ANIMATING THE ANIMATORS MASTERCLASSES

MIRROR GAMES
Supplementary Paper to Masterclass with Teatro Marionetas do Porto, organised by the Puppet Centre Trust, Visions, October 27th 2004.

My interest in puppets started with a research investigation into Portugese popular theatre carried out as part of my job at the Portugese Institute of Youth during the 80’s. As one consequence I became aware of the Dom Roberto Theatre, the traditional Portugese puppet theatre, descended from the lineage of the Italian Polinchelle, which would originate many theatre forms all over Europe.

I met at that time the last descendant of a whole generation of itinerant puppeteers who generously over a long period of time taught me his art with the passion of a master teaching his way of life to a disciple. At that time the Dom Roberto Theatre company was a wonderful, three-hundred year old tradition about to be lost in the labyrinths of time, suffocated by the advent of new forms of entertainment, media and technology. That happened twenty-five years ago. After thousands of Roberto shows I keep thinking of the mysteries of ancient wisdom and the way it influenced my practice.

Sometimes it seems to me that I’m the only one able to understand the deep and intrinsic relationships between old wood and rag puppets moving inside a tent in a square surrounded by people and my contemporary theatrical practice which always involves lots of technological paraphernalia. Curiously – or maybe not – having started with the traditional, I’ve since become interested in the contemporaneity of puppetry and become very enthusiastic about the immense possibilities of a theatre form that is not naturalistic in its nature, essentially imagistic and formalistic. A form which demonstrates, more than any other traditional form, the capacity to incorporate with powerful efficacy the new scenic language, new visual models, new sensibilities of the contemporary world.

For the last ten years or so, my theatrical practice has become linked to various personal obsessions. I am always looking for alternative forms of interpretation for the performer as opposed to the convention of the naturalistic scene. This implies, in my opinion, a formal investigation into the theatrical language, not in an attempt to create ‘beautiful images’ but, essentially, the possibility of extracting emotional content from the body as an image and metaphor. In this sense the puppets have an extraordinary role as ‘mechanical’ bodies with relationships of energy and geometry to the ‘functional’ body of the actor.

Obviously this implies the presence and visibility of the puppeteer/performer to the audience in spite of my belief in graduating this presence. The dialectic established between the present and visible actor and the puppet is extremely prolific and rich. I remember reflecting profoundly about this question when I saw Bunraku for the first time. This was a kind of theatre very close to ballet and music in the sense that it allowed the register of all movement made as part of the show and their relationships with time and with the world. This effect is very much what I hope most of the time to create with my work.

One of the aspects that interests me the most in this very intimate relationship between actor and puppet at both a movement and vocal level is the question of the character, how it relates to the actor and the puppet as a mediator to that other relationship essential to the theatrical art, that with the audience. We can say that the actor is both inside and outside of character, both representing and at the same time assisting the representation of it. He/she is the puppet’s double which, in its turn is the double of the character, who by an evocative essence of reality, is a double of somebody or something, in an endless procession of images until the abyss. Here resides the great and fascinating complexity of puppetry, maybe even the perfect theatrical situation, in the sense that reading representation can never be linear and the audience is drawn to a vortex of mirrors, forced to disentangle the invisible threads that reveal themselves during the scene with their understanding, imagination, sensibility, experience and intelligence.

Something else which I find fascinating about puppetry or the representational act as such is the question of the ‘mechanics of the body’. I have been reflecting a great deal in my more recent creations about the new urban sensibility, about how our emotions endure and survive in the mechanical chaos of urban life. Do we love and suffer in the same way that our grandparents did? What I am interested in exploring in this evocation of postmodernism is the question of highlighting on stage the extreme and progressive mechanisation of our bodies using the actor’s bodies as metaphor whilst on the other hand, taking to the limits the possibilities of the humanisation of the ‘mechanical’ body of the puppets. The tension resulting from this confrontation is sometimes enormous and of great beauty. It is the tension between life and death. And this could take us to what I consider to be the essence of the theatrical act: the real possibility of evoking the world that we live in, the possibility that what happens on stage is a resonance of reality, our worries, our perplexity facing life, ephemeral like the existence of a puppet of the stage.

Joao Paulo Seara Cardoso

Article written for the magazine, UBU
June 2004.