Reviews from the
London International Mime Festival January 2009
> Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes – The Armature of the Absolute
> Faulty Optic – Fish Clay Perspex
> Figuren Theater Tubingen – Salto.Lamento
> Akhe Engineering Theatre – Faust 2360 Words
> Aurelien Bory – Les Sept Planches
Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes
The Armature of the Absolute
Barbican Pit
13 January 2009
Reviewed by Matthew Isaac Cohen
 Some writers’ lives are as fantastic as their artistic creations – no more so than the French historical avant-garde. Think of Gerard Nerval, who walked his pet lobster through Paris streets “because it does not bark and it knows the secrets of the sea” or Antonin Artaud and his occult pilgrimages to Mexico and Ireland. Or, case in point, Alfred Jarry, playwright, puppeteer, poet and founder of the mock science of ‘pataphysics’.
Jarry’s mixed-up life, poetry, theatre, dreams and obsessions are the subject of the second major production of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, an international company directed by the ferociously talented American puppeteer Patrick Sims, founded in Spain in 2004 and now based in Marseille. Using puppets and masks, a ghostly electronic soundscape of clicking bones and old phonographic recordings and a constantly shifting array of machines and screens, the company has created a deeply unsettling meditation on a disturbed and disturbing artist.
“Clichés,” Jarry tells us, “are the armature of the absolute.” The production gathers the banal, working with recycled materials including animal parts, redeployed machines, fairground and monster movie imagery, in order to force us into a whole new consideration of the relation between personal fantasy and common culture. The play proceeds through a continuous sequence of images, mostly set behind a screen in a proscenium frame, with reappearing motifs and figures that shrink and expand, wither and transform with perverse irregularity. A giant pair of horse legs decked in a pink tutu produces a huge pile of excrement, which becomes the stage for a ballet by a child-like horse creature. A deep-sea creature lights a candle which is instantly consumed in a burst of light. Jarry appears as a floating head with rapidly blinking eyes that is joined to a clownish body and receives the sacrament – a pen – from a skull-faced priest. Jarry chases a winged wine bottle and fights with a giant version of himself. Ubu, Jarry’s most famous creation, appears as a rotund rodded puppet on roller skates, crushing the little Jarry. Ubu philosophises on the toilet and births a small crocodile-like creature. A baboon toys with the remains of Jarry’s head and licks a bloody skeleton as a mass of nerves quivers in a corner. Image accretes over image in a continual play of scale on the border between life and death, up until the beautifully realized epilogue set after Jarry’s death in a fun fair.
Spectators emerge drained and shocked as survivors of this cruel symbolic world. Idle chit-chat (“how’d you like the play?”) would be sacrilege. The play is intensely ironic and playful, but never humorous. There are the pleasures of recognition (“ah, those are the three Palatins from the Ubu cycle,” “oh, a sausage-making machine à la Punch,” “isn’t that A Bicycle Built for Two?” “oh, that hand puppet is Felix Hébert, the prototype of Ubu”) but no relief.
This is must-see puppet theatre, and as convincing a case for the vitality of the artform as any work now being produced.
Faulty Optic
Fish Clay Perspex
Shunt Vaults
17 January 2009
Reviewed by Darren East
 Fish Clay Perspex sees Faulty Optic go back to basics, with work – as the title suggests – based on concrete, tangible materials. There is none of their characteristic film work or live-feed camera here. There are also innovations; unusually for Faulty, the puppeteers, Liz Walker and Sarah Wright, are unhooded and at times use voice.
Subtitled Incidences of a Quirky Kind, the show is a triptych of strange character-led pieces, each seemingly in their own surreal world, linked by a recurring group of pin-footed dancing puppets who are washed up by a cotton-wool tide, isolated on their own tabletop square.
In the first Fish section, a typical Faulty Optic puppet outsider is painstakingly collecting stones on a beach when a fish mysteriously attaches to his head. He has a running, muttered monologue as he is eventually driven to nailing his feet to the floor in order to gain purchase to attempt to wrench the fish off, flailing about trying to make sense or gain purchase on his upturned world.
In the Clay story, a pair of gleeful puppet sculptors – or are they two aspects of the same character? – unleash a joyous mess of creativity, building a large clay head, and then descend into a backstabbing frenzy of violent destruction that is both disturbing – an insight into the creative process? – and very funny.
The final piece finds two wriggly little puppets trapped behind a sheet of Perspex, where they explore and squabble, constantly reinventing and rediscovering the changing rules of their world, where drawn lines become solid enough to cling to, and scribbled beasts can pursue three-dimensional puppets.
If it wasn’t always clear what linked the three stories – and the third (Perspex) in particular felt at times like a very clever exercise that was still in need of its meaning or context – the show was still very satisfying.
A particular technical strength that runs through all Faulty Optic’s work is the sense of struggle of their puppets – nothing is airy or abstract in the moment, every action is worked, nuanced, effortful, whether it’s choosing a pebble to put in a bucket, or slapping clay to a board. This is a large part of how their bizarre worlds draw us in, becoming temporarily normalised and intelligible – because we understand the very human strains of the characters caught up in them.
Figuren Theater Tubingen with live music by rat `n ´X
Salto.Lamento
ICA
13 January 2009
Reviewed by Beccy Smith
 Salto.Lamento is a sequence of comic and surreal images inspired by ideas around the danse macabre and a certain medieval iconography; a brilliantly executed music and puppetry collaboration. This is a world where men can lay solid gold eggs; a world of alchemy and religion, where the lower regions are never far from view. The figures are ghoulishly inventive – an insect-like hoofed creature, distinctly satanic; a moribund legless (literally) monk whose frolicking joy in response to his music suggests a wandering will o’ the wisp – whilst the piece as a whole is bookended by the graceful veiled, almost bridal, appearance of death herself.
The company’s interest in object work as well as puppetry is clearly in evidence in their handling of their fantastic figures, which makes excellent use of qualities of weight and momentum and their physical affinities with things: figures disappear into boxes, shift, mid-swing from glorious flying character to inert dead weight, and constantly threaten to transform themselves into disparate pieces; or through contortion and amputation into different figures altogether.
This is a collaboration with musical duo rat `n ´X and the character of the collaboration is joyously playful. Every figure merges with its own theme and its sounds seem in holistic dialogue with the character of the movement, and the qualities of the figure itself. Rat `n ´X, whilst principally appearing on sax and double bass, offer a huge musical range of instruments which also aurally animate many of the qualities of the set and figures. Although free from overarching narrative, the strong thematic relationship between the character sequences and the deeply mined physical and musical logic that underpins each sequence creates an immensely satisfying and theatrically exciting piece of visual, movement and puppet performance.
Akhe Engineering Theatre
Faust 2360 Words
ICA
19 January 2009
Reviewed by Darren East
 Faust.2360 Words is one of two pieces acclaimed St Petersburg company Akhe Engineering Theatre brought to the London International Mime Festival this year (the other being their cabaret piece Plug'n'Play).
It opens with a pair of heavy-set men throwing themselves about the stage, thrashing along to the beats of a gnomic, gold-painted, DJ imp as we, the ICA audience, file delicately past them to our seats. Maxim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko eventually take their places as Mephistopheles and Faust respectively, and the rest of the show is played out like a séance in a Heath Robinson nightclub, with Mephistopheles waiting patiently, upstage in the gloom, while Faust tinkers and toils, trapped in a delicate cube.
This Faust’s magic is pleasingly mechanical - everything in his world is tangible. He plays out all his stories alone, with a plethora of miniature and mysterious objects and devices – earth and water, string and smoke, pulleys and pumps. There are spinning tops and books that leak water or burst into fire; alchemical liquids that fume and shimmer; crude shadow puppets that flicker in an instant from alluring to devilish. The explicitly simple but witty creations are teasing and very pleasing; ridiculous, humorous, and frequently very beautiful.
Accompanying this, Andrey Sizintsev plays not only recordings but also a wonderfully live amplified soundboard, which has a handful of springs and scrapers and little toys attached, and makes a series of macabre twangs and tweets, scratches and screeches.
The problem came in harnessing all this to the Faust story – it seemed an unhelpful attempt at giving gravitas to the playfulness, which effectively made the performance shrink and turn more hermetically inward, becoming increasingly cryptic in the attempt to link the visual and sonic effects with the plodding numbered glimpses of narrative that we got. These came on both delightful, low-tech scrolling-paper surtitles, and a more conventional electronic board, although even between them they translated only a fraction of the (presumably 2360) words the actors used.
Overextended, the sounds and visuals threatened to become repetitive, as if needing to find more and more material to fill in the lists and lists of story sections.
The piece is hallucinatory, dreamlike, elusive and playful – not an aesthetic usually connected with the brutal, destructive and profound moral choices that Faust makes. While this may have been intended as a daring attempt to dismantle and reinvent the ancient story, the show felt as if it slipped away between narrative and invention, and left both sides undernourished.
Aurelien Bory
Les Sept Planches
Barbican Theatre
January 2009
Reviewed by Penny Francis
Impossible to translate the title sensibly: ‘The Seven Boards’ doesn’t really do. This wordless piece was about seven geometrical forms – triangles, rectangles, rhomboids – and how they were all finally fitted together to make a perfect square. Did you have as much pleasure as I did when as a child I played with the small coloured shapes which you made into various other shapes and finally had to fit them back into the box they came in? The ‘Sept Planches’ was just like that, except that the shapes were grey or black and huge, but light enough to allow the company to push them around the stage, to up-end them, to slide or walk down their sloping sides and squeeze between the narrowest of gaps. Immaculately dressed in business suits (except for the shirtsleeved whipper-snapper who was probably made of rubber) they were able to climb up the vertical faces and do all manner of amusing and clever things with these great forms, arranging and re-arranging them, until right at the end the forms all triumphantly fitted together to make the perfect square.
If object manipulation is a cousin of puppetry, the show is at home in Animations Online. I found it beautiful: there was true harmony in the combination of the music, lighting, the bodies in space, the shifting shapes, the inventiveness. There was no drama and little story, and to tell the truth it took two visits to the Barbican to make me appreciate it, but I’d see it a third time if I could.
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