination to create connections. I wasn’t always certain what the connections were, but nonetheless I felt touched. At another moment, Tsukerman proclaimed, “Let the ugly parts live” as we watched a simple box with holes “cry” chains out of its “eyes.” Neither the words nor the image alone could accomplish what they did together. This exemplifies what comics theorist Scott McCloud might call “interdependent.”1Tsukerman used the power of metaphoric objects—bread and babies are both nourishing and need to be nourished—in combination with closure. This is an important concept in many artforms and integral to puppetry’s magical expressions. Closure is experienced when a reader or viewer or audience fills in the blanks of a scene. In comics, for example, the reader makes assumptions between one frame and the next. An image of a man with a knife in one frame, followed by the outside of an apartment at a distance with a scream in the background, suggests someone has just been murdered.2 We imagine this action, but it is never shown in an image. In puppetry, closure happens when we imagine a puppet’s thoughts or feelings. For example, if a cat were to go missing in a puppet show, we might assume the puppet is sad about the lost cat, desires to find that cat, and makes up its own mind to go and find it. In truth, the puppet is an inanimate object and has had none of those feelings, thoughts, desires, nor expresses any decisive agency. We, the audience, imagine it. That is a core wonder of puppetry, and why an audience can be so mesmerized with a puppet show.In puppetry, closure can also occur in the relationship between text and image, just as it does in comics. In Remedy, Tsukerman did not tell the audience what the exact relationship was between her words and images. Rather, the audience made their own connections and filled in the gaps she had left for them. Tsukerman, with her metaphor-laden objects, left just the right number of gaps to fill to satisfy her audience.A relationship between text and image is also at the heart of Theodora Skipitares’s latest work, Grand Panorama, which played at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in February 2022. Skipitares has been creating puppet shows for decades and her work is a staple of the downtown theatre community. Her latest work was a playful history lesson as she presented Frederick Douglass’s biography while delivering snippets of his lectures and writings on photography and slavery. She offered stories of Sojourner Truth and Nicholas Biddle, as well as writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, who picked up Douglass’s efforts after his death by exhibiting photographs of African American communities.Though ultimately extremely visual in nature, the show began by focusing the audience’s attention on the auditory. At the outset, a commanding oratory of primary historical source texts filled the space, delivered by narrator Jayson Kerr and accompanied by mesmerizing violin played by the production’s composer, Mazz Swift. This drew the audience into an interior space of ideas. In her director’s note, Skipitaires writes, “Douglass believed photography revealed the essential humanity of its subjects.” Thus, as a black man, he had many portraits taken, some of which he sold. The same was true of Sojourner Truth. She believed photographs were a mechanism to “level” society; before that time, only wealthy people could afford to “gaze upon themselves as others do.” Douglass thought he could alter white America’s perceptions by proliferating photographs of African Americans. Skipitaires addressed these weighty existential concepts and concrete struggles using puppets, an inherently playful art form. This helped the audience digest the difficult subject matter of Douglass’s plight: trying to prove his own humanity through photographic evidence. The puppetry also offered a helpful distance to grapple with this deeply troubling topic. Distance is inherent between a puppeteer and their puppet.Skipitares used many visual storytelling devices common within puppetry to create levity and distance while exploring this heavy subject. For example, the oratory burst forth into visual designs of a giant toy theatre stage. Traditionally performed in nineteenth-century living rooms across Europe, toy theatre uses flat paper cut-outs to perform plays in miniature replicas of famous theatres. Skipitares’s toy theatre utilized the power of simple imagery, but in a much more grand capacity at least ten feet tall. At one point, a toy-theatre elephant drew a picture and attempted to sell it to a dog who could not appreciate it because it was non-human. The ridiculousness of an elephant considering a dog to be less human than itself was a dark reflection on how people treat other people. Yet somehow the scene was enchanting. It was accompanied by human actors wearing giant papier-mâché bobble-head likenesses of Frederick Douglass performing synchronous dance moves. Instead of coming off as flippant, this performance drove home the poignancy of the moment.Skipitares’s visions filled this proscenium, then reached beyond it into every inch of the theatre space at La MaMa. Shadow puppetry figures invaded a Victorian bay window, and a “cranky” panorama scroll shared the story of Nicholas Biddle, a celebrated and later denigrated union soldier. Also noteworthy were the gorgeous two-foot-tall figure puppets of Douglass and Truth who sat for photographs taken by a human with a papier-mâché camera for a head. Finally, the audience was invited to trek across the stage into an adjoining theatre. There, images of nineteenth-century African American communities were blown up to become life-sized as flat toy theatre-style puppets moving across the floor. Through these multiple devices, Skipitares used non-narrative storytelling to create a collage of story. This allowed audience to actively puzzle together pieces of America’s racial past, a deeply troubling history which continues to haunt our present.In the final section of the show, I wondered if Douglass was right that these photographs were revealing and expressing the humanity of their subjects. I certainly felt my white gaze upon the photographs and was cognizant of the long path of white people oppressing Black people. The power of the images throughout the whole show brought me to this realization. But I was also stuck by my own modern-day cynicism towards the eye of the camera. I experience photography, combined with touch ups and filters, as a medium with the propensity to hide and evade while dehumanizing its subject. The narration playing during this final section suggested that photographs today threaten our anonymity instead of offering us an opportunity to see one another, as Douglass believed. The show did not draw a conclusion about the value of photography. Rather, it served the audience an array of ideas to ponder. In the political and social climate of today, this production was a woefully needed history lesson and opportunity for reflection on how we truly see one another.Song of the North by Hamid Rahmanian was also an attempt to see one another, this time across cultures. Rahmanian, a Persian puppeteer, filmmaker, and writer, sought to introduce the western world to Shahnameh, or The Book of Kings. This thousand-year-old epic poem tells stories of the Iranian Plateau, stretching from (what is now modern day) Turkey to the Himalayas in Western Asia. In response, Rahmanian created a series of pop-up books, audiobooks, films, and shadow puppets featuring stories from this work.I arrived early to see Song of the North in March 2022 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As I waited with anticipation, I overheard a child asking their guardian if they were here to see a movie. “No,” their guardian said, “it’s a play.” To which the child responded: “What’s the difference between a play and a movie?” Although the simplest answer to this question is that a play is performed live, I suspect this child will remain confused after watching Song of the North, as it is a shadow puppet show.Shadow puppetry, as a medium, shares a great deal with film. Rahmanian’s version of this form is even more filmic than most because his shadow light is a projection of a recorded animation. In this way, the piece was half puppet show and half film. However, Rahmanian made it clear from the beginning that this was a live performance. Upon entering the theatre, the audience could see the backstage area with puppeteers milling around and moving props while wearing costumes. When the time came for the show to begin, a giant movie-theatre sized screen lowered between the stage and audience spaces.Song of the North requires eight highly skilled puppeteers to manipulate a total of three-hundred puppets over the course of the production. The shadow screen is approximately thirty feet across, with two projectors as light sources. This set-up allowed for cinematic cuts between projectors. The particular light source also allows for a sharp shadow to be cast from any depth, not simply when holding a puppet against the screen. This enabled “live zooming” as actors in headpieces walked toward or away from the light. The setup was inspired by the one created by Larry Reed’s Shadowlight Productions. However, Rahmanian added a new element: a shadow light source that is simultaneously an animated background. On top of this projected animation, the live puppets performed. Ultimately, this meant that the crew of puppeteers behind the screen were constantly moving in highly choreographed sequences of acting, puppeteering, swapping puppets, changing costumes, and preparing puppet entrances at memorized heights to match the animation onscreen. (I know these details because I was an understudy on the show. Many puppet shows have exciting backstage choreography, but this piece rivals some of the trickiest shows in which I’ve performed.)The storytelling in Song of the North used dynamic visuals, an energized original score, and comedy in its precise presentation. Several moments made the audience laugh: an impossible fight with demons only achievable with puppets, and a row of knights actively (yet silently) avoiding being chosen for adventure. One of the main characters of this section of the Shahnameh is Manijeh, an unruly princess. She is daughter to the king of Turan, sworn enemy of Iran. In Song of the North, we follow a young Iranian knight, Bijon, who, through bad advice and arrogance, travels to Turan. There, he falls in love with Manijeh and is subsequently imprisoned. The use of modern-day cinematic techniques such as perspective, framing, panning, and zooming with live puppetry was an exciting way to bring this ancient text to the stage, and a welcome lesson in what is possible with the medium of puppetry.I have one reservation about Song of the North: its relationship to liveness. The whole show was stunningly beautiful. The shadows were crisp and sharp, the colors were vibrant and amazing, and it was overwhelmingly visual and dynamic. However, the animation made the live puppetry feel ubiquitous. The audience knew that some of what they see is live, but it was unclear exactly what was live and what was not. This diffuses one of the core traits of puppetry: the performers are inanimate, and the audience and puppeteers engage in a collective game of pretend that these objects are actually alive. By no means do we lose this engagement entirely. Film also requires imagination and pretend-play from its audience. However, I find Rahmanian’s animations-as-light-source confuse the boundaries of these genres.The final work discussed here also premiered at St. Ann’s Warehouse and drew upon another ancient text from Asia. Book of Mountains and Seas, a choral-puppet collaboration between Basil Twist and Huang Ro, digs into myths about the origins of the universe from the classic Chinese text of the same name. Originally slotted to premiere in New York in January during the (Covid-canceled) 2022 Prototype Festival, it was subsequently pushed back to March of that year. Although it is a puppet show, the piece is equally dominated by its music. Initially commissioned as a choral score for the acclaimed troupe of singers, ARS NOVA Copenhagen, Book of Mountains and Seas is driven by Huang Ro’s score. At times eerie and beautiful, the music was also often unrelenting and vigorous. Twist’s puppetry supported the music and myths, fashioning a work that exists as a complete whole, not separable into its parts. The difficult score was sung skillfully at St. Ann’s by the distinguished Choir of Trinity Wall Street.I’ve known Basil Twist for many years. He is a renowned puppeteer who works across genres (puppetry, theatre, opera, and ballet) on international stages as well as tiny downtown experimental ones. He’s known for his use of abstraction with silk, fans, and water, but also regularly incorporates beautiful multi-operator figurative puppets, be they humans, fairies, or animals. I’ve puppeteered on many of his productions, fabricated puppets, managed projects, and filled in as puppet director in his absence. When I came on as assistant director in March 2022, I had already been associated with the development of Book of Mountains and Seas at various stages. However, I hadn’t witnessed its completion and culminating premiere which took place in Copenhagen in fall 2021.From total blackness, twelve voices, one by one, joined a haunting and complicated song as heads of the singers appeared floating in nothingness. They were all dressed in black velvet robes, each holding a single light source illuminating their faces. They gently ambled into various formations across a large black square on the floor, avoiding a circle at its center. Another large disc loomed perpendicular behind them creating a simple setting. Slowly, a universe formed out of the nothingness. Though the puppeteers entered invisibly under the veil of darkness, they soon became characters in the world because their heads too were uncovered. They were both witnesses to and activators of the mysteries of this universe as they raised a disc from the floor and revealed a face made of driftwood. In this way, the entirety of the stage and its inhabitants were treated as a single being which came to life.Twist deftly weaved the dramaturgy of transformation throughout this exquisite visual performance. Transformation is a theme of many puppet shows because puppets are apt at it. In this case, transformation is also the central theme of the source text. The creation of the universe, the subject matter of the first movement, was performed as a transformation from blackness, to molecules in space, to the face of a great being. Twist went on to transform the collection of driftwood making up the face into a mountain range, a dragon, ritual objects, and finally a giant running figure. Other puppet objects included ten red Chinese lanterns on poles as well as small and large swaths of silk that represented, at various moments, ten suns, a bird, an ocean, a river, and the sky. Text of the chosen creation myths was projected on the large disc at the back of the stage. This helped the audience connect the simple, yet elegant abstract performing images to distinct stories. A princess who drowned inhabited the body of a bird and exacted revenge on the ocean. Ten suns caused a great drought on Earth, so the God of Archery shot all but one of them down. A man tried to chase the sun to where it set, but could not catch it.The decision to work with simple objects was originally a practical one: the singers were meant to animate the puppets. In this conception, the choir would both sing and puppeteer simultaneously. A keen dramaturgical choice, this would have the singers creating their own universe. Though the plan did not come to fruition, it colored the final design, which read as straightforward and uncomplicated. Most of the time, this feels fresh and beautiful. Occasionally, the repetition seems extended and unusual for a Twist production. For example, the entrance and exit of the ten suns was lengthy. However, the visuals were just one piece of a whole that also included music and dramaturgy, supporting a slow and deliberate pace. Simplicity itself transformed into complexity when the driftwood changed shape for the last time. From a circle of kneeling singers, a driftwood person literally rose up to the height of ten feet. This puppet, maneuvered by six puppeteers, was anything but simple. It ran, jumped, fell, drank, and stood back up only to fall back to its knees. The gigantic puppet coming to life was a highlight of the production.Book of Mountains and Seas defies easy categorization: it was a puppet show, a choral concert, an opera, and a piece of theatre all at once. However, to my eyes, it was very clearly created from the perspective of a puppeteer. The unique skillset of the puppeteer included recognizing how every element in a production might come to life, become animated, or be treated as an illusion. Only a puppeteer would think to use the heads of a choir to perform the role of molecules gliding through space. A puppeteer knows how to use light and fabric to create the illusion of total nothingness which then surges to life. A puppeteer knows that the puppet stage itself can move with breadth and impulse, that it can contribute as much to a performance as the puppets and performers. A puppeteer knows that the metaphoric power of an object connects to a larger dramaturgical structure. A puppeteer knows that objects can transform, and that if you listen, they will tell you what they want. A puppeteer knows that one does not need to tell an audience everything because it is more engaging for them to fill in the blanks themselves. All of this was clear to me from watching Book of Mountains and Seas, a show cultivated by the hand of a puppeteer.■Puppetry in New York City during the winter of 2021 featured a wide swath of styles, from three-dimensional humanoid figures and abstract shapes to flat toy theatre, shadow puppetry, and crankies. Materials used included fabric, plastic, cardboard, light, and paper. Puppets were operated by hand, with rods, strings, or the puppeteer body. The stories were both narrative-based and non-narrative. But commonalities remain. Each show expressed itself visually with inanimate objects that in some way became “alive.” In both Outside In and The Rest of It, there was non-conscious liveness. Jenny Lai explored the performative capacity of multiple yards of folded tule fabric, while Chris Green used a puppeteer to manipulate his floating table with breath. Consciousness was performed by the shadow puppet figures in Song of the North as well as the ten-foot-tall driftwood giant chasing the sun in Book of Mountains and Seas. Multiple shows recognized and incorporated the inanimate nature of puppets into their dramaturgy. Strange Bird used the book-face puppet’s exploration of itself as a living being as its subject matter. Grand Panorama used the inanimate nature of puppets to tell difficult truths about truly animate beings. Some used the power of objects to express metaphor and literally transform, as Remedy did with its bread-baby puppet.Similarly, the driftwood and silks in Book of Mountains and Seas constantly transformed across the show to represent new elements. Each puppet production also consciously incorporated the puppeteer. Song of the North hid this device during the actual performance, but made them visible in the preshow moments. The Rest of It used visually present puppeteers who remained effectively invisible to the focus of the artwork. Finally, all the puppet shows left space for the audience to experience closure, where their imagination fills in the blanks of what has not been directly expressed. The emotional roller coaster of no one showing up to Bill’s 44th birthday party was understood through closure. Remedy’s indirect collaboration between text and image let the audience conclude that chains were “crying” from the holes of a box. In Grand Panorama, a collage style of storytelling offered space to contemplate the power and the breadth of its subject.Thinking back to the audience member at Puppet Lab, the one I overheard say, “That’s not what you think of when you hear puppetry,” makes me wonder, what do I think of when I hear the word puppetry? When I attend a puppet show, I expect that inanimate objects will be its focus. They could be tiny or huge. They might be familiar objects, abstract shapes, or recognizable as humans or animals. I expect that the stage will frame the action in front of me or even perform itself. The puppets could perform a spectacle or tell a story. Finally, I know there will always be a puppeteer, hidden or otherwise, to either purposefully or inadvertently remind me that this illusion is all a game of pretend. As a puppeteer myself, I am biased towards this role. However, the puppeteer could never do it alone. It takes more than a puppet and a puppeteer. The essential magic-making ingredient is the imagination of the audience. The puppeteer simply draws it out, and offers it a puppet show as a playground on which to play." @default.
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• W4313560642 title "Seeing Puppetry: Winter Report from New York City" @default.
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