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Puppets Everywhere
2005 UK puppetry festivals round-up by Penny Francis
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Shows featuring puppetry and object animation at the London
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TOTAL
PUPPETRY
Dorothy
Max Prior looks at how puppetry fared at the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe 2005.
Photos:
Andrew Dawson – Absence and Presence, Blind Summit –
Low Life, Kazuko Hohki – Evidence for the Existence
of Borrowers |
In a sister feature in this e-dition of Animations, Penny Francis
reports on the plethora of puppet-theatre festivals hosted in
the UK. But what of the regular arts festival circuit? How
well is puppetry represented within the general theatre culture?
A good way of telling would be to take a look at the biggest
arts festival in the UK - the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The Fringe 2005 saw an exciting breakthrough for puppetry. Of
the hundreds of shows presented, many advertised the inclusion
of puppetry and object animation in their productions, and a
number of these gained attention in the mainstream press. This
included successes both for dedicated puppet-theatre companies
and for theatre companies using puppetry as one performance
tool in a multi-discipline production, many of whom broke free
of the traditional allocation of puppetry to the Children’s
section of the 200-page Fringe brochure.
 But
how best to describe the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? Here’s
a moment to relish: it is 10.30 in the morning and we are in
the heart of the Underbelly, an ancient grey-stone building
with a seemingly endless number of performance spaces tucked
away in its labyrinth of stairs, corridors and caves. One such
nook, the Jelly Belly bar, is full of folks queuing to see their
first show of the day – a sell-out adult puppetry cabaret
piece, set in a bar, which takes its inspiration from the writings
of boozy late-Beat poet Charles Bukowski. In Low Life we meet
a motley crew of puppet characters – including a Kevin
Spacey look-alike who needs just one more drink, a gold-lame
clad diva who’s seen it all, and a Chinese cleaner with
a penchant for literary criticism. The puppets are beautifully
crafted and the sketches delivered very much in the post-Burkett
style of intimate interaction between animator and puppet. The
master-slave relationship between puppets and humans is played
to the max – the puppets croon, confess, cajole, but ultimately
they are at the mercy of their operators. The audience are delighted
with what they see, and the puppeteers from UK company
Blind Summit are treated to rounds of rapturous applause.
And here’s another moment: an evening show at another
multi-spaced venue, the Gilded Balloon, presented by Montreal
company Soma International, who have featured numerous times
previously in Animations. Their Cabaret Decadanse is also a
puppet show for adults - in essence, it's a series of lip-synched
songs and dances superbly enacted by the puppeteers Serge Deslauriers
and Enock Turcotte, who animate their cast of puppet characters
with a sensual and flowing skill that blurs the boundaries between
flesh, bone, fabric and wood. The company's collective experiences
- in puppetry of all sorts, dance and fashion design - has led
to the creation of a show that utilizes all these skills to
maximum effect.
The Fringe is usually seen as the barometer of the UK theatre
scene and the fact that both these shows were such a huge success
is a wonderful indicator that ‘grown-up puppetry’
- puppetry made by and for adults as Soma like to put it - has
finally arrived on the UK stage as a force to be reckoned with.
Both shows were rewarded with sell-out audiences, but also gained
the critical approval and status of being shortlisted for a
Total Theatre Award. These Awards, first presented in 1997 and
now a well-established event at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
honour the best in physical and visual theatre and performance
as presented at the Fringe. The Judges Advisory Panel includes
many leading lights from the sector, including festival directors
such as Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan from the London International
Mime Festival, producers such as Chenine Bhathena and Louise
Blackwell, venue managers such as Martin Sutherland and critics
from both the specialist arts press and national newspapers,
including Donald Hutera of The Times and Dance Theatre Journal,
and Mary Brennan from Scotland’s national paper, The Herald.
It is useful to look at how puppetry fared in the Total Theatre
Awards 2005 after a breakthrough in the 2002 Awards when Shona
Reppe’s puppet-theatre show Cinderella was a winner. Giving
that particular Award, judging panel member Maggie Kinloch (formerly
of Central School of Speech and Drama and a long-time puppetry
advocate) spoke of the rise of puppetry as an artform, respected
as a crucial and integral part of the visual theatre sector,
which Total Theatre represents and supports. A higher profile
within the Total Theatre Awards, like other ‘litmus paper’
tests such as inclusion in the London International Mime Festival,
is a sign both of the emergence of puppet-theatre into the more
general physical and visual performance sector, and the growing
integration of puppetry and animation within devised, physical
and visual theatre practice.
One characteristic of the 2005 Awards was the very large number
of nominated shows proudly advertising puppetry as a vital component
of the production. Apart from the above-mentioned two companies
- Blind Summit and Soma, which made it through from the hundreds
of entries to the shortlist of twelve shows - numerous other
puppet-theatre productions and companies using puppetry were
considered.
In the early stages of the process, shows are seen and assessed
by a team of reviewers and advisors. Nottingham New Theatre’s
The Shoe Story (presented at Sweet on the Grassmarket and aimed
at a family audience) was one such show, which created their
theatre using a mix of puppetry, mime, storytelling and original
music. Marigold Hughes had this to say in her assessment: ‘Adorned
with sparse simplicity, the opening moments in this intimate
studio space are gentle and magical. Lulled into the warmth
of the story through the narrator’s song in the softness
of twilight blue, and after “the last television has been
switched off”, it is the time for the real stories to
come out…these stories, all founded in the feet and the
shoes which adorn them, are tied together well by their metaphorical
shoelaces and are told by skilled performers who present a bunch
of dynamic characters in energised performances’. It was
not, however, seen to be quite strong enough to make it through
to the next round – unlike stable-mates Sorcerer Baklava,
appearing at the same venue with A World in your Shell-like,
which describes itself as ‘a multi-media puppetry show.’
This production first saw the light of day when presented at
the Puppet Centre Trust as a work-in-progress (reviewed in Animations
14 by Cath Connolly), and its ingenious use of scale, amusing
portrayal of the elements using everyday objects and integration
of original composed soundscape with the animated action led
to the show moving on to the second stage of the Awards, the
Longlist of around 25 shows – quite an achievement for
a new show from a young company.
Another longlisted show was 7K’s Shadows. This did not
purport to be a puppetry piece, but in its exploration of the
gothic that owes more than a little to the classic film, The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, we witness human performers who take
on the characteristics of puppets, shadows that seemingly take
on a life of their own, grotesque animated mask-heads and a
life-size music-box set with hatches and moving parts. 7K are
one of a number of contemporary companies who, like Akhe (reviewed
in this e-dition of Animations), construct a theatre of engineering
and robust buffoonery that challenges divisions between physical
performance, puppetry, mask, animated set and automata.
Although a puppet-theatre company per se was not among the final
list of six Total Theatre Award winners, puppetry and object
animation was nevertheless well-represented in this list, with
UK puppeteer Mervyn Millar (2003/4 PCT bursary award recipient)
as one of co-devisors in the creative team that put together
Kazuko Hohki’s winning show Evidence for the Existence
of Borrowers, awarded for its creation of a delightful
alternative world filled with unusual objects and artefacts,
quirky songs and tall tales about small people. A highlight
of the show is a concert played on Binstruments – Borrower
mini instruments made from spoons, pins, rubber bands and teeny
metal tins.
In fact, most of the Award-winners incorporated some form of
puppetry or object animation into their production. These included
Gecko’s The Race, an exuberant and energetic piece of
physical theatre, which used deft little object-animation touches
to good effect, an example being a telephone cradled as a baby,
the cord snipped to represent a cut umbilical.
Winning show The Devil’s Larder is a promenade piece inspired
by Jim Crace’s book of modern fairy tales of the same
name. Crace’s magic-realist text is used by Scottish company
Grid Iron as a starting point for a series of extraordinary
set-pieces, including the story of the search for ever more
exotic meat in a secret diner’s club in foreign lands,
which is enacted on a miniature set with tiny animated objects.
It is directed by Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison, a graduate
of the Central School of Speech and Drama MA in Advanced Theatre
Practice, which includes puppetry as an integral skill for theatre-makers.
Another winner was Andrew Dawson. His Absence and Presence
is a moving and memorable one-person show with quiet gravitas,
an autobiographical piece that investigates the artist’s
relationship with his dead father, using mime, text and object
animation to beautiful effect. In the closing section, a wire
figure that has sat inanimate on a chair at the back of the
stage is lifted and raised above Dawson’s head. In a masterful
moment of animation, the figure seems to become both skeletal
remains and the flying spirit of the father. It’s a beautiful
show that will be touring again in 2006, including an appearance
at the London International Mime Festival in January.
What was evident from all these artists and companies, the winners
the shortlisted and the longlisted of the Total Theatre Awards
at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005, was that not only is puppet-theatre
on the up as a vital part of the physical and visual performance
sector, but also that puppeteers can and do play a valuable
role in the creation of multi-disciplined devised performance;
and that theatre-makers of all sorts who feel empowered to include
object animation in their productions are opening themselves
to an enriching aspect of visual theatre.
Dorothy Max Prior is editor of Animations
Online and also of Total Theatre Magazine, which is hosted by
Total Theatre Network. See www.totaltheatre.org.uk
Some of the commentary on the Total Theatre Awards first
appeared in Total Theatre Magazine Vol 17-4.
An edited version of this feature is simultaneously published
in British UNIMA’s Puppet Notebook: see www.unima.org.uk
or email puppetnotebook@unima.org.uk
for subscription details. |
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