Awash in puppeteers
Wren, Celia
o away with the actor," proclaimed the theatrical innovator Gordon Craig in the early years of this century, "and you do away with the means by which a debased stage realism is produced...
...With Youki-za patriarch Magosaburo Youki XII guiding the strings, the puppet pranced on stage and cavorted, scratching its ear with its hind foot like a cat, biting its tail, and snapping at butterflies, to the audience's amusement...
...The spookier side of puppets was on display in a particularly provocative festival selection, created by the celebrated puppet artist Roman Paska...
...In the play's central conceit, Schuster depicted a radio deejay coordinating coverage of Catholic/Protestant conflict in sixteenth-century France ("Over to our special correspondent, Christopher Marlowe...
...Plumes glide and sway like a corps de ballet...
...Even with these echoes of the animate, though, it isn't easy to concentrate on abstractions for an hour...
...Commonweal | 7 October 9, 1998...
...Can we trust our own perspective on anything...
...Whereas a unified aesthetic governed Dieu...
...But other cultures boast richer traditions, and artists all over the world are creating adventurous works using puppets--with and without the help of human actors...
...Quite different in tone and scale was Lion Dance, a wordless selection that featured a twelve-inch dragon with a gold head, white whiskers, and a turquoise silk coat...
...Can we hold God responsible for tragedy and evil...
...The five-foot puppets--Salom4 in a purple halter top and sequined skirt, Commonweal | 6 October9, 1998 Herod with a pale blue beard and demonic red eyes--were stunning...
...Salomd, by the Stuffed Puppet Theatre of the Netherlands, toyed with the Oscar Wilde play, while introducing contemporary sex and violence, presumably for added relevance...
...Over the summer, a puppet show that was entirely abstract stunned New York...
...To this end, it makes grants to artists, and every other year sponsors the festival, which includes international acts primarily for adults...
...Salomd earned "Adults Only" billing, but for the most daring puppetry, you had to go outside the Henson festival...
...Making its U. S. debut, the Japanese company Youki-za, which was founded in 1635, illustrated the elaborate and highly stylized traditional Japanese art of marionettes...
...Do we have free will...
...Even so, the work had its moments...
...The marionettes stood in for people caught in the turmoil, but because the figures were so tiny in comparison to the stark, black stage, pathos relied almost entirely on the audience's imagination...
...o away with the actor," proclaimed the theatrical innovator Gordon Craig in the early years of this century, "and you do away with the means by which a debased stage realism is produced and flourishes...
...The word usually implies something frightening, but Freud's observation helps explain why puppets can be so droll, as well as so eerie...
...This year's smorgasbord, representing sixteen countries, included pieces as diverse as a multimedia dramatization of William Hogarth's Rake's Progress, a meditation on South Africa's post-apartheid Truth Commission, and a contemporary tribute to the ancient Indonesian art of shadow plays...
...At the last movement's conclusion, Twist and his five assistants trudge out for a bow onstage, utterly drenched--no one ever said the avant garde was easy...
...Then, in a passage that has given the creeps to drama students ever since, he went on to demonstrate the inferiority of human actors to puppets, "descendants of a great and noble family of images, images which were made in the likeness of God...
...familiarity with the music enhances the experience, the gothic story Berlioz devised as back-up for the symphony lending a little narrative energy...
...Most of these works ventured into experimental territory, but one entry did represent a more conservative strain...
...In a country where most of us associate puppetry first and foremost with Kermit the frog, the art form holds less exalted status, and puppets can seem childish--modified toys...
...Dieu...
...Every moment in the seventy-minute production, in fact, seemed to create huge gaps for the human mind to bridge...
...It's a long, long way from Sesame Street...
...Symphonie Fantastique, by the way, is supported in part by the Jim Henson Foundation...
...The image of the radio studio--a room sealed off from the outside w o r l d - - made the deejay's implied manipulation of that outside world all the more sinister...
...Dieu...
...At the ultra-hip HERE performance space, puppeteer Basil Twist sets fabrics and cut-outs swirling through a 500gallon tank of water, in a hallucinatory interpretation of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique...
...The Henson Foundation, founded by Muppet creator Jim Henson, exists to promote puppetry in the United States...
...The play's unnerving central motif was the metaphor of God as puppeteer...
...Ultimately, perhaps, Twist's concept is better than the show itself...
...cloths undulate like flames, or wings, or jellyfish...
...By choosing annihilation, the puppet seemed to try to demonstrate its free will...
...Wearing black, with black veils wrapped around their heads, the puppeteers coaxed six-inch marionettes, clad in elaborate silk cosfumes, through a tale of murder and betrayal during the reign of a shogun...
...The play seemed to zoom from biblical lands to Wilde's England, to 1990s New York and the no-man's land of metatheater, making context as unstable as an optical illusion...
...But the concept is brilliant, and the production certainly deserves to be the off-Broadway sensation critics have made it...
...In the rows of inert marionettes, the audience had to glimpse itself...
...But a subplot involving a lecherous modern criminal, and a coy soundtrack (technorap, a song from Gigi), seemed arbitrary, an instance of writer/director Luk van Meerbeke indulging himself...
...A marionette dragon is marvelous to watch because it moves as if it were living, but we still laugh when it scratches its ear--because it is funny to watch something not alive act as if it were...
...God Mother Radio splices an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's 1589 play The Massacre at Paris with a disquieting vision of a cosmic radio station...
...Humor glinted here and there through the solemnity: during an impressive battle scene, a samurai's weapon sliced a warrior clean in half, and the two halves hopped awkwardly off into the wings...
...The vibrancy of this work was splendidly showcased in New York this September when the Jim Henson Foundation sponsored its biannual International Festival of Puppet Theater...
...Sigmund Freud observed that the presence of the familiar within the strange, the hint that the inanimate is living, creates the "uncanny...
...The effect is beautiful and a little unnerving, as if an aquarium had mated with a lava lamp...
...Youki-za performed three pieces, including the operatic Meiboku Sendai Hag!: Tale of the Loyalty of Goten Masaoka, a play often staged in kabuki theater...
...For 2000 years I've been getting the blame for everything," Salom6 complained to the puppeteer (Neville Tranter), demanding that he put her out of her misery...
...The puppeteer Massimo Schuster, looking like a mad monk with his wild beard and long white robe, roamed up and down two racks of marionettes, which he periodically seized, toyed with, and replaced...
...God Mother Radio, Salomd jolted uneasily from one plane to another...
...God Mother Radio forced viewers to confront these questions...
...Moments like these draw attention to the contradiction that puppets embody: they are simultaneously animate and artificial...
...Behind him, a glass-topped booth resembled the control room of a radio engineer...
...A n equally bizarre but much less successful festival offering touched on some of the same themes...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
