Beccy
Smith reflects
on the place of marionetting and other
traditional forms of puppetry within contemporary theatre
In 2006 the Little Angel Theatre was awarded a substantial Heritage
Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of more than £180,000 for the work
of preserving the heritage of the marionette, and specifically the
seminal work of John Wright, through and prior to his establishment
of that theatre. The relationship of HLF support to artistic projects
has always been somewhat problematic in concept – included
in the portfolio of activity for this grant was to be a new production,
albeit with existing puppets from the theatre’s archive. Preserving
the old for the health of the new can seem antithetical to the project
of reinvention central to artistic imagination, but for puppetry
this tension seems especially foregrounded. In the course of the
nine-month span of LAT’s John Wright Centenary Heritage activities,
some of the key puppetry productions visiting London seemed to highlight
the potential dichotomy between a form where mastery of a historic
craft is a predicate of strong performance, yet whose presence in
England increasingly signals an experimental approach to performance-making
and theatrical form. What can an exploration of this dichotomy show
us about the identity of puppetry in the landscape of British art-making
today?
The ambition inspiring the Little Angel’s Heritage project
was the preservation of a craft (marionetting) which, like many
forms of puppetry in the UK, has suffered historic underinvestment
with few professional training opportunities in recent decades,
but the richness of whose form was uniquely accessible for this
project via the corpus of work retained by the theatre. The inter-relation
between craft-based mastery and contemporary practice is innate
to much work with puppetry. Advancement in global communication
and the interchange of ideas has made the diversity of puppetry’s
traditions more readily available as currency for the contemporary
practitioner. In recent years the resurgence of bunraku in the work
of companies such as Blind Summit and the use of sophisticated shadow
techniques in the work of, for example, Steve Tiplady or Luis Boy,
highlights the centrality of long established crafts to the creative
re-appropriation of puppetry within more mainstream theatre. Yet
the specialisation required to master the complex art of the marionette
– intimately bound up with its rigorous staging demands as
well as complex making requirements – has rendered it particularly
vulnerable to a dearth of training and development opportunities
in this country and to limited application of the form in the making
of new work, which Little Angel Theatre’s project sought to
address.
Most formal puppetry courses, including the London School of Puppetry,
offer marionetting as one of a spectrum of training options and
supportive drama schools such as the Central School of Speech and
Drama are limited in the facilities and specifics to train in this
craft. In England, only Little Angel Theatre and the Puppet Barge
offer the possibility of working, and learning, on a permanent marionette
bridge (prior to this project the two annual apprenticeships offered
by the Puppet Barge had been the only informal, specifically marionette,
training available in London).
Despite its innate theatricality, puppetry has always retained a
Janus-like quality to its character, straddling practices of both
performance and design/making, and this duality between materiality
and ephemera is intertwined with the question of its status between
heritage and the avant-garde.
Forming a background
to the Heritage oriented approach of the LAT’s project were
seasons hosting British premieres of the work of several artists
whose use of puppetry seemed to embody an entirely different attitude.
The acclaim of artists such as Ronnie Burkett and Philippe Genty
has often focused on what is experienced as a radical reinvention
of the possibilities of the form. Genty’s innovation has been
seen as a visual one – pacing the liminal boundaries between
theatre and magic through dreamlike images whose presence never
quite holds – hovering always on the edge of transformation,
exploding audience imagination through the consistent re-imagination
of objects, bodies and staged space. In La Fin de Terres (Land’s
End), his first new show for several years (presented at London
International Mime Festival 07) the prevailing audience experience
of puppetry lay in this sense of their potential for interchange
and flux – staged sleight-of-hand which transformed human
bodies into animal bodies, figures into objects. Puppets and objects
prickled with theatrical energy. The filmic aesthetic of his stagecraft,
in both its illusory focus and striking use of large-scale two-dimensional
images, helped to invest it with a contemporary air. Where traditional
forms were used, such as in a dance sequence between two enormous
bunrkau lovers/opponents, they were appropriated into assertively
modern contexts, underscored by recognisably current rock music
(Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl?) and playing out an aggressively
postmodern sexual politics.
Ronnie Burkett, whose recent UK tour was co-commissioned by the
Barbican and QueerUpNorth (amongst other international partners),
has made his name through a dramaturgical reinvention of the possibilities
for marionette theatre. When in 1994 Tinka’s New Dress exploded
onto the Canadian, and international, circuit it was with a mixture
of surprise and glee that reviewers and audiences (re)discovered
that marionettes had the capacity to embody and express adult human
themes and emotions. Over the past twelve years his work has vigorously
reset the agenda for marionette theatre, exploring, amongst other
issues, racism and resistance, AIDs, identity, and mental health
through a humane, often melodramatic lens of death, sexuality and
coruscating wit. Part of what has made his work so critically surprising
is his choice of form, the aesthetics of the marionette –
his primary medium – being so innately related to theatrical
grace and yes, historicism.
The transformative emphasis of both artists – in visual aesthetic
and form – seems representative of a broader approach to contemporary
art-making which values consistent revolution and change as its
primary engine. Yet to separate a ‘heritage’ approach
from an experimental one in puppet theatre is in many respects a
false distinction. Burkett’s background is urbane here –
undertaking early informal mentorship with several of the most established
of North American puppeteers in his teens and finally training as
an apprentice under Bill Baird (editor’s note: having seen
and been impressed by his Lonely Goatherd scene in The Sound of
Music!) with Baird’s puppetry troupe in New York. It was Baird
who emphasised to the young artist the importance of thorough training
in every aspect of his craft – from fine art and the plastic
arts to voice and actor training – an approach which has been
seminal to the evolution of his actorly approach to writing and
performing his work and his rigorous integration of design, so characterful
in the development of Burkett’s overall aesthetic. When Burkett
later came to start creating his own work from scratch, at a time
when ‘muppetry’ was de rigeur on the American stage
and screen, it was exactly this background that allowed him to make
the choice to innovate through redefining an established, even archaic,
form. In his most recent work, Ten Days on Earth, Burkett returns
to the even greater formality of long string marionetting –
his reason? to situate his characters in isolation on the stage
as part of his exploration of the idea of loneliness. A rigorous
approach to traditional form here has afforded a sound dramaturgical
decision underpinning the work. Burkett’s unique contribution
to puppet theatre may be seen as his vision to look forward by drawing
strongly from the tradition of the past, and his sensitivity to
the space within what to many seemed an ossified form, which he
was able to inhabit and resonate with his own voice.
The scope of the John Wright Centenary Heritage project has been
to embrace both thorough training in every basic aspect of the marionettist’s
craft – from construction and carving to the integration of
voice and movement – alongside the development of individual
artist’s vision – through devising, expressive design
and performance. Over the past six months, training, which has been
open to puppeteers from across the country but which has particularly
evolved a programme for an intensive apprenticeship of two artists,
has been shaped around workshops exploring fundamental principles
as well as masterclasses inhabiting the diverse visions of contemporary
practitioners. The project has also made provision for an all-new
schools production, Give Us a Hand!, on which the apprentices have
worked from R & D to realisation and its eight-venue London
tour as well as an adult performance lecture exploring through demonstration
The Art of the Marionette.
Always the underpinning ethos has been that a thorough exploration
of one vision of an established art – the specific aesthetic
and approach of John and Lyndie Wright at the Little Angel Theatre
– provides a launch pad for the evolution of the original
artist in his/her own right. Both looking back and looking forward
are essential to the puppetry artist’s growth.
In one of the most memorable sequences from his corpus, in the short
film Pierrot (1980), Genty shows us the marionette’s hunger
for freedom – from the strings of servitude that bind him
to his master, perhaps too from the strings of tradition that link
him to his past. For the marionette form, many of the most sophisticated
practices and structures are evolved from their Western heyday in
popular terms, on the naturalistic Victorian stage, a tradition
whose principles of realistic illusion and materiality now seem
far removed from the priorities of modern performance. As the frustration
between marionette and puppeteer grows, in one almighty tug the
figure rips the strings from his operator’s hands. Both marionette
and puppeteer collapse for a moment – logically of course,
the performance itself has been killed. The marionettist disappears
and we are left to ponder on the face-down folly of an artform trying
to rip itself from its own form, its own history. Yet the sequence
is not over. Slowly, inexplicably yet with a logic of its own, the
figure begins to move, hauling itself to its feet, with a look of
joyful complicity to the audience, and slowly limps from view. At
this moment the puppet may be seen to exceed its form and its past.
Yet with the marionette control as its crutch, and the not un-Victorian
priorities of Genty’s craft and dramaturgy at the creative
heart of the scene, what we really see is puppetry’s, the
marionette’s, uneasy yet co-dependent relationship with craft
and past, a fruitful dependency from which arresting new images
can form.
Compagnie
Philippe Genty’s La Fin de Terres is reviewed by Eleanor Margolies
in Animations
Online 19.
Further reflection on Genty, in the context of an article called
Dancing Puppetry by Janet Lee, can be found in Animated
Encounters the new print publication from the Puppet Centre
Trust which is the first volume in the new series, Animations in
Print. Contact...
to order a copy at the special introductory price of £15.
More
on The Little Angel Theatre Heritage project:
Between January and July 2007 workshops have been run by, in order
of delivery: Peter O’Rourke, Jonathan Broughton, Chris Leith,
Ronnie LeDrew, Stephen Mottram, Stefan Fichert, Sue Buckmaster,
Gren Middleton, Joy Hayens and John Roberts. The programme is now
closed. The Art of the Marionette is touring to 20 London venues
from April – October 2007. See: www.littleangeltheatre.com
IMAGES:
Top left Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes 10 Days on Earth
Top right: Philippe Genty Fin des Terres
Centre: Philippe Genty Fin des Terres
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