Antidote Art #2
Puppetry As Antidote
(Part Two)
Once we have dispensed with the idea that puppets are a quaint cute cheap children’s theatre we are still faced with a central obstacle to an appreciation of the value of puppetry as an important art form. We might call this the ‘so-what-factor’. After all is said and done we live in an age where we can find visual electronic images moving on a vast array of screens. We can walk through Times Square assaulted by televisions peering down on us from the sides of skyscrapers. We can pry into the most private acts of another human being through the computer. We can watch live televisuals from New Guinea or Antarctica. We can inhabit filmic science fiction worlds. The average person has nearly immediate access to the most fantastic phantasmagoria ever imagined. What is the point of watching a little puppet show?
I have asked several puppeteers the same question. And the answer I found was surprising: for even though we are surrounded by screens there is something that happens in reality that no cluster of digital images can touch. In 2005 I was on a journey through Europe looking for puppet theatres, following my curiosity about the nature of these moving objects. I stopped in at the Theatre Guignol Anatole to watch Guignol, that rascally cousin of the nefarious Punch, entertain a group of French kids outdoors at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. What was fascinating to me in this largely traditional performance was how the French children were completely caught up in the reality of the puppet. At one point a Crocodile swallows the Gendarme by the side of a river. A little later Guignol shows up at the same spot and then the kids erupt trying to warn Guignol to go somewhere else. Guignol responds that there is no danger that he can see. He turns away for a moment and a brief glimpse of the Crocodile’s snout sends the French youngsters into a fit trying to get Guignol to notice the reptilian beast.
Kids reacting to Guignol's indifference to the Crocodile (2005) at Le Théâtre Guignol Anatole in Paris
I later asked Pascal Pruvost, the Guignoliste, about that reaction. He told me that it was traditional in Parisian Guignol performances to get the kids involved. I then asked him if he thought children had changed as a result of all of the televisions, video games, films, DVDs etc? Absolutely, he replied He told me that some kids come having only experienced visual media. They are used to controlling the images in some manner. But Guignol was really interactive. The puppet was not under their control. They couldn’t press stop or repeat. At times he even used the puppet to exercise control over troublesome children. Did the change in their behavior hurt the show? Oh no! Because it was even more surprising for them to see the tangible reality of this very tactile character.
I found the same effect among high school aged students in Poland at the Teatr Groteska in Krakow. I was sitting amidst an afternoon matinee of teens on a field trip. The theatre was fairly full. They were talkative and noisy, as one would expect, until the lights were turned off. Then we all watched a rather dark intellectual folk tale called Balladyna. There were actors who had puppets on the ends of the hands. The puppets were designed from some sort of burlap type of material. Sometimes it was the actor speaking, sometimes the puppet. The Polish students were engrossed completely. Now these students had certainly been exposed to the plethora of screenal creations that we all are. But the puppets caught them with a dark intellectual work that they might not otherwise have fully grasped.
From Balladyna as perfromed by Teatr Groteska in Krokow Poland 2005
But then again I’m using children, teenagers and Europeans as my examples…
I had a chance to explore these dynamics on my own in the autumn of 2009 as our Reckoning Motions puppet troupe made a very large two month arc through North America from Whitehorse in Canada to the East Coast down to Florida across through Texas to Los Angeles and finally back up through the Pacific Northwest. We took a show called The Great Ziggurat, which was a reflection on power and towers. The show was certainly not designed to be easily digested in one sitting. My confederate, Carsten Hyatt, and I decided not only to not dumb things down but in fact to go against the grain and to make people reach for what we were saying. We purposely stocked the show with dozens of historical references. Many of the puppets were known personages. Carsten presented shadow theatre that focused on the meaning of language. (Think about that for a moment.) We made allusions to folk tales (Rapunzel), films (Vertigo & King Kong) and famous murders (Charles Whitman & the Kennedy assassination). And we used the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as an overarching theme.
President Kennedy, mass murderer Charles Whitman, Scotty and Madeleine from Vertigo - Reckoning Motions 2009
We performed for a wide variety of types. (One of the great things about puppetry is that after it is determined that these aren’t children’s puppets people get a touch confused and then you can play anywhere.) We played in a rock club in New York City. We played in a tiny native village in the Yukon. We played for an anarchist art collective and we played at a fundamentalist Christian high school. We played for professional puppeteers and for people who had never ever seen a puppet show before. We played in theatres, gymnasiums, backyards and front rooms. And in one truly bizarre occurrence we played in a small drive-through wannabe Starbucks in South Carolina mini-mall. (Thanks to Danielle Howle for that one!) And here is the point of breaking down the odd demographics of our trip: It really didn’t matter the place, the age, the beliefs or lack of them. The majority of people got it. They enjoyed being wrestled with creatively, even intellectually. They took the bait and afterwards I could see people discussing what it all meant. In Bellingham a guy came up to us grateful for the breath of non-digital fresh air. One girl in North Carolina came up to us and said “That sort of disturbed me, because I could tell that you were trying to get us to think. But you were telling us how.” To which I responded, “Exactly.”
Our philosophy was this: Before you can get people having real discussions about the issues at stake they have to get out of the irrational mode that our society favors at present. I know that puppets can also be used for the same kinds of spectacular entertainments that surround us at every turn. But why leave them merely as amusements. Puppets can do so much more. And here’s a hint: At this moment, the field is wide open. The reason we could perform anywhere is that few people have seen a puppet show. We could have just told funny stories. But why waste the opportunity? Why not really say something? If we were musicians we would be quarantined to where bands of a certain ilk play. But as puppeteers? No one even knew what hit them. How many other arts are there like that left? (There are others.) In puppetry there is still an element of wonder and mystery. I asked a Bolivian puppet master once if he thought puppetry would survive in our media bloated age. It has to, he replied, people need puppets. But why? I asked. He spoke only one word. “Simplicity.”
There is so much more to say about puppetry… but I’ll leave this as an introduction. Meanwhile go look for an interesting puppet show.
Byrne Power
Haines Alaska
3/9/11
Antidote Art #1
Puppetry As Antidote
(Part One)
I need to say something about puppets.
I need to communicate something here, in this manner, about puppetry and it’s relationship to the world we are moving into. The problem isn’t that I don’t know what to say; the problem is that there is too much to unravel, too many long thoughts, involved histories, autopsies of other cultural manifestations. I’m also not quite sure who the reader of this little missive will be. I have to assume that most of the people who will read this, at this moment in 2011, have little or no interest in the subject. Then there are those who may find this introductory little essay who might have a professional interest. Yet I believe what I have to say can span the gap.
Jan Svankmajer's Punch and Judy (or The Coffin Factory)
For most, certainly most Americans at any rate, the mention of puppets will immediately start hitting exactly the buttons I do not wish to hit. So let me just get this off my chest now and we’ll take it as given. Muppets are indeed puppets, but the world of puppetry is so much wider, so much deeper that I have to state from the beginning “Don’t think of puppets merely as Muppets.” Secondly, in a similar vein, puppets are not a children’s medium. (Any serious puppeteer actually reading this at the moment will wonder why I’m restating the obvious.) I would say that, without a doubt, for the vast majority of folks, puppets are for kids. To which all I can say to that is keep reading. Thirdly, puppets aren’t simply a quaint folk art, though they have a fascinating history. And finally for my lefty friends, puppets aren’t just for protest marches: cardboard turtles and political effigies. Puppets aren’t even exclusively humorous and ironic.
What then am I talking about? Punch? Absolutely. Guignol? Certainment. Shakespeare performed with marionettes? Often. Faust? Don Juan? Mozart operas? Nativity plays? Ballets? Modernist theatre? Puppet films? Seven times yes! Performed in little booths? In traditional theatres? In parades? In barns? In fields? In water? In the dark? Seven more times yes! They can make you laugh, but you knew that. They can make you cry. They can even frighten you. And they certainly can even make you think. They can defy truth, religion and God, because they can also speak of truth,
religion, God. Unlike actors they are perfect as abstractions, as personifications, as pageantry, as philosophy. But like actors they can be imbued with movement, with character and with a voice. Puppetry is an art that is only just now coming into it’s own.
The Skeleton has a special place in traditional Czech puppetry
And puppets can even enter into the historical realm. Consider puppetry in the Czech Republic: Folk and church puppets certainly existed there during the Middle Ages, but the proof is scanty. Serious puppetry was introduced sometime in the Baroque Era through English, Italian and German itinerant companies. Marionettes performed versions of Marlowe, Shakespeare and even Molière. The Czechs took to marionettes with great enthusiasm and soon began to produce their own little puppet plays as well as this classic repertoire. Marlowe’s Faust became a traditional favorite, likewise Don Juan (Don Giovanni) and biblical themes. And after the Battle of White Mountain in 1622, which resulted in Germanic language domination by the Austrians, puppetry became one of the few cultural venues allowed to smuggle in the forbidden Czech language. One of the characters inherited by Czechs was the Pulcinella, Punch, Kasperl puppet who was christened Kaspárek in the Czech lands. This loudmouthed creature was like an unhinged court jester who was by the late 19th Century, saying some awfully pungent things about the Czechs Austro-Hungarian overlords. One puppeteer claimed that the remarks were not his fault, but the puppet’s. But this was only the beginning.
Kasparek, the Czech version of Punch
Actually, by the mid- 19th Century, puppetry was beginning to take a familiar road in the Czech Republic, the road that leads to the quarantine of childhood. Yet by the turn of the 20th Century Czech puppetry was on a new track that would intensify itself through the darker days to come. Theatrical artists were beginning to discover the lowly hand puppet and shadow puppets had arrived with more visibility. And with a revival of the Czech language came a printing of several classic puppet plays. The first congress of Czech puppeteers was held in 1903, which would eventually pave the way for the formation of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette), the international puppetry organization. In 1912 the world’s oldest puppetry magazine, Cesky Loutkár, (The Czech Puppeteer) entered circulation. It continues today as Loutkár. Also in the early part of the 20th Century, puppets began to be discovered by modernists of various stripes. This just scratches the surface though. The real value of puppetry in the old Czechoslovakia can be seen by what happened during the Second World War.
The Nazis occupied not only the Sudetenland but also all of the Czech lands during the war. The Czechs did not welcome the beast however. And one thing they had working for them was the impenetrability of the Czech language. Also the serious Germans did not at first fully grasp the place of puppetry in helping to preserve the language in the face of a previous Germanic Austrian suppression. They hadn’t done any basic research on how many puppet theatres there were in this small country in, say, 1936: 1,357. Nor how many puppet plays had been performed that year: 10,000. Nor did they grasp the significance of the rebellious Kaspárek in thumbing his Bohemian nose at the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Under the watchful eye of the Nazis Czech puppeteers found surreptitious ways to perform suspect material. The SS began the elimination of some puppet theatres in 1938.. By March of 1939 it was clear to the Nazis that puppet performances were clearly a danger to the propaganda of the Third Reich. They shut down Loutkár and the Sokol puppet institution. Underground anti-fascist puppet plays were held even when all Czech cultural manifestations were for a time halted. Meanwhile the plays of Josef Skupa, the greatest living Czech puppeteer, the inventor of the beloved Spejbel and Hurvinek, were presenting challenging allegorical works for their adult programs. These plays did not catch the attention of the SS overlords immediately. In fact they tried to use Skupa’s fame as a propaganda tool by claiming, falsely, that Skupa had performed for the Nazis in Germany.
But as the war entered it’s feverish final phase Czech puppeteers were snagged in the nets of the Germans. Many were tortured, imprisoned, tossed into concentration camps. Professor Skupa was thrown into a jail in Dresden near the end of the war. And in a supreme irony, he was able to escape when the murderous Allied bombs destroyed not only the city but the prison that held him. All in all, however, over one hundred Czech puppeteers were martyred at the hands of the Nazis. And yet in one of the most fascinating chapters of this strange story Czech prisoners at the Terezín and Ravenbrück concentration camps made miraculous puppet shows out of rags to entertain their fellow doomed inmates.
Jiri Trnka's The Hand - The puppet film that exposed the lie of communism
This, obviously, is something quite different from the cute childish figures that linger in the common perception of what a puppet can do. And just as plainly, these puppeteers did not conform to the happy-go-lucky stereotypes that again form the popular imagination of what puppetry can be. These were not simply puppeteers as counter-propagandists. This was puppetry as a courageous truth telling art.
Buchty a Loutky (Cakes and Puppets) Urbild Remix 2005
And we haven’t even gotten to communist era yet! Great figures like the puppet filmmakers Jiri Trnka and Jan Svankmajer both ran afoul of the censors with their allegorical works. And puppeteers learned to speak with subtlety so that scripts might be approved, while the imagery might speak a different message entirely. And even after the Velvet Revolution puppetry still speaks in questioning tones about the value of all of that materialistic cash being injected into the Czech economy at the expense of the soul of the nation.
In short, in the Czech lands we have a clear case where puppetry was never simply reduced to a kiddie cute definition. But what is the value of even this sort of puppetry in this 21st Century hi-tech virtually networked media saturated world?
(See part two.)
Byrne Power
Haines Alaska
3/2/11
Most of the Czech puppet history is found in Dr. Jan Malik’s book Puppetry in Czechoslovakia (Orbis, Prague 1948) and The World of Puppets Yesterday and Today (Museum of Puppetry, Chrudim, Czech Republic 1997) – both highly recommended.
Non-Random Thoughts