The Švankmajer Effect #2
Part Two
The Švankmajer Effect Comes to Life
Pre-Show for the Urbild Remix April 2005 Buchty a Loutky
In 2005 I traveled through Europe tracking down puppet theatres and talking with puppeteers. I spent several weeks in the Czech Republic and in Prague in particular. I was thinking about Švankmajer the whole time, half hoping to run into him. At one point I wandered through the library of the Strahov Monastery on the castle hill. I looked through the shelves and glass displays at objects like a desiccated baby dodo bird when I saw a portrait from hundreds of years ago of a face made of seeds. I knew that Švankmajer had seen this too and found inspiration in its pronounced Mannerism.
I had visited tourist friendly puppet shows on a earlier Prague visit so this time I was determined to find something a little closer to the heart of Czech puppetry and also if possible to the spirit of Švankmajer. Jakub Krofta, a director from DRAK in Hradec Kralove, had recommended I look for Buchty a Loutky (meaning Cakes and Puppets in Czech, a parody of Bread and Puppets) whom he said, along with the Foreman Brothers (both sons of the film director Milos Foreman) were making intriguing innovations on Czech Puppetry.
Buchty a Loutky who regularly perform at Prague’s Švandovo Theatre
I descended into the brick walled basement of the Švandovo Theatre in the Smichov district, a 15 minute walk south of the Charles Bridge. Buchty a Loutky performed an absurdist take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale The Hound of the Baskervilles, retitled Pes Baskervillský. There was no stage as such only crudely constructed wooden boxes and cubby holes. Then I watched many strange things that I had never associated with puppetry before. At one point the puppets request tea. On the side of the ramshackle assemblage a Czech puppeteer pours liquid out of samovar into a teapot. Meanwhile the small Holmes and Watson puppets are given full sized teacups. The puppeteer steps up and pours the ‘tea’ straight down into the cups, liquid splashes out of the cups of course, yet some of the refreshment does indeed remain within the porcelain containers, upon which two suited puppeteers stand off to the sides of the little cage-like wooden puppet stage as the puppets and their life sized human doubles sip gently as the tiny figures do the talking. This doubling effect serves Buchty a Loutky as a sort of signature style. A puppet has a gun. Suddenly a human hand in another small box directly below the main puppet theatre is holding a gun as well. At another point we hear the sounds of train while a tiny HO scale train circles the aimlessly around the wooden boxes. Even the intermission midway through the show was handled in the most unpredictable way imaginable. One member of the troupe, Tomáš, began to read from a boring scientific textbook about swamps as an eco-system. He read this for perhaps ten minutes. The time it took a majority of folks to ken to the fact that this was indeed the break and that a small snack bar had opened up. I, of course, was one of the last.
Before the Urbild Remix show the Buchtys rather funky set. Anyone who has seen the Lilliputian Puppet Sideshow, Geppetto’s Junkyard or Reckoning Motions will spot the connection.
In another performance entitled the Urbild Remix, a variation on one their older shows, a tiny, perhaps seven inch tall, crudely made puppet wanders out into a ‘stage’ about ten inches by fifteen, with a teensy beer bottle in his hands. He sits on a miniature bed drinks a little. And then falls to sleep. The rest of the show is his dream. And takes place in the multiple small boxy stages below him. Then all mayhem breaks out as a mermaid breathes bubbles in a large water filled jar, carnal relations ensue, one character is killed and very red stage blood streams off the already red stained set, enlargement doubles with weapons take place in the space below the dream stage, live acoustic music encircles the audience and an American Indian figure plays a sort of heroic role while a skeletal figure brings a warning. And this state of brilliant theatrical anarchy was as funny as could be even for a non-Czech speaker. Especially when Marek Bečka, the Buchtys de facto leader and founder stood up before the show and recognized a few English speakers. He told us he would explain everything. Then spent several minutes talking to the Czech audience who were sitting on bleachers then turned back to us and said “That was important information.” Then continued on in Czech.
The importance of live music. Vit plays the accordion.
In a discussion with Buchty a Loutky’s Tomáš Procházka, the director of Pes Baskervillský, I asked him about the groups connection with traditional Czech puppetry. He replied “We don’t feel such a strong connection between the puppet theatres and stuff. We are very interested in film and in bringing the film style into puppet theatre.” I was fairly certain I had seen a Švankmajer connection. He confirmed that, “Švankmajer is the only name we can say we all love it.” As I was still about to see the Urbild Remix he added, “You will see in this story the Švankmajer style. It’s made of rubbish.” Among the objects that caught my attention was a vortex shaped chunk of rusty iron that looked like it been unearthed in someones’ back yard. This was definitely not standard theatrical gear. Later after Urbild I observed that, like Švankmajer, they must be pack rats of odd artifacts. Procházka explained, “Our office is full of rubbish. When we find something that looks interesting we just keep it.”
Tomáš Procházka, director of the Buchtys version of Hound of the Baskervilles
This approached struck me as something I’d really never seen before in puppetry. And it was clear that that the Buchtys were using the junk and detritus of the past less in a postmodern spirit than in an almost entropic patchwork mode. Tomáš Procházka said “Now is the moment when (Czech) people need to find a new way to get the rich life of puppetry, to find some new way to do puppets, what is the modern theme for puppets, to say what is the use of puppets at all. And there are only a few people who really want a new direction. Otherwise it is very classical and conservative, it’s still the same from the 50′s to now.” That is to say that they were seeking something beyond the Modernism of the mid to late 20th Century. To me there was an affinity to Punk rock; not the rage, but the D.I.Y. aesthetic. Procházka concurred “It’s nice to say it. Because then we can say we do Punk. We do Punk Puppetry.”
The backstage chaos. This is really D.I.Y. puppetry.
In an age of artificial surfaces, hollow objects, virtual screens on every angle of perception, Buchty a Loutky had taken hints from Jan Švankmajer about the importance of the dense inhabited tactile object, perhaps what Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor called the l’objet pauvre, the poor, ruined, or miserable, object. Švankmajer’s film work and experiments in tactility open up the possibility for a breed of puppetry that is not interpreted through the artificiality of theatrical tropes. He not only breeches the fourth wall but the other three as well. It was seeing Buchty a Loutky’s version of this as well as coming across the works of some of the students of l’École Supérieure Nationale de le Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières in France that convinced me to hijack this style and to apply these principles to the puppet troupes we would soon form in Haines Alaska. But that is another story.
Rocky IX by Buchty a Loutky a satire of the interminable Rocky series.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
7/13/12
For more information about Buchty a Loutky read this:
Journey into European puppetry #7
Or to visit them in Prague:
or to find the Divadlo Švandovo:
The Švankmajer Effect #1
Part One
Explorations in Texture
The Inexplicable Automaton Monkey’s that Open Jan Svankmajer’s Rakvičkárna – Also known as The Coffin Factory or Punch and Judy
In 1989 I first came across the puppet films of Jan Švankmajer at the Film Forum in New York City. I remember feeling an oddness popping through the screen. I couldn’t put my finger on it. A little later I also discovered the films of the Brothers Quay, which also touched a similar, if indefinable, nerve. (Someday I’ll discuss the Quays in more depth.) I wasn’t consciously interested in puppetry then. My interest was primarily in film. But over the years I kept returning to the works of Švankmajer. I eagerly bought my tickets at obscure venues to watch Švankmajer’s Alice and Faust as they were released. These works were bellwethers for me.
Jan Svankmajer Still Vital in his Late Seventies as this is Being Written
Švankmajer’s films, with their manic crosscutting and hyperreal sound effects, reflected the preoccupation of the filmmaker with his pet obsessions; childhood nightmares, food, the difficulties of dialogue and, certainly, puppets. As an American I saw puppets mainly as a folk art relegated to the nursery where fluffy Muppets amuse toddlers. Švankmajer’s use of puppetry was a revelation. Yet throughout the early 90′s only slowly, dimly, did it occur to me to seek out puppetry in New York. A little diligence would have amply rewarded. Yet in a way I’m glad that it was only in my last year in the city, before moving to Alaska, that I began to realize that much of the strength of the Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay lay in their puppets. In 1994 I discovered their VHS tapes at Kim’s Video. Only as I began to closely examine these films that I began to understand what I was seeing.
Arcimboldo Techniques Come To Life in Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue
But even before I lay hold of the videos I knew what it was that really grabbed me in Švankmajer’s works. In a word it was texture. By the late eighties I was already convinced that something was off in the modern preoccupation with flat empty surfaces. Whether it was the white walls of galleries, offices and apartments, or whether it was the flatness of of our appliances, fixtures and electronic gadgetry, it occurred to me that humanity was not meant to live in sterile empty environments. Nature was a system at once soothingly simple and extremely complex. Their was the visual sweep of the forest and the unique singularity of the bark on one tree. Traditional art and design had many of these elements as well. But Modernist aesthetics, say Bauhaus or minimalism, had been commercialized and sold to people in a variety of packages. Take a walk through the average postwar office building; look for the cheese in the sterile rat trap. What would be the effect upon humanity living in an environment as dead as the surface of the average refrigerator? While it would be almost scientifically impossible to calculate I think we already know the answer.
Švankmajer’s puppet films fly in the face of the sleek modernist ethic by pushing your face directly into the path of dense textures. There are few simple textures in a Švankmajer film. Instead you get a riot of corrosion, fracturing, old wood grain, rotting food, vegetation, dank metal and dry bone. He even animates cow tongues and pieces of raw pork.
In the Textural Flood of Ravickarna Svankmajer Trumps All with the Living Fur of a Guinea Pig
In Rakvičkárna (known in English as Punch and Judy or it’s more literal translation The Coffin Factory) textures and puppetry go hand in hand. From it’s opening shots of decaying musical automaton monkeys it pushes texture to the foreground. The textures that then assault us include mechanical toys and carousel horses, a dead animal eye suddenly slipped in among the painted. Then we are forced to observe the ripped patchwork of gunny sack burlap that makes up one of the backdrops. And then come the two puppets, each a masterpiece of textural complexity. While called Punch and Judy, there is no Judy figure represented. Instead we have Punch and what seems to be Harlequin (which touches of Pierrot). Punch is fashioned in an antique manner a la the 17th Century. But this is not an antique puppet, it is purposely aged. The face of this punch is like a painted moonscape, designed to appeared cracked and dented. Likewise the Harlequin wears an extraordinarily colorful ragged patchwork gown. Then to really up the textural ante, as if it wasn’t already thick with cracks, crevices and features, Švankmajer throws in a live guinea pig then proceeds to show us its fur, eyes, teeth, and moving tongue. All of this is still only the opening salvo. There is a strange house wallpapered with antiquarian clippings from books and newspapers. There is a coffin papered in a puppet sized engraving of a skeleton. The coffin is then hammered, nailed and dripped upon by candles. Finally in a frenetic battle holes are drilled in the wooden floor and carnivalesque paintings are punctured as we are reminded that at the beginning these puppets were merely the extension of fleshy human hands.
Jan Svankmajer Working on the Oversized Puppets for Don Juan
Similar textural studies can be found in Don Šajn (or Don Juan) where the Švankmajer thrusts us into further conundrums: Are the puppets old or merely painted that way? Are the puppets real or are they actors in puppet garb? Is that a set or is it a very non-theatrical reality? Švankmajer distinctively blurs such distinctions. At one point two human-sized puppets are sword fighting in a decayed medieval setting, which is overgrown with weeds and shrubbery, when they pass a wing of the Baroque stage they have also been seen on. And it isn’t the front of the stage. We instead get a casual sidelong glances at the back of the painted set. No attention is paid to this detail. This breakdown between the theatrical or the filmic illusion and the grittier denser textures of reality are a hallmark of Švankmajer’s work. It doesn’t matter if you see the hands or the back of the set. He does this without breaking the illusion of the piece at all. What matters is to bring the animated figure or the object freely back and forth across the borders of our reality, much as messages, books, music, etc had to be smuggled in and out of the old Communist world. And texture is one of his chief means for accomplishing this feat.
You can be sure that’s real fur! The White Rabbit from Svankmajer’s Alice
And so Švankmajer uses real bones in Neco z Alenky (or Alice), his version of Alice in Wonderland, and stuffed rabbits, various socks, actual false teeth, glass eyes and many other objects not generally associated with puppetry or animation. In Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions in Dialogue) he uses most of the objects found on a desk, in a kitchen, in a refrigerator, not to mention shoes, butter and toothpaste. And not content to merely use these things he crushes or destroys each in its turn changing the textures from the rather hollow items purchased in stores into symbolically charged objects.
Alice, Dolls, Bones, Socks, Wood, Leaves, and an Endless Textural Feast.
People sometimes use the phrase object theatre. And just as often they mean something which is taken from the outside world and treated theatrically. The object in Švankmajer’s hands retains the mystery of the thing in itself. He points us away from the slick surfaces of modernity towards the haunted characteristics of older inhabited used materials. In doing so Švankmajer displays an aspect of his professed Surrealism. And old school Surrealists valued the displaced object highly.
(To be concluded next time.)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
7/1/12
For more Anadromous puppetry essays:
http://theanadromist.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/antidote-art-1/
http://theanadromist.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/antidote-art-2/
http://theanadromist.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/journey-into-european-puppetry-1/
The Feral Life #1
The Feral Dream
Rousseau’s Dream Dies Here. Pollyanna McIntosh as The Woman 2011
A woman, dressed in rags and furs, carelessly filthy, black stringy and presumably lousy hair, teeth unsubjected to any dentistry and poisonous as a hyena’s, her face cocked like a gun preparing to explode, enters the lair of a wolf. The animal growls. The human brute growls back even more ferociously. The camera does not show us but we hear the beating and the tearing of those human teeth. In a moment we see her running, perhaps it is a dream. But in this story the woman who runs with the wolves is no sub-Jungian New Age empowerment fantasy. This is a fearful thing.
The film is The Woman. It was released in 2011 and more recently for home digestion. Directed by Lucky McKee, who also directed the brilliant watch-at-your-own-risk May back in 2002, The Woman has been vilified as misogynist, far too gory and just plain nerve-wracking and simultaneously praised for it’s feminist undertones and unique character portrayal by Pollyanna McIntosh. It is indeed quite hard to believe that Pollyanna (Has anyone ever been more paradoxically named?) is actually a statuesque Scottish beauty. But all of this contradiction delineates clearly the manner of beast we have here.
The Call of the Wild ca. 2011. Pollyanna McIntosh in Lucky McKee’s The Woman.
And as I watched this grisly work of art I was struck by many details that resonated far beyond the confines of this inexpensive little indie film. The screenwriter, novelist Jack Ketchum, had continued his novel, The Offspring, with special emphasis on the Woman at the suggestion of producer Andrew van den Houten, who had directed a version of the earlier book. The film of The Offspring also starred Pollyanna McIntosh as the Woman, leader of a tribe of feral humans in the American Northeast. And it is in fact this notion of feral humanity that really jumped out at me with such force in both films.
Feral is a curious word. (By the bye it can be pronounced in two ways. One, the more standard, makes it sound like fair-al. The other less common pronunciation is more like fear-al.) It suggest not merely wild, or wildness, but of the domesticated thing returning to the wild. For instance if you showed up on the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean you would find a healthy population of feral cats that had been left behind by sailors from centuries back to eradicate the rat infestation accidentally bestowed upon the islands. I am claimed by a feral cat myself here in Alaska. They can go in and out a feral state. And that is very different from the human race. This could have something to do with the fact that domestication depends entirely on an animal’s relationship to mankind. We are not tamed by our pets or cattle. Now before I tread too far into some politically incorrect screed let’s return to ferality.
On the prowl with a few Feral Cats
So to be feral is to revert to a wild state. Now at this point we bump into a raft of cultural issues that have their primary origins back in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who theorized most famously that ‘L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.‘, which translated says that, ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.‘ It was clear from his writings that Rousseau lamented the state of society that had enslaved us. All those compromises! All that book learning! All of that conformity! The individual must be free as an individual! Vive la Revolution!
Back to Nature with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Another related idea is that of the ‘noble savage’. Rousseau did not invent the concept nor was he as primitivist as it sometimes claimed. Yet the somehow a reduction of his idea comes down to us like this; that the most free folks on earth are those most free from civilization, those closest to nature and the earth. Rousseau praised children for their purity, primitive tribes when they had achieved the stage of the savage. Regardless of the subtleties of Rousseau’s very influential works, the concepts of the ‘noble savage’ eventually merged with the art movements of 19th Century French Bohemia.
French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin followed a quest for this kind of wild life when he left behind everything and followed his muse to Tahiti. There was vision at the time that the Tahitians and many other tribes were more liberated than the stale old bourgeois European world that he had left behind, along with his failed marriage and children and the sense of depression that led him to attempt suicide. He wanted to find something in Tahiti. Something he was missing. Yet it could not be found. When he did eventually paint his masterpiece, D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous? (trans. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?), this was not the work of a man who had found his boho dreams come true. Death and futility are writ large. Paradise, not a paradisaical as the dream. A great painting had been made but the Tahitians were pretty much stuck on the same earth as everyone else.
Gauguin’s D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?
Nevertheless more and more souls began to empty themselves out into various jungles of the mind in search of the perfect primitive conditions of liberation. Expressionist movements like Les Fauves, the very word meaning wild beasts, followed Gauguin into the primitivist wilds. In fact so much of modern art can be seen as a various forms of rejection of the things that make up the a dull conformist society: a return to nature, a rejection of nature, the artist as prophet, the artist as shaman, the artist as outlaw, the artist as madman, the artist as barbarian, the artist as explorer at the edges and the artist as denizen of the dregs. And all the while the dream of a feral sort of existence haunts the proceedings.
The Surrealist Unconsciousness – Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) 1929 Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
The Surrealists perfected perhaps the most intellectual version of this dream… which is of course an oxymoron. Yet one has to hand it to the Surrealists, whom I have a great deal of respect for. Following Symbolist dream theory and folding into it a strong dose of early 20th Century Sigmund Freud’s reduction of human psychology to the libido, the Surrealists sought among the detritus of tainted experience in childhood, the metal institution and other outsiders for a way to connect, beyond reason, to the meaning of Art and Life. Later artists would discover Carl Jung.
Jack Kerouac tunes into frequencies not heard through the rational mind
But finally a movement would come along that would bubble up higher than the demimonde of the arts. The Beat Generation were by the late 1940′s pickled in Rousseau’s individualistic liberation dream. All that matters is to be true to yourself. That is the final statement. (With the proviso ‘as long as you don’t hurt anybody’ whatever that means. Actually that is the nail in the noble savage’s coffin.) But the Beats had a few nice twists in the lime of Rousseau’s gin and tonic. One, sex, and lots more of it. Two, drugs, and lot’s more of them. And finally music, or should I say Jazz, with Charlie Parker, (Oops! Sorry! Dead from primitive aid number two!) or Miles Davis in the role of the prophetic noble savage. We’ll overlook the hidden racism in considering black jazz players as noble savages with a pipeline to the primitive urges and demiurges. Did anyone ever at the time notice that being black did not equate to being more in touch with the mysteries of the savage universe? Great musicians? Yes. Fresh from the jungle? Um? Not quite. Pretty damned intellectual actually. So let’s change that addition from Jazz, just cross that out, to let’s look around a little… Oh! Wait! What’s this wild primitive stuff over here? Oh yeah! Rock ‘n’ Roll! And voila sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (!) equals another variation on the noble savagery theme.
Okay. I’m well aware that white American asses in the 1950′s had gotten damned tight and needed some musical loosening. But in plain fact, find one 1950′s rock ‘n’ roller that was truly in Rousseau’s camp. This was a case of the noble savage interpretation of what was actually fairly standard electric folk music in the traditional American vein. Had Postwar America not been quite so somnambulistically square it would not have been seen as such a radical departure from Jazz or the Blues. Nevertheless by the late 1960′s this Rousseau interpretation of Rock music was standard. (See the burgeoning field of Rock criticism.) Rock had indeed become a revolt against civilization. LSD was the psychosomatic magic which would effect the liberation of desire. Down with Christian prudery! Down with humanistic rationalism! Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go! Vive la Revolution!
And now the feral dream was out of the intellectual closet.
The Wild Mystical Tribes Gather – The San Francisco Be-In January 14th 1967
(Next time we continue our little survey of the wilderness from Woodstock to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Virgin Prunes)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
5/17/2012
Also here’s another Anadromous essay on a similar theme…
A Doll’s Heart
The Face of the Future: A Japanese BJD
As a puppeteer, with quite a wide definition of puppetry, I find often myself keeping an eyeball cocked onto the world of those close cousins of the puppet, dolls. Technically the basic difference between a doll and a puppet is this: you play with a doll by yourself, but get an audience and you are a puppeteer. Playing with dolls is an act of personal fantasy, the creation of a private world. When you turn the figure outwards everything changes, you now have to communicate something to someone else. Dolls and puppets both serve valuable functions. And there is some academic wrangling over the true ancestor of the puppet. Is it the doll or another strange homunculoid cousin, a more fearful relative, the religious idol? It is probably a mixture of the two. The puppet is a performer who can contain many a complex message. The doll is a figure that is usually outgrown as a playmate as a child discovers the outside world.
But what happens if the child doesn’t outgrow the doll? What happens if the child begins to treat the doll as something to emulate? What happens when the personal fantasy becomes a prison? And more to our point: What happens when the doll becomes a role model and object of desire? What happens if the doll’s lover develops a real case of agalmatophilia, that is a statue, doll and mannequin fetish?
VenusAngelic Doll Girl 2012
I recently stumbled upon the phenomenon of girls becoming dolls. We have often the heard a girl compared to a doll before. But in this new trend to call a teenage girl a living doll has taken on far more than subtext. There is a girl whose real name I’m told is Venus Palermo, but who goes by the YouTube moniker VenusAngelic. Venus is about 15 years old as I write. She likes to dress up like a doll, to wear ribbons and frills and to compose her face with wide eyed innocence. Oh! Did I say wide eyed? I mean that literally. Not ‘literally’ as in ‘I literally fell on the floor laughing.’ when no such thing occurred. But literally as in this girl has a fetish for Japanese anime an is turning herself into a ball Jointed Doll (BJD in the doll world). In her video entitled: How to look like a doll (make up), Venus instructs her viewers how to achieve a porcelain like doll skin and even how to apply contact lenses to enlarge the size of the pupils. Giving her eyes a real doll effect. And VenusAngelic has about 80 videos on her personal philosophy of doll simulation. (She also speaks in a crazy doll’s voice that make her videos uniquely bizarre.) So think about this for a moment… A girl trying to become a doll.
Venus Palermo as a Doll
As soon as I saw these photos and videos I knew I was looking at one of those weird trends that would catch on all over the place. It’s obvious to me that hippiedom, punk attitude, alternative piercings and tattoos all pretty much have the musty aroma of stale history to many teens these days. They need a new model. The revolutions of the counterculture are basically dead. (Occupy Wall Street not withstanding.) Here is the strange new thing. This is not my vote for a new paradigm mind you. I would hope for something more grounded, more questioning of technology, a bit more Luddite and much more fiercely intelligent. But as long as people are seduced by our wireless, app-worshipping, multi-screenal technocracy this is what we will get. I just knew I would see much more of this particularly curious blur between fantasy and reality, between plastic and flesh, between screen and quotidian existence.
And there certainly is more…
Kotakoti another Doll Girl 2012
There are more doll girls already. Dakota Rose, a 16 year old, who goes by the name dakotakoti or Kotakoti is even more popular than VenusAngelic. (Between the two their videos have been watched by millions.) She’s a bit less extreme and some have said she tweaks her photos a bit to get the doll effect. She too comes across as a human BJD and creates her big eyed effect a bit more naturally. But the effect is the same. (She also reveals a connection to the Emo girl look on occasion.) And the doll look is certainly being copied. Japan? Absolutely. America? It’s just winding up. Globally? We’ll see.
Dakota Rose posed as a BJD
BJD by Marina Bychkova
But this doll/human interchange is actually a two way street. The doll itself has become a sort a laboratory for a kind of android aesthetic. Let’s consider the BJD. The unusual thing about the BJD is that they are anatomically more correct than most dolls. Some of these dolls are exquisitely crafted with incredible attention paid to detail. Not only that the costumes and accessories are even more elaborate. I first ran into the Ball Jointed Doll (though it wasn’t called that yet) in the mid-80′s through little Japanese doll books of Amano Katan. His Katan Doll: Fantasm was something I’d never encountered before. Beautifully constructed, yet disturbingly emaciated dolls, that seemed one step away from drawing a warm tub of water and contemplating a razor blade.
Katan Doll: Fantasm – The Book of the Dolls of Amano Katan
Since then the BJD has developed a cult following with artists vying with each other to create the most dewy eyed melancholic homunculi imaginable. In the hands of an artist like Russian/Canadian Marina Bychkova these dolls are anorexic works of art. They have a strange erotic power in their tangible realism. I’m impressed by the craft and dedication that goes into these dolls.
Oh yeah, by ‘anatomically correct’ I mean they show pink nipples and genitalia, which is quite unusual for a doll. Of course they aren’t really for children. But what is their function? I know that people get together at conferences to marvel over these BJD creations. Doll collectors consider them a real pinnacle of the craft. But there is a problem.
‘Anatomically Correct’ Dolls by Marina Bychkova
The Japanese have a word, ‘kawaii’, which roughly translates into English as ‘cute’. Now in English ‘cute’ a relatively recent word, means something akin to baby-like, when most people use it. Babies are cute. Bunnies are cute. Kittens and puppies are cute. Cats can be cute. A teenage girl might say that a boy is cute. (Here the meaning is slipping a little.) But generally baby-like things can’t be violent or pornographic. At least that’s our vision of things. Kawaii things in Japan can be. That is, big-eyed anime and manga characters can certainly be both violent and highly pornographic. I won’t follow this any further, but if you know the worlds of anime and manga you know exactly what I’m talking about. The BJD has evolved from the anime tradition. And like anime or manga the BJD, though fitted with the standard markings of cuteness, big childlike eyes, puffy lips, silky smooth skin. But in the very realistic, and stylized treatment, of human genitalia several categories are being blended in ways that are not only erotic but have an especially troubling kick. The moist childlike faces seem to beckon towards very forbidden fruit.
So what exactly are we being invited to imagine?
But there are further degrees of the human/doll interpenetration. If you remember the climax of the first Star Trek movie where man mates with machine you can understand that there has long been a desire to make the perfect erotic mate. One that isn’t bitchy, naggy or bleed once a month. Someone who will not ask uncomfortable questions. This curious desire goes at least as far back as the Greek myth of Pygmalion. I suspect that it even finds it’s expressions in various fertility idols of the remote past.
A truly ‘anatomically correct’ life-sized RealDoll©
And RealDoll has achieved the next step. The old image of the inflatable love doll is now hopelessly antiquated. For about $6,000 one can purchase a female doll approximately the exact size and, more importantly, the weight of a real woman. And would you understand me if I said that these dolls are even more anatomically correct than the BJDs. They have certain replaceable parts and very pliant human textured silicon skin. Interestingly the movie Lars and the Real Girl, featured one of these lifelike dolls and yet did not find the concept all that creepy. Again, as so often in the movies, humans and machines were made for each other. The relatives of Lars find it getting a touch too weird. But the movie itself seems to plump down with that old saw ‘whatever works’. Well they do make porn films of these dolls too. And what is the nature of the actual relationship of the man (Girls don’t get too envious, they now make male RealDoll’s too.) to the simulacra? Have we crossed the line from fetish to idol?
Where does Reality Stop and Fantasy Begin?
I don’t know, am I being too much of a Puritan about this stuff? (Calvin did make some good points.) Or is this really the destiny of the human race? Predictably the media has recently been covering the Doll Girl phenomenon and of course the questions they ask go something like this: Are we sexualizing young girls again? Like that was the big issue here. It is indeed a problem. But I don’t think that’s the serious issue. Maybe we should ask; What are we sacrificing in our desire to blur the distinction between what we make and who we are? What are we losing in the bargain?
Gazing at the Face of a Real Doll
Too understand the answers to that line of questioning I think we can start by imagining VenusAngelic or Kotakoti twenty or thirty years down the road. What prosthetics will they choose to retain their status as living dolls? What surgical procedures will they adopt? We know that most organs can be transplanted now. What happens when they finally find a donor to give them a doll’s plastic heart?
I hope they learn to face reality long before then… But then again what in this society is really encouraging them to do that?
Gazing at the Face of a Doll Girl
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
4/10/12
Journey into European Puppetry #8
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 8 – Staring into the Dark River
The Salzburg Marionette Theater, Salzburg Austria
I was awakened in my converted medieval hotel room by bells pealing loud and long enough to wake the dead. I’m not talking jingle bells either. These sounds were deep, rolling, earthshaking. It was Ascension Day in Salzburg, Austria. Ascension Day? Evidently the day of Jesus’ ascent back into heaven is celebrated pretty widely across secular Europa while we more religious Americans hadn’t even been informed that it was a holiday. I felt gypped. (Hey wait a minute isn’t gypped from gypsy? Uh oh I feel something politically correct hovering about. Down damn you!)
This baby puppet was found in the Salzburg Marionette museum. It serves as a good reminder that the differences between dolls and puppets are not that great.
Meanwhile back in Salzburg everything was closed except the Hohensalzburg Castle, which fortunately contained the small puppet museum of the Salzburg Marionetten Theater. I also discovered there that it would be impossible to interview any of the Salzburg puppeteers because the office was closed for the holiday. But I did have tickets for the theatre that night.
A Baroque Woman in a Baroque city. From the Salzburg Marionetten Theater’s museum at the castle.
I found my seat in the Salzburg Marionette Theater, amid children and Japanese tourists, for an unseasonal (to my mind at least… Or maybe it fits the Ascension Day festivities?) performance of The Nutcracker. This was the most expensive puppet show I had attended on my entire trip through European puppetry: 28 euros (nearly $40 US) and hardly the best seats in the diminutive antique theatre. But after all the Salzburg Marionettes had toured the world. And when I saw their show I knew why. Their technique was elaborate, flawless. It was like watching a three dimensional film without the glasses. The use of lighting was particularly good. But it was the actual movement of the marionettes that was stupefying. Whether it was a parade of snowmen or a Middle Eastern dancer, the performance was truly lifelike. The puppets appeared to be actual miniature beings rather than mere pieces of wood, wire, fabric and paint. As the ballet concluded the possibilities of puppetry appeared nigh endless to me. Although it was curious that the group with the most refined style moved about primarily to prerecorded music. If Buchty a Loutky in Prague had this kind of technique what would they do with it? Indeed many of the students at Charleville would eventually have this level of technique and they were already beginning to move far beyond traditional concepts of puppeteering.
A postcard showing the antique interior of the Salzburg Marionetten Theater. My own seat had a similar perspective.
As I walked back to my hotel in the darkness over the Salzach River I stopped on the bridge and looked across to the lights Salzburg and the castle reflected in the dark water. I reflected on what a journey it had been. I could see that puppetry was still an untapped artistic treasury, from the folk art of Guignol to the philosophical experiments at the Institut International de la Marionnette and ESNAM, from the savage comic timing of Der Weite Theater to the gentle humor and earnest ideas of DRAK, from the pure displays of light and shadow at the Fuguren-Zirkel to the dark seriousness of play’s like Groteska’s Balladyna and from the perfect professionalism of the Salzburg Marionette Theatre to funky absurdism of Buchty a Loutky. And I could also easily see how much was left, acres, countries, galaxies to be explored in the puppetry matrix, including masks and objects. Puppetry had been a folk art for so long, with only tentative steps towards art having been made in the 20th Century. It was as though though this art form was still in its glorious silent movie stage awaiting the advent of sound.
Another postcard, this time showing the same Nutcracker show that I watched: The dance of the sugar plum fairies.
I also had another reflection: I remembered back in Berlin going to a rock club to watch three indie bands play. I left before the third one started. Why? Well I think it’s safe to say I’ve seen a lot of music in my lifetime. And these bands were doing what so much music does these days. They were providing a rather predictable experience for the people who like that sort of sound. The club was full of the usual suspects: hipsters standing around looking coolly bored or the folks who invariably bob their heads in approval of the beat. But nothing surprising was occurring. And without some element of surprise nothing new can be said. The musical conversation that had stretched back into the mists of the 20th Century and before now looked to have become stale. (Yes I’m well aware that there is plenty of good music out there. The problem is that it has ended up as our personal portable soundtracks.)
But in puppet theatre after puppet theatre my mind was being blown all ways from Sunday. Puppetry, by retaining its tangible, tactile character, had stepped up to the artistic task of confronting the infernal virtuality of the 21st Century. The European puppets that I saw raised questions that most of the other arts could no longer confront in our maelstrom of hi-tech simulacra. Puppetry can be used effectively in films, but it is barely contained by them. And the best puppet films by Wladyslaw Starewicz, Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay or Genevieve Anderson throw us back upon the textures of the real world with its mysterious essence. But the only way to truly know why the once and future art of puppetry is able to speak into our dismembered reconstituted times is find a real puppet show (not some muppety kiddie show either) and get thee henceforth. And that’s the point puppets require our presence, which gets us out of our isolation.
A postcard from the Nutcracker featuring a marionette ballerina. Most Salzburg marionettes are controlled by nine strings.
As I stood on that bridge crossing the Salzach River watching the lights of Salzburg it occurred to me that everywhere you go there are endless musical bands, singers, organizations. But where were the puppet troupes? Why shouldn’t there be just as many? The punk puppets of Buchty a Loutky provided an excellent model. But why not shadow puppets? Marionettes? Toy theatres? Rod Puppets? Puppet films? Crafty automata? Reconditioned action figures? Recycled junk? And not just to make kids laugh either? (But then again why not?) And not just to make adults giggle? (And again why in the name of hell not?) But why not make versions of Shakespeare, Faust or Alice in Wonderland? Why not make versions of movies? Buchty a Loutky did Rocky IX why not The Maltese Falcon or Night of the Living Dead? Or my own personal dream – a live outdoor version of Tarkovsky’s Stalker with a small audience following the Stalker puppet to the Zone. Puppetry is an ancient art with a deep past that ranges from Punch to King Kong, from Captain Pod to Michel de Ghelderode. But it is also an art that is still discovering its grammar, especially since it is not just a language of homunculi and funny animals but of all objects. On my journey I saw stones, grapevines, electric trains, water and light all used as puppets.
And so I determined right there on that bridge that I would take on this art myself and see if I could get it to work back in Alaska, back in North America. And take it I did. And I believe it has worked… But that is another story. It was time to leave Europe and the rich panorama of faces and characters, both human and animated, I had encountered on this astounding journey.
A mannequin on the streets of Salzburg… Again the distance between the mannequin and the puppet is infinitesimal. And in the hands of Czech puppet filmmaker Jiří Barta… non-existent.
In early May during my last stop in Europe I had one closing benediction related to puppetry. At my hotel in the Latin Quarter in Paris the desk clerk, whom I had known for years, told me that the man on the night shift, Jorge, was a Bolivian puppet master. He introduced us and I interviewed him. As he discussed puppets made out of paper in the shape of condors I realized how much more of the world of puppets I had yet to encounter. There were indeed puppet shows all over the world. I asked him if he thought puppets would have problems surviving in a world of televisions, computers, video games, etc. “No!” He replied with passion. “People need puppets.” “Why?” I asked him. For him all of puppetry came down to one word “Simplicity.” And after all I’d seen I couldn’t help but agree with him: simplicity and a tangible reality.
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Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
March 4th 2012
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And if you are in Salzburg at the right time dig deeply into your pockets and see the Salzburg Marionette Theater. Visit their website:
Journey into European Puppetry #7
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 7 – The City of Eccentric Dreams
The Jan Hus Statue in the Center of Prague’s Old Town Square
Meanwhile Prague was calling. I had been traveling for a couple of months through Europe, visiting friends and hunting down puppet theatres in Europe. The entire time I had essentially been making a Fibonacci spiral towards Prague, the heart of puppetry in Europe. Švankmajer, Skupa, Trnka, Faust, Don Giovanni, Kašpárek, puppetry as history complete with heroic martyrs. The Czech Republic, the eccentric core of Europe, the Surrealist dreamscape, to quote Andre Breton: “Prague, wrapped in its legendary magic, is truly one of those cities that has been able to fix and retain the poetic idea that is always more or less drifting aimlessly through space.” I had come to Prague for the second time, in the second half of April 2005, a little more prepared to unwrap it’s curious puppet mythologies.
Buchty a Loutky presents their version of The Hound of the Baskervilles
My first stop was the Švandovo Theatre to find Buchty a Loutky. Back in Hradec Kralove DRAK Director Jakub Krofta had highly recommended them. They were performing Pes Baskervillessky, their absurd version of the Sherlock Holmes mystery ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. The lights went down. Someone played slow music on a piano. A tall bearded long-haired gentleman in a suit began to read from Sherlock Holmes. Behind him in an exceptionally funky homemade stage Sherlock Holmes and Watson suddenly appeared. Watson and Holmes were full sized actors who had crammed their heads into the tiny puppet stage. Soon the actors were replaced by little string puppets. At one point Holmes requested tea. Suddenly two full-sized cups appeared on the stage. Water was poured from above. Splashing helplessly on the tiny figures as well as into the porcelain cups. It was then consumed by a couple of puppeteers from the side as the play continued. Suddenly the actors would be in front of the little stage duplicating the movements of the puppets. A model train began to roam around the makeshift stage at one point. At another a puppet is falling and falling and falling, the miniature stage curtain descends suddenly the play stops and the bearded guy starts reading a book on swamps through a microphone. This goes on for five minutes before it starts to dawn on everyone that this is the intermission. He reads for 15 minutes. The evening continued with humor, absurdity and inventiveness blazing away in full glory. Holmes does indeed solve the case. Eventually the play ends as a cello lonely tune is bowed offstage. And the players take a bow. I approached the guy with the beard… his name was Tomas Procházka. He is the director of the piece. We set an appointment to talk for later that week before their next show. I walked off thinking, laughing, obsessed with the play, my head positively exploding with ideas. I had seen much on this trip, but nothing had prepared me for this. I would return.
Black Theatre in Prague
The next evening I decided to visit one of the unique Czech black light theatres, Ta Fantastika to see “Aspects of Alice“, a truly weird variation on Alice in Wonderland. Black theatres tend to be quite commercial in their production design and sadly proliferate largely for the tourist market. Nevertheless as they are tangentially related to puppet theatre I felt I should see another one. This one appeared to be the best of the current crop. In the presentation Alice follows a magician by floating, always lots of floating in these shows, across a day-glow version of historic Prague. She meets some tall Jewish ghost puppets that carry her around in her hands. It was doubly odd since most of Prague’s Jews had been exterminated in World War 2 and these gangly puppets were largely nostalgic characters. Then there was a fairly successful clown show to cheer Alice up after getting depressed by the Jewish specters: lots of floating juggling day-glow bowling pins. After the intermission things turned down right odd. For no discernible reason Alice was suddenly topless and reenacting the Garden of Eden, with the snake represented by another topless woman. Now I’m fairly familiar with the Bible and many interpretations of the GArden of Eve story but I’d never encountered this interpretation before. The magician then becomes Adam. Alice/Eve becomes pregnant. She prays for forgiveness to a triangle with odd lines in it. (Was that the Trinity?) And the show ends. I’m not sure what that meant, but it sure was slick and bizarre.
Loutkář Means Puppeteer
The next morning I went to meet Nina Malíková, daughter of famed Czech puppeteer Jan Malik, an intelligent animated woman in her fifties, editor of the noted puppeteering magazine Loutkář, who was already being interviewed by a French student, Rachele, doing a Master’s thesis on Czech Puppet history. Eventually Nina, Rachele, an interpreter and myself were deeply involved in a discussion about the meaning and future of puppetry. Nina was worried that there would not be enough good puppet shows for children, since in the Czech Republic everyone wanted to do work for adults. I could only dream of such problems for America. “What about DRAK and other companies”, I said. “They do work for children?” “Yes”, she said, “that’s one show once in a while, but I want to take my grandchildren to puppet shows every week. We are supposed to be the land of puppets.” She had definite and high standards. She lamented that increasingly puppets were becoming a purely improvised visual phenomenon. (Several other puppet theorists have pointed to same defect in so much contemporary puppetry.) She also wondered if the future of puppets was to be contained within various filmic or digital media. I pointed out the use of strong texts by the students of the International Institute for Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières France. Rachele added that there were writers in Avignon who were assigned to specific puppeteers. That was exactly what I saw at the Institute. I said that there had to be more of an emphasis on texts to bring puppetry to the next level. Nina looked at me and said… I want you to write about what you’ve been telling me for the next issue of Loutkář. We’ll translate it. And she also offered the same to Rachele. It had proved an interesting meeting indeed. (I did write something but I suspect it was too long. You are basically reading a variation of it write now.)
The Serbian Imitation of Don Giovanni. The best part of the show is outdoor display.
Not all in Prague was fascinating theatre and engrossing meetings. I couldn’t help noticing the predators of tourism as well: the strange bad tourist puppet shows and imitative black light theatres. Prague has so many genuine puppet attractions that it is also plagued by commercial puppetry trying to cash in on the Czech culture. There were so many cheap puppet shops that the authentic ones took a little effort to find. There are two Don Giovanni marionette theatres. The real one is at the National Marionette Theatre. I talked for a while to a Bulgarian girl who was passing out leaflets in front of the imitation Don Giovanni marionette play. She worked 12 hours a day six days a week doing little more than this. She was so bored with her job that she struck up a conversation with me when I turned around to walk away from a theatre foyer. She explained how a group of Serbians also ran many of the most exploitative black light theatres. She was stuck working for them a few years until she could get enough to go home.
The Bloody Stage of Buchty a Loutky’s Urbild Remix
Returning to the Švandovo on my last night in Prague I found Tomas Procházka from Buchty a Loutky. I told him that their puppetry reminded me of old school Punk rock. Not the rage, but the D.I.Y. aesthetic. “It’s nice to say it. Because then we can say we do Punk. We do Punk Puppetry.” He explained how the troupe took turns coming up with ideas for shows. The group of five or six people had been influenced mostly through the strange puppet films of Jan Švankmajer, also probably the reason I found myself wandering around Europe looking for theatrical homunculi. Referring to that night’s entertainment Tomas said “You will see in this story the Švankmajer style. It’s made of rubbish.” The stage for this show, entitled Urbild Remix, was actually indeed constructed exactly in the Švankmajer mode. It was made from wood you might have found in your backyard. There were three puppet stages and extra curtains besides piled on top of each other. The show was billed as an adventure. There were chases, murders, mermaids, skeletons, American Indians and stage blood that literally flowed from the middle stage into a teapot, again homemade music, plenty of strange humor and a great comic introduction by the play’s director, Marek Bečka. And it was all a dream! I can’t possible summarize it. Except to say if you ever go to Prague if you must hunt down the performances of Buchty a Loutky at the Švandovo Theatre. I hear Rocky IX is particularly good.
Setting up a Mermaid for Buchty a Loutky’s Urbild Remix
At one point in my two weeks in Prague I was exploring the Strahovsky Cloister libraries, particularly their surreal object collections, not too far from a desiccated baby dodo bird; it was then that I found I found a portrait, several centuries old, made entirely from seeds. As I looked at them locked behind the glass on a low shelf ignored by the hordes of high school students currently being herded through the place, I smiled to myself. This was exactly like one of the images in the short film Dimensions of Dialogue. Švankmajer had been here. And I promised myself that next time I visited Prague I would find the man himself.
Next time we conclude our journey in Salzburg Austria with the most polished and complicated marionettes of my whole trip.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
2/20/12
And here is what you will need to explore puppetry in Prague on your own!!!
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For more information on Buchty a Loutky:
http://www.buchtyaloutky.cz/content.php?set=en
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or their haunt at the Švandovo: (Hint more shows are listed on the Czech version)
http://www.svandovodivadlo.cz/index.php?lang=en
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And to learn more about Jan Švankmajer begin here:
http://www.jansvankmajer.com/
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To see the authentic Don Giovanni puppet opera in Prague go to the National Marionette Theatre. This is an excellent place to begin.
http://www.mozart.cz/don-giovanni.php
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And if you do want to see a strange if commercial black theatre presentation Ta Fantastika seems to be the best one I’ve seen so far. And they are still presenting Aspects of Alice! (They have a video here too.)
http://www.tafantastika.cz/en/
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Other spots for real puppet shows Říše Loutek theatre. DRAK plays here on occasion.
http://www.riseloutek.cz/en
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Divadlo Minor is a good place for interesting children’s puppetry:
http://www.minor.cz/
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If you want to get more adventurous translate this…
http://www.divadlovdlouhe.cz/
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Highly recommended The Forman Brothers – Film Director Milos Forman’s sons are experimental puppeteers and high on my list to catch:
http://www.formanstheatre.cz/
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To learn more about Loutkář run this through a translation tool:
http://www.loutkar.eu/
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To buy a serious puppet try:
http://www.loutky.cz/en/our-shops/
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And finally to have a puppet commissioned for you! (as Reckoning Motions did) write to Lenka Pavlíčková. She does an amazing job!
http://www.praguemarionette.com/
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There are also puppet festivals!!
Get thee to Prague …
Journey into European Puppetry #6
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 6 – The Czech Puppet Trail
Classic Czech Faust Puppet from a Couple Hundred Years Ago (Note: the CSSR on the Postcard.)
I stole my way into the Czech lands by train. I arrived at the obscure town of Chrudim, looking for the Muzeum loutkářských kultur Chrudim (The Museum of Marionette Culture in Chrudim) in the heart of its medieval core. Passing the central plague monument I eventually found the museum located in the Renaissance Mydlář building. Museum Manager Alena Exnarova, a very knowledgeable woman, and one of her assistants, a spark-plug of a guy named Radek, graciously spent an hour and a half giving me the Czech history of puppets. (A history I’ve already spent some time writing about back in Antidote Art #1.)
Alena Exnarova then Manager of The Museum of Marionette Culture in Chrudim
What was curious to me then was that Czechs had been doing mature puppet plays ever since the 1700s. They had been performing medieval church puppetry before that but were highly influenced by wandering Punch and Judy Men and other homunculoid riffraff drifting over from England and Germany. The traveling Czech puppeteers would give miniature versions of famous plays and novels for people who might not be able to see the real thing or read. It was during this time that classics like Macbeth, Don Juan and Faust put down their puppet roots. And this also proved to be a significant influence in helping to keep the Czech language alive while under a ban from the Austrians after the devastating Battle of White Mountain in1620. This was the battle that destroyed the Reformation that Jan Hus had started nearly a century before Martin Luther. Puppets therefore occupied a very special place in the Czech psyche for while their Austro-Hungarian overlords spoke German, the puppeteers performed in Czech: a language too far beneath them for the Austrians to notice.
In the Chrudim Storage Rooms with some Rather Knowing Puppets
Puppets were sometimes a way of presenting messages that the authorities overlooked. Kašpárek, the Czech Punch, sometimes made salty comments about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the late 1800s more was being done for children as the trend was developing in many countries. Many children looked forward to getting miniature puppet theatres as Christmas gifts. Yet before World War One there were thousands of roving puppet troupes, some for children many still for adults. They even started a puppet magazine called Loutkář (puppeteer) in 1912… and it continues today. Later Joseph Skupa invented the characters Spejbl and Hurvinek who actually made such anti-Nazi remarks so as to get Mr. Skupa thrown into a concentration camp. The Soviets, ironically, as they had done in other Iron Curtain countries, encouraged puppet theatres. And yes there were many times when the audience saw something beneath the obvious surfaces, they were used to reading the allegories. I realized that alone of all the countries in the world the Czech Republic was the only country I could think of where puppetry was not just woven into the warp and woof of its history but was positively heroic! Astounding.
The Skeleton has Meaning Beyond Merely Death Imagery in Czech Puppetry
It was a fascinating history from a fascinating museum in an undiscovered little medieval town. They also housed a library of 70,000 multilingual books, magazines and other items pertaining to puppet history. The museum was supported by the Czechs because puppetry is respected as a vital art form by the Czech government. The museum also serves as a focal point and aid to the Amateur Puppet Festival in Chrudim. The amateur festival is held each July for Czechs only, but foreign guests are also invited. It is a pretty big deal and might warrant a return to Chrudim someday.
Radek Shows Me the Back Rooms of the Museum
As I concluded my interview with Alena Exnarova I asked her about the meaning of puppetry. “The puppet has limitations but then again it can do things actors could never do.” She explained that there is a life to puppetry that will continue even with all of the modern digital screenal gadgetry. What were some of the new trends in Czech puppetry I asked? Radek explained that there was a movement translated as something like Illusion Theatre. It was a return to certain aspects of the roots of traditional puppetry particularly the used the hidden puppeteers. In other words while Americans hardly knew much beyond the Muppets except in a few isolated zones, most of us having not even seen puppeteers standing on the stage with their puppets performing, some Czech puppeteers have already been there, done that and have started to return to the mystery of the hidden hand by behind the puppet.
There is no European spiritual program that allows one to return to states feeling vaguely in touch with the ineffable. It’s not like a trip to Asia. Instead one often just feels as stupid as a laundry bag in need of some real education. (Oh thank you American public school for partially teaching me English and English alone!) And I was hardly finished with my lessons in puppet history. I was now on my way to receive a few more instructions and to tag along with a Czech puppet troupe across some of the most dangerous roads in Europe.
DRAK Puppets at the Museum of Marionette Culture in Chrudim
A short one-hour train ride the next day took me to my next destination Hradec Kralove. My purpose in coming to this town was to visit the DRAK (an acronym that spells ‘dragon’ in Czech) Theatre. And to meet with Jakub Krofta, son of Professor Joseph Krofta, who did, and continues to do, so much to change Czech puppetry. Jakub is the de facto director of the theatre most of the time and was rehearsing a new play with actors in bear costumes. When I arrived I spent the first two or three hours interviewing and chatting with Jakub. After giving me a tour of the facilities, that I must say inspired a little wistful envy, Jakub gave me much of the history of the theatre and so many interesting perspectives that it would be difficult to begin to unravel it all here. As I watched them rehearsing their bear play I felt a need to speak out from the Alaskan perspective. Bears sniff around with their sensitive noses. If you ever see this play you might notice the bruins sniffing around a bit… now you know why.
DRAK’s Jakub Krofta Rehearsing a Play About Bears
Petra Wearing the Bear Suit Without the Head
I was temporarily adopted by the troupe and was even invited to travel the next day with them back and forth to Prague on the crazy Czech roads. I felt honored. I got to know several of the cast and crew, including the petite Petra Cicáková an unusual actress/clown/puppeteer and folk musician Filip Huml. Driving on the narrow Czech roads to the wild music of a Balkan brass band was one of the more disturbing adventures I’d ever experienced. Cars passed each other in waves on the two lane highways. Once a car drifted out into the opposing lane from some three cars back and passed three more in front of us an instant before a semi-truck plowed forward on that same lane. It didn’t comfort me to later read that indeed the fatality statistics for the Czech roads are basically the worst in Europe, all fueled by the incredible (and incredibly cheap) beer. Our able driver passed at least 60 cars on the night time ride home.
The Enchanted Bagpipes Filip Huml on the Gajdy
And the play, The Enchanted Bagpipes, contained a life-size puppet or two and several actors and musicians in devil costumes. The music was curious, rewritten versions of Czech folk tunes while the lead character, Filip Huml, a Czech musicologist as well as actor, played the gajdy, the Moravian bagpipe. Quite an earful! DRAK had over time been moving more into an area that used circus techniques and masks as much as puppetry. This coincided with some of the developments at Teatr Lalka and Teatr Groteska. The message of the piece was intriguing as well. The bagpipe symbolized the Czech soul. The devils tempted Filip to surrender his bagpipes. They used the authority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the cold uniformity of the communist system and finally the randy cash of the Americanized West. I was happy to see that the old Czech tendency to use puppetry and theatre for questioning the reigning powers was far from moribund.
Petra Cicáková Tempted by the Devils After the Show
Finally in a side note, as I strolled around Chrudim, Hradec Kralove and Prague I noticed something. There is a kind of connection between Alaska and the Czech Republic. Back in the U.K. men often wore a sort of uniform short post-skinhead hairstyle. In the Netherlands a very absurd waxy hairstyle predominated for male fashion. Poland was a bit formal. France a bit more stylish. But in the Czech Republic men didn’t seem involved with any particular hair trend: Short, long, beards, mustaches, shaved headed it just didn’t seem to matter, just like back in Alaska. I felt visually quite comfortable. This has nothing to do with puppetry, or does it???
Hanging Out with the Cast of DRAK’s The Enchanted Bagpipes
Next time we finally enter the puppetry capital of Europe… Prague.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
2/15/12
For more information on DRAK:
http://www.draktheatre.cz/en-home
Go see them in Hradec Kralove!
The Museum of Marionette Culture in Chrudim is remodeling until June 2012
But this website might be helpful until then:
Eventually their English page will be back up.
Journey into European Puppetry #5
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 5- Finding the Roman Polanski Puppet
Teatr Groteska's Balladyna in April 2005 Krakow
I arrived in Poznan, Poland a day after Pope John Paul II died. After spending a requisite amount of time being thoroughly confused by Polish housing numbers I found myself at the main entrance of the Adam Mickiewicz University along with what started off as fifty or so mourners to the late Pope and which eventually grew to a march of what appeared be about twenty thousand people. I was searching for the Teatr Animacji for puppet shows. I passed it and didn’t even recognize it. The building was much grander than I was imagining any puppet theatre would be. Eventually the next day I would find it in a massive colonnaded grey cement building. I also discovered that all cultural venues in the country were closed for a week. This included puppet theatres. I also found that no one in the offices of Teatr Animacji spoke a word of English.
Cannons fire nearby at the Warsaw funeral mass for Pope John Paul II early April 2005
I continued on to Warsaw. And I met my friend Marta Czanik at the train station. Again the city was in mourning for the Pope. I attended one outdoor service that was extremely moving amongst over 100,000 thousand Poles. Although the puppet theatres were not performing that week there were a few people in the theatre. Marta came to my rescue in regards to the titanic bulk of the Teatr Lalka (teatr = theatre & lalka = puppet) and set up some meetings for me. We interviewed the artistic director for Teatr Lalka, a Polish woman with a strong character named Joanna Rogacka. Sitting in her dark office in the Palace of Culture and Science, the massive Stalinist Gothic building at the center of Warsaw, listening to this regal woman unravel the history of puppetry in the communist era, provoked quite a few thoughts. The gray morning light drifted through the windows shading the woman and her assistant Anna Bojarska is high contrasts. The furniture surrounding us was old heavy dark wood. Pani Rogacka explained that the Soviets encouraged puppetry as a form of art, though Teatr Lalka had a more elaborate history. She explained that how back in the forties a man named Jan Wilkowski began to change the presentation of puppets by stepping from behind the curtain to work with the puppets themselves on stage. Also there was clearly an influence upon the Polish style by the Russian puppet genius Sergey Obraztsov. This moved the world of Polish puppets closer towards a more artistic idea. She showed me photos of elaborate stage shows, including some tantalizing images from their version of Homer’s Odyssey. I was missing one performance because I was on my way to Krakow. But I certainly got the idea. At a certain point the interview, rather the monologue, was over. I had been granted my time. I was brimming with questions. But she was indeed a busy woman, and I was indeed fortunate to have been granted an audience. I watched a rehearsal of a story about a noble bunny rabbit, some strange looking black creatures and shadow plays. I also watched the troupe put on a clown play that reminded me of a cross between Laurel & Hardy and a child’s version of Waiting for Godot. I owe Marta good words for translating the entire interview for me. I couldn’t have done this without her.
THIS is what a puppet theatre looks like in Poland - Teatr Lalka, Warsaw
It was soon time to go to Krakow. The city was thoroughly fascinating and well worth several visits. I also detoured for a day to visit Auschwitz, which left me with conflicted emotions about the nature of our presentation of the tragedies of the past. At last I made my way over to Teatr Groteska, which was housed in another large old domed cement building. Inside, up the four or five flights of wide marble stairs, were housed examples of the theatre’s sixty-year history. I was also allowed into the puppet storage facilities. An usher named Olga told me that she had become so fascinated with the reactions of children to puppets that it had become the thesis of her doctoral dissertation. She arranged interviews for me with one of the actors of a mature puppet play, Balladyna, which I would see later in the day. But first it was time to watch a kooky version of Little Red Riding Hood. The interesting thing about all of the daytime performances was that they were all full. The theatre had made arrangements with schools across southern Poland to bring kids to the theatre. I was told that over 90,000 students a year viewed the various shows. Now that’s how it should be done!
Again... When visiting puppet theatres get yourself into the backrooms!
The afternoon show, Balladyna, was full of high school students. This was a serious work with some eerie raggedy puppets, puppets that reminded me somehow of Auschwitz, used in a way I’d never seen before. Live actors interacted with the humanoid shapes as they manipulated them. And somehow at one moment they were actors and in the next they were the puppets. The story was a dark Polish legend of sorts from a work of classic Polish literature. It was clear to me that puppets could easily do work as serious as Shakespeare’s plays if they so chose. Afterwards I spoke with one of the actors, Franciszek Mula, about the differences between puppetry and standard acting. This was actually his first puppet work. He explained that puppetry was far more humble than theatre work; that the actor had to give space to the puppets, which actually went against the obvious inclination of actors to be seen. When I asked if he would pose for a few photographs with the puppets he replied with a knowing smile, “Of course, I’m an actor.”
Franciszek Mula demonstrating the difference between actors and puppets in Balladyna
A couple of days later, after seeing one more performance with a Chinese theme and a wild use of masks, smoke and balloons (!), I had an interview through a translator with the slyly sagacious director of Groteska, Adolf Weltschek. He too explained that the theatre started as a result of the Soviet push towards classical culture at the end of World War 2. Essentially the way it worked was that the Russians thought that there were four pillars of culture: Ballet, Opera, Theatre and Puppets. That is why every Polish puppet theatre was so large. They had been financed at great expense by the Soviets. He also explained more of how the censorship issues worked. How the text of the play would be submitted to the censor for approval and then how the images might contradict the text to get another message across. He also offered me his theory that all Polish artistic puppetry was influenced by the Russians. And in fact, unlike the Czechs, the Poles did not have such an involved history of puppetry. There were some folk puppets. But the real burst in Polish puppetry had come after the Second World War. When I asked how this transference might have occurred he said probably during the war when Polish and Russian troops were fighting side by side. Before the war he said puppets were nothing special in Poland, just a folk art, but in Russia… And there was no way to get to Moscow on this trip!
Adam Weltschek, Artistic Director for Krakow's Teatr Groteska
As I was leaving Adam Weltschek, descending the marble stairs, my translator stopped. She pointed to an older funky looking puppet and remarked with pride, “This is the Roman Polanski puppet. When he was 12 years old he used to work with this puppet.” Teatr Groteska in Krakow had just become yet another crucial element of this poetic topography of puppet history.
Next we travel to heart of puppetry in Europe – the Czech Republic
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
January 25th 2012
For information on Krakow’s Teatr Groteska run this page through a translation tool
And this one on Warsaw’s Teatr Lalka
And get yourself to Poland!!!
Journey into European Puppetry #4
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 4- Puppetry Can Do Everything
Die Schaubude, a puppet repertory theatre: One very good reason to live in Berlin
On to Berlin… The name alone conjures up some powerful images: Prussian soldiers, 1920′s decadence, Hitler, the Russians ripping the city to shreds, the Cold War and dances on the crumbling Wall. It’s all there and much more: A city obliterated by the past and a perpetual construction zone preparing for an unrealized future. City workers spend time erasing neo-Nazi graffiti, while the overwhelming Turkish presence raises questions yet to be answered. What does Islam mean in secular Berlin?
My very good friend Millay Hyatt met me at the Ostbahnhof. Millay has an endless curiosity about many subjects. She took me to a Stanley Kubrick exhibit, an abandoned amusement park, rows of endless communist era buildings and a monumental Soviet World War 2 memorial, among other places. She also aided me immensely by becoming my interpreter for two puppet theatres.
The Figure Circle performing elaborate shadow puppets to music.
The first theatre, a shadow theatre called the Fuguren-Zirkel (Figure Circle), was run by an affable Austrian named Georg Jenisch. We watched romantic and psychedelic displays of light and shadow along with the music of Mozart’s Magic Flute. His entrancing figures were elaborately cut from malleable plastic or even flexible plastic mirrors to give an effect of not only shadow puppets but of light figures as well. Strange little figures danced around in a large circular window, the size of a pair of outstretched adult arms, and it seemed impossible that there was only one man behind the stage. His figures were based partly on Turkish shadow puppets. But he was also clearly influenced by the work of the brilliant silhouette filmmaker and shadow puppeteer Lotte Reiniger. He was also a musician himself and composed music for his performances at times. Georg thought his figures should only move to music and never speak. This was similar in style to the Salzburg Marionette Theater where he had indeed worked. Puppet art had been more innovative in the 90s, he felt, yet he seemed to feel it was regrouping. Overall it was a courteous and friendly interview.
Fuguren-Zirkel (Figure Circle) a magical one man show by Austrian, Georg Jenisch
It was then time to see Das Weite Theater performing a piece called The White Hammer at Die Schaubude Theater, which was the funniest piece of puppet art I’ve yet to see. A small cuddly white bunny hops out onto the stage. It eats what appear to be real carrots. A sinister female puppet slinks out onto the stage and then without warning pounces upon the critter and slices open the rabbits throat in an exceptionally bloody scene of red cloth blood. I know this doesn’t sound funny. But trust me the abrupt U-turn between cute little bunny and mad slasher was outrageously funny. I mean who expects a white rabbit to be mercilessly slaughtered within the first few minutes of a play. (Don’t worry though the bunny’s ghost returns near the end of the evening.) The rest of the play was a comic farce based on whodunnits. Blockheaded puppets carved by Czechs moved in frantically satirical actions. One buck-toothed woman spun around in circles every time some the possibility of danger was even hinted at. The farcical movements were given to them by Torsten Gesser and Irene Winter. It was mostly just the two of them with as many as six large wooden hand puppets at a time. And they turned out to be excellent interview subjects. Millay Hyatt provided excellent help by translating their predominantly German speech.
The White Hammer from Das Weite Theater
As we spoke I began to piece together the story of puppetry behind the Iron Curtain. The Communist state, through direct Russian orders, funded puppet theatres. For years an artistic council planned the repertoire, which was mostly Russian Fairy Tales and folk tales. Before the Wall fell there were 17 serious puppet theatres in East Germany. Shows for adults began in the early 1980′s, notably a puppet presentation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper or as it is know in English the Three Penny Opera. (Brecht was known for his leftward leanings.)
Was criticism of the government present in these puppet shows?
“The puppet theatres did not feel as much pressure as the standard Theatre and the Opera did.” said Irene. “There was always a way to express criticism through puppetry in the GDR. You didn’t do it in a blatant way though, you used subtlety. People in East Germany were used to reading between the lines. So the audience could tell when something was being said.”
Was it done by allegory?
“Here’s an example?” Irene continued. “ We did a version of satirical Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There were soldiers in the forest watching everything. They were spies for the Queen. You didn’t have to spell out what this meant. Everyone knew it was a criticism of state paranoia. The spies in the forest were even wearing the uniforms of the state police. So we always expressed criticism. And sometimes the audience would read criticism into works where none was intended. And they would be thinking ‘Wow! They are so daring! They actually said that?’ But there were colleagues of ours who did try to speak in a more directly political way. And they did have trouble with the authorities”
Torsten added, “ Then, you did have a feeling that people actually heard you when you were being critical. Nowadays when you are critical they laugh; they don’t listen, nobody cares. But then, you definitely had the sense that criticism was effective.”
Did more people come to the puppet theatres then?
“Theatre was much more affordable back then.” Torsten remarked. “And it was considered a necessity. People were encouraged to go to the theatre from a very young age. The thought was, ‘If we can’t provide them with consumer goods, then we’ll provide them with culture.”
Torsten Gesser and Irene Winter of Das Weite Theater in Berlin
And after the Berlin Wall came down?
“It was a 180º turn.” Torsten said, “We had a professional career. Now we are freelancers.”
“In West Germany they weren’t working with puppets in a professional way.” Irene pointed out. “There weren’t university courses on puppetry. So West Germans were more self-taught or following older folk traditions. But there was no professional training.”
They had been cut off from puppetry in the West. And so it was a bit of a shock for them to see the accommodations that might have to be made to continue as puppeteers in the Western mode. Irene lamented some of the changes.
“So after the Wall came down the East German style began to become more of a popular entertainment mostly for children, although there was some movement the other way. But in the West is was more of an entertainment and in East Germany it was an art.”
Das Weite Theater Irene & Torsten
When I asked them if they did shows for children they said “No! We do shows for families.” And the distinction was important for them. They didn’t want to be confined to the kiddie ghetto.
“When we have material, we think about what we are trying to convey, we don’t think about age groups.” Torsten explained. “ We try to get across the central idea, what we find fascinating in the material.”
When we did speak of contemporary children and their fixation on screens, they concurred with guignoliste Pascal Pruvost about the tangible reality of puppetry in communicating with modern kids. Irene called it the “live sensual nature” of the puppet.
Finally I just asked them the most basic, yet most difficult question: What is Puppetry?
Irene burst out laughing “Puppetry can do everything!”
Torsten agreed “It can portray thousands of images and fantasies.”
(Next: We travel to Poland to find some of the largest puppet theatres in the world.)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
1/11/12
When in Berlin you MUST visit…
http://www.schaubude-berlin.de/
And Das Weite Theater
http://www.das-weite-theater.de/
And don’t miss The Figure Circle
And remember to run these through translation tools if your German isn’t up to snuff. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak German, you’ll still find yourself truly impressed.
Journey into European Puppetry #3
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 3- The Reality Principle
We walked three floors up to an attic room with a pitched ceiling and exposed beams at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ESNAM) in Charleville-Mézières, France. A Polish student, with the nearly unpronounceable name Przemyslaw Piotrowski, dragged in three scruffily constructed crosses as the room darkened. He also had several nameless placards like the one that read I.N.R.I. hanging above Christ on the cross. He handed one to an audience member with a faint smile foreshadowing death. He handed out another. Then he set up the crosses and began to reveal how each of these people died and their relationships. They were just people from his life. People he was intimate with. He was the crucifier. The story was predominately about his complicity in their deaths. In the end he crawls to a light emanating from a box. He finds a small door. He knocks on it and prays in Polish. Finally a dark eerie face comes to the window. But there is no sound coming from it. He finds that it is just a mask. But a mask for whom? He doesn’t know. He stops there waiting for an answer.
Przemislaw Piotrowski performing his piece based on a text by Thierry Panchaud
Before we can find out we descend again back to the long dark hall downstairs continuing on to the next student performance. This time we pass through the long blackened hall into a room where a woman is reading names and stories on a wall. It felt like autumn with dead twisted branches on the floor and walls and walnuts in rows on the ground. The voice continued reading from brown pages on the wall. It is the elfin black haired girl again. She is of Russian ancestry from Romania. Her name is Aurélia Ivan. When she introduced Julia’s piece she seemed shy and quiet with a whisper of a voice and an open smile. But now no one had any trouble hearing her strong words as she read from the wall in her dark dress while holding a wicker basket full of walnuts. She was transformed from petite girl with a gentle smiling face into the strongest of women. She spoke directly and with authority, but also quite sadly and compassionately. She finally leaned over while reading a list of attributes describing a proud man named Jean (John). She pronounced his final name, ‘Jean le mort.’ (John the dead.) Then she picked up a walnut and looked at it. She backed down this hall beckoning us to follow. The text was an extract from Valére Navarina’s longer dramatic work, La Chair de l’Homme (The Flesh of Man).
Aurélia Ivan reading from the wall with a cemetery of walnuts below her.
Aurélia then stood behind a wooden drawer that had been filled with sand. Then slowly she picked up a strange twisted root with a little plaster face attached to it. Faces inspired by the work of artist Jephan de Villiers. And she brought it slowly forward speaking in its voice. Then she planted it in the sand. Then she brought forth another root in a quite different shape with a different motion, with a different voice and planted that in the sand. By the time she was finished she had more than a dozen of these root creatures in this box carrying on a conversation in different voices about how they would eat the body below them. We followed her and walked through a jungle of phrases hanging from the ceiling which were in French and a little too poetic for me to quite understand. Finally we stood before long scraggly bare branches whose shadows grew as she waved her illuminated hands before them. Suddenly they seemed alive. She came to a door, rapped with her knuckles and it opened. She turned to us with her basket full of walnuts and bid us to leave through the door. As we left she handed us each a walnut, the fruit of decomposition, the possibility of something new.
Aurélia Ivan and her Hungry Roots in Valére Navarina’s La Chair de l’Homme
I stepped outside into the light my head exploding with ideas. I viewed a few other student shows but these few quite exploded my concept of puppet theatre while confirming exactly why I had taken this journey. I had been attracted to the general idea of puppetry, suspecting that as an obscure art it contained ways of communicating that been barricaded in other art forms. Yet here was a form that could speak to children, everyone’s first prejudice about puppets, yet could also in the right hands deliver strong philosophical ideas as well. I didn’t necessarily agree with all of the content of what I saw. But I didn’t need to be kicked in the head to realize that this was indeed a powerful medium for ideas. And it had both ancient rules and a new vitality. It was also clear to me that it could communicate in a way that could possibly move beyond the postmodern dilemma. And this was the time to explore it.
The day ended with my talking to Julia Kovacs and Aurélia Ivan and photographing parts of their presentations after their evening shows had finished. As I was talking with Aurélia, who was quite serious and curious about why I had come all the way from Alaska to watch the student performances, there was an older French man who stood near us occasionally supplying French or English words to help the conversation along. As I was finishing my discussion with her she said “Oh! Do you know who this is?” Of course I didn’t. “His name is Francois Lazaro.” And then she proceeded to tell me he had been a teacher there for 15 years and had is own puppet theatre in Paris, the Clastic Theatre. And I turned and said, “So I guess should interview you?” He agreed and we set up a time the next day. And I walked back to the hotel that night, my head bursting with ideas, realizing that I had just had an unrepeatable day. I thought of the performances I had seen and the people I had met. And the way that puppetry could speak volumes in the right hands.
Clea Minaker's puppet trash heap
The next morning I met student Clea Minaker from Canada at a café for coffee and an interview. The first thing she said to me was that not all of the presentations were as serious or philosophical as the ones I had seen. The other set of performances had a lot crazier pieces. Her own piece was evidently built upon a mountain of consumer rubbish as she was coated in latex sheathes. (She had shown me the structure the evening before. A photo of the performance briefly glimpsed lead me to conclude that it must have been a wild piece.) Clea also explained the way the school worked. Oddly enough, there were only fifteen students in the school at any one time. The course lasted three years. And the same fifteen students moved together from an understanding of traditional puppet techniques, theatrical history, acting skills, experimental ideas and live performances. Several important European puppeteers passed through Charleville-Mézières with their shows. And the education was all for free, including the room and board. The students didn’t even need a college degree. They just needed to demonstrate their interest through past projects, speak passable French and survive the winnowing process. Clea also came back to the same line of thinking that Pascal in Paris had, that in today’s world puppet theatre provided a real tangible presence rather than yet another televised electronic spectacle. (Not that she was against puppet films.) The live performance was the chief importance of puppets in our times. So here at the International Institute for Marionettes it was quite clear that they were quite consciously leaning against the currents of the day. Clea certainly spoke of a profusion ideas herself and understood the importance of fighting against the tide of virtual electronic images to find something new. That is what struck me about the school in general: It was a place that profoundly encouraged intellectual searching and questioning in both a theoretical and a practical manner. These students truly were asking serious questions. Puppets were not seen as yet more mindless entertainment but as a means for provoking real thought.
François Lazaro of the Clastic Theatre
Later I met Francois Lazaro for a beer in a café and we had a fascinating conversation about puppets, theatre and philosophical ideas. He had been performing puppet shows since 1966. We discussed his influences: Beckett, Švankmajer, even Tarkovsky. He also was quite aware of the special nature of puppets to reality in this media saturated age. For him puppets held revolutionary possibilities, not in the political sense, but in changing our view of things. He felt that traditional theatre had come to a dead end and was borrowing increasingly more from puppetry to stay alive. As we were talking Aurélia dropped in and joined the conversation. We all talked about the reality principle a little more. Aurélia was just as serious as Clea and Francois in her feeling that puppetry was a unique art form for the present moment. She planned on producing her own plays. And she had the intensity and commitment to pull it off. When she asked me how I even knew to come to see the students perform she locked eyes with me in a way that showed the need to have the question answered earnestly. She would be joining Francois’ troupe after graduation. These puppeteers understood the need for engaging the brain, a desperate shortage everywhere these days. They knew well that this world of simulated knowledge, cheap information and hollow entertainments could only be opposed by something as small, humble, tangible and intelligent as puppets. It was a way forward culturally, a way out of the maze, possibly a way to actually get people to laugh or cry or miraculously to reconsider their ideas, especially those created in virtual miasma of this 21st Century.
But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first. Matthew 19:30
(Next time we discover shadow puppets in Berlin and have a serious laugh.)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
12/23/11
…………..
To learn more about Clea Minaker’s recent activities:
http://cleaminaker.wordpress.com/
And to see images from her 2005 ESNAM performance:
http://cleaminaker.wordpress.com/past-projects-2003-2007/
To discover what Aurélia Ivan has been doing since 2005:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/TSARA/206935446038225?sk=wall
To learn more about The Clastic Theatre this link might be helpful:
http://www.clastictheatre.com/
For more information about the Institut International De La Marionnette (en Français):
http://www.marionnette.com/fr/
And about ESNAM:
http://www.premiumorange.com/marionnette/pages_recherche/uk/esnam_cond_admiss_uk.htm
They used to have an English page but there are translation tools… Here is an English version of the course of study:
http://www.premiumorange.com/marionnette/pages_recherche/uk/esnam_prog_etude_uk.htm
Journey into European Puppetry #2
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 2- The Unexpected
Back in 2005 when I was traveling across Europe looking for puppet theatres I did not plan on visiting every country. Sadly there would not be time for Sicilian puppets in Italy or a good old English Punch and Judy show. But I wanted to make an arc from France into Central Europe and back. There were several reasons for my journey: among them pure fascination, a desire to visit European cities with a purpose beyond sightseeing and a love of the art form. I also suspected that there was more going on in the realm of puppetry than could be seen from my media saturated American perspective. In 2000 I had visited several puppet theatres in Bucharest, Vienna and Prague while making my irregular visit through Europe. I had also been considering ways to incorporate puppetry into some other presentation. I had a mistaken notion that puppets might be added somehow to another form to create something new: Mistaken because I didn’t fully grasp what puppetry itself could do yet. But I strongly suspected that there were ways to present ideas through the use of puppets that had been minimized or even cut off in other art forms. With that in mind I decided not only to visit puppet theatres on this trip but also to interview puppeteers for a possible magazine article or two. I assumed quite correctly that the puppet masters would not have phalanxes of bodyguards keeping regular folks away. I knew that there was something here yet I wasn’t expecting to strike gold. But that’s what happened in my own creative thinking when I arrived at the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières in the north of France.
l'École National Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ESNAM) a 2005 brochure featuring several of the students I saw.
Now I really had no expectations at all about what I would find there. In fact it was the most dubious stop on my puppet trip. All I knew was that it was called the International Institute for Marionnettes (Marionnettes meaning all puppets in French.) and that there was a school attached to it. I didn’t know exactly where it was situated within the town. I didn’t know if there was any puppet theatre connected to it that I could visit. I had discovered their website. I had written to someone about possibly conducting an interview in English with someone. I rerouted my email to someone else with a promisingly English sounding name. My inquiry was never returned. But I did notice in a French language version of the town’s website that it seemed to be saying that the students were giving midterm presentations that were open to the public. I would miss half of them. But I committed myself to going and booked a hotel reservation for two nights. Vague indeed, however I figured that at worst I’d probably be in another French town with an old town square and some decent food.
Inauspiciously, the train didn’t take me all the way there. Track work forced me to arrive in Charleville-Mézières by bus. I couldn’t find a city map for sale at the station. So I memorized the train station’s map and started looking for my hotel. I found the street and then noticed a sign that said “Institut International de la Marionnette” with an arrow pointing my way. I sighed. Now I won’t have to spend my time hunting the place down. I dumped my heavy baggage onto the bed of the hotel. Then I realized that it was past three o’clock and that I really should get out there and find the institute. After turning the wrong way once I came upon another sign on the road. I turned to look in that direction. There next to a three story tall statue of a marionette figure built into the side of a building I saw the Institute. I entered sheepishly and asked “Parlez vous Anglais?” at the front desk, to which I received a “Non”. Then I tried in my halting French to discover if anyone there did. Another woman came out. Her English was only slightly less halting than my French. Was it possible to interview anyone? Alas no. The teachers had just finished reviewing the student’s works and were engaged in long meetings discussing them. Were the student presentations open to the public? Well, yes. They took my name and put it on a list for the 7PM shows. A group of perhaps ten people shuffled behind us then left the building. The woman I was talking with exchanged a brief word in French with someone behind me then abruptly turned to me saying, “You can go with them.” Where? “To see a few presentations. But you’ll be missing two of them.” So I hurried out to catch up with the small band of pedestrians as they rounded the corner of the building.
I walked with them perhaps five blocks mystified as to where I might be going. I heard a woman speaking in a familiar accent. She was a Canadian woman who has come to see her daughter’s performance. I had missed seeing her daughter’s piece, she was with the earlier group. But she explained a little bit about the school, l’École National Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette or ESNAM. At length we came to a large old arched wooden door. The woman leading the parade opened it and we entered a compact antique stone courtyard. A girl in her mid-twenties was standing near old rusting equipment. She was wearing a black dress; her hair was pulled back. She would not have been out of place at a New York dinner party. Hanging on a rusty pipe were several woolen scarves in black, beige and brown. She picked one up and placed it around someone’s neck. She began to talk about the word, la parole, how it brings humor, sorrow and many other qualities. She eventually placed scarves around every neck. She looked directly into everyone’s eyes as she repeated her gesture. When she bestowed a scarf upon me she said that la parole leads to silence. Evidently this was to be a philosophical piece related to the pain in relationships. After she finished dispensing the scarves she pushed the remainder of them away to revealing a dark stairway leading down to a dungeon. We all must bow to step down these stairs as we enter the dark chamber illuminated by two or three small lights. After we have huddled together in the dark she descended slowly with dim lights attached to her palms. She crept along the side of the walls, reminding me of Cesare, the somnambulist, from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, until she came to what appeared to be a small homemade meat grinder. She placed a few small smooth stones inside and “ground” them into sand. She continued her comments about words and silence as she continued to follow a row of smooth rounded stones on the side of a stone wall. She disappeared through a doorway and with the slightest of gestures beckoned us to follow. We entered an even darker more claustrophobic room. Piles of stones lay on the floor. She slowly organized them into a spiral. Then she followed the stones to what looked like a slightly oversized ant farm with a frozen shadow puppet person floating in silhouette inside. She then slowly poured sand into it burying the figure ‘alive’. Finally she spoke again about words and silence. The last thing she said to us was that the very last word will be ‘Believe.’ She picked up a large rounded stone and walked off alone into a blackened corridor, the rock illumined by light emanating from her hands. And the piece was finished and she came back for a bow almost in tears at the intensity she had put into it. Her name was Julie Trezel.
This was the only the first performance. I may not have concurred entirely with the philosophy of the piece but I was completely captivated by the presentation. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. But before I could consider it too much we were walking towards the next show.
ESNAM Student performers in 2005: Julia Kovacs & Aurélia Ivan.
We passed in front of an old church, practically a cathedral, and we entered a building near it. We stopped in a workshop with a couple of circular saws. By this time I was fully expecting that the saws would be a part of the next performance. (And why not?) Then a petite black haired girl in a long dark dress spoke to us. She said that the piece by Hungarian Julia Kovacs would begin in just a moment. As the time passed I was introduced to the Canadian woman’s daughter Clea Minaker and she was interested to talk with me about the school once the performances were over. She informed me that each of these midterm performances was to be done in collaboration with a French author and that it was essentially a lesson in working with a text. At last Aurelia, the raven-haired girl, led us into a darkened room that was smothered in black felt. She sat us down on wooden benches as we stared into the impenetrable void. All of the lights were extinguished.
Julia Kovacs and her puppets demonstrating the nature of war.
In the pitch blackness of that hall a white light was projected some ten meters away from us against a rough textured pale stone wall and against a tall brunette girl who was dressed in a white robe. Her hair was minimized being pulled back. She appeared to us almost as a statue from classical antiquity. Written words scrolled horizontally on the wall, against her human form. She began to speak in a clear burning voice. From what I could gather with my faulty French she was speaking about war and about what kind of people we are in relationship to war and to fear. The projection and the lights vanished. In the utter dark she held a wooden box that was then opened in a way loosely reminiscent of Pandora. Light shone from the box. She moved spectrally towards us asking questions as she paused to place broken puppets on nearly invisible black boxes. Where does war come from? She advanced closer and closer to us with her crippled marionettes. All were white or dirty beige, and while missing limbs, they were clearly homunculi, though none had defining features, hair, clothing, even color. She continued speaking about war and fear as she little by little drew nearer and nearer to us. She stopped directly in front of us before two waist high felt covered platforms. Transfixing our eyes she removed the last two puppets from the box. Though, like the others, they were both featureless and white they were also both completely intact and quite clearly male and female. I say they were featureless but this was not true of their faces. While hairless and unclothed, like unfinished dolls off of an assembly line, their faces were genuinely distinct, even riveting. This may have something to do with their eyes, which caught the light and reflected it back. The puppeteer then began to speak through the female form. She turned to look at the male puppet and she began to ask him about fear and war and life. The robed girl then changed positions slightly and began to articulate the male figure in more defiant gestures and to speak his voice. Basically he said that there is no reason to fear, these things are all just a part of life. You have to be strong, get used to it. The female continued to plead with him to help her understand. He became more incensed, more frustrated. She in turn was pleading now too much, too pitifully and he in turn was now frighteningly angered. The puppeteer, though directly before us the entire time, so inhabited the characters, that she had disappeared into each of them by turns. Finally she posed them each in their habitual attitudes: the female homunculus in a supplicating position, the male in defiance. The white robed specter finally turned away from them repeating her questions about war then sadly proclaiming all that remains is the blood. The lights were then extinguished.
Julia Kovacs from Hungary at ESNAM performing ‘Si le vent le dit’
The small audience applauded the riveting performance with vigor. The program notes explained that Julia’s piece was an extract of a longer work by Perrine Griselin, entitled ‘Si le vent le dit’ (If the wind says). I was so entranced by this performance that I couldn’t even remember to record the audio for it after the second session later that night. But one thing was certain… my impressions of what puppetry was and could do had just been smashed to pieces.
But I was hardly finished with my tour through the student performances at ESNAM.
(To be continued soon…)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
12/22/11
For more information about the Institut International De La Marionnette (en Français):
http://www.marionnette.com/fr/
And about ESNAM (en Français):
http://www.marionnette.com/fr/Esnam/Presentation
They used to have an English page but there are translation tools… But here is an English version of the course of study:
http://www.premiumorange.com/marionnette/pages_recherche/uk/esnam_prog_etude_uk.htm
Journey into European Puppetry #1
Notes from European Puppet Explorations in 2005
Part 1- The Little Buffoons
- Guignol as performed by Les Petits Bouffons de Paris
It was a pleasant Parisian Sunday afternoon in March 2005. After watching several men tightrope-walking high up in the trees of the Buttes Chaumont Park as part of the French Arbor day celebrations we strolled over to the small Theatre Guignol Anatole. I had come to visit Les Petits Bouffons (the Little Buffoons) de Paris. Pascal Pruvost was a wiry stubble-headed man with a striking countenance. Bernard Willeme, his laconic partner in Guignol crimes, stood by. When asked by my friend Corinne which story they were going to perform today he replied in French “I have no idea yet.” The show was only a half-hour away. Both men were around 40 years old and certainly did not fit the American stereotype for the kind of people who perform with puppets for children. But I suppose that is because too many Americans equate puppets solely with cute and goofy Muppet-like creatures.
Guignoliste Pascal Pruvost ringing the traditional bell before the performance
Eventually it was time for the show. Pascal took a large old brass hand bell and walked around near the entrance of the compact outdoor theatre and rang it. This was the traditional signal that Guignol was about to appear to work his mischief. Guignol is the French relative of Punch in England,Kašpárekin the Czech Republic, Jan Klaassen in Holland, Kasperl in Germany: all descendants of Pulcinella of the Comedia del Arte in Italy. He is not as viscous as Punch but will always eventually find a way to get the Gendarme in trouble. To these American eyes, deprived as we are of a native Punch variation, he reminds me of the old Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny. The brilliant thing about these performances is the way get the children involved. Although involved is too polite a term. In this episode the officious Gendarme was eaten by a large puppet crocodile. After the Gendarme’s demise, Guignol arrives on the stage to have a picnic and to go fishing. The crocodile lurks just off stage; the children go nuts trying to warn the hapless Guignol. They shout. They point. They even stand. Guignol turns to the kids several times and says, “What are you talking about? I don’t see a crocodile.” They point furiously at the corner of the little stage. He continues fishing. A big tug is felt on the line… the children are almost pulling their hair out. Of course, in the end Guignol survives because he is Guignol. And you can’t kill Bugs Bunny. You can’t kill Guignol.
The kids are alright. Les enfants sont bien.
On Monday I took the metro out to the 20th arrondissement to find the office of Les Petits Bouffons. I was greeted by Pascal and Bernard in their small stuffy studio. They showed me dozens and dozens of puppets that were hanging from hooks on the wall. Pascal explained that they did longer shows like Beauty and the Beast and Puss’n’Boots, not forgetting to mention a few very bloody fairytales that did not find a home in the English-speaking world. They also had a futuristic (!) Guignol show. As comical as these shows could be these guys were very serious about the Guignol tradition. And even if they performed a standard fairytale Guignol had to at least be a minor character in the show, a butler or a waiter. In my interview with Pascal we discussed the meaning of puppets in this postmodern age. He pointed out that children have changed even since they started the troupe in 1991. Kids are now so immersed in television, games or computer screens that, even at a very young age, they come to the puppet show with very different expectations than they used to. As a result they are even more surprised than they used to be. You see the stage of the puppet theatre resembles an enormous television screen to the child’s untrained eyes. So they expect something like a movie. But then as they watch something strange happens. The puppets become real. They talk to the children. They come out from the stage in three tactile dimensions. They are completely unpredictable. All of Les Petits Bouffons’ performances are improvisations based upon many traditional plots.
Pascal Pruvost of Les Petits Bouffons in the studio.
Guignoliste Bernard Willeme with his background art
But the rascally Guignol or the anarchic Punch stand very far down on the puppetry scale of respect. Pascal said when it comes to puppet festivals “They don’t want to see us. It’s all become about the Performing Object. It’s become quite artistic.” Yet even though Guignol performances are folk art of the highest order they are basically ignored in the world around them. Yet it’s guys like Pascal and Bernard, with a passion for the strange little rogue, that keep the tradition alive: Guys like these and the thousands upon thousands of French children and their parents who accompany them to relive their own childhood Guignol recollections. I felt kind of proud of them for holding down the fort without much recognition or financial reward just because they value the reality of the puppet over the artificiality of the televised screen. Impressive.
More specimens including the Gendarme, the Devil and even a Czech Spejbl hanging around the Bouffons' atelier.
In 2008 the 200-year anniversary of Guignol was held in Lyon. The future of puppetry may indeed come down to performers like Les Petits Bouffons de Paris. The future is always built upon the past. Guignol is a slice of living history. Next time you are in Paris (or Lyon) check out the little buffoon
Meanwhile the Journey into European Puppetry continues with a visit to the surprising École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
11/27/11
For More Information about Les Petits Bouffons de Paris
More puppetry on The Anadromous Life
http://theanadromist.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/antidote-art-1/
http://theanadromist.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/antidote-art-2/
American Gothic #6
American Gothic Culture
There are questions and implications that I have left dangling during this survey of various aspects of American Gothic Culture. And undoubtedly I have left a few confusions uncovered. Since this has been essentially an introduction to a subject that doesn’t really seem to have been dealt with before I’m well aware of how many other examples I could pull from a hat. There many discussions left to be had about what is and isn’t American Gothic Culture. There is also a fairly serious delineation to be made between this nascent American Gothic sensibility and what is often called Goth. I will attempt a little of that now.
Gas by Edward Hopper - The Isolation of What Was Once a Quotidian Scene
One question that has been left unexplored is this: Why did American Gothic Music take so long to come into being? The short answer goes like this. Music has always been a part of that which links people together. Thus there has often been an underlying sense of confidence that often pervades the music. Music often has a joyful component to it. Or at least a simulacrum of joy as in the sterile ‘fun’ of so much pop music. Even the blues, as painful as they can be, often has an aspect of hope buried in the implications: The idea that “the sun will shine on my back door someday”. Or even the notion that by hearing the pain of these lyrics someone will change somehow.
American Gothic Music for the Next Generation: Jessica Herenadez in the Decay of Detroit
As a result music hasn’t been the best vessel for expressing real darkness… until fairly recently. After years of exploring various musical phenomena I think I can fairly confidently state that it wasn’t until the 1960’s that a certain kind of philosophical darkness entered popular music with groups like Love and The Doors. This existential dread festered into real anomie with Iggy and the Stooges. (It is curious to note that all of these bands were on Elektra Records.) And finally the music erupted into explicit rage with the Sex Pistols in 1976. And this rage was new. I don’t just mean it was a new musical trend. I mean in all of the history of music there was absolutely no precedent for such blood curdling scabrous anguish as to be found in, say, The Birthday Party’s Fears of Gun where Nick Cave vomits out the word ‘Love’ as if being disemboweled. You can search all you want, I have, for anything that sounds remotely that angry… you will never find it, prior to that point in human history.
It takes that sort of bleak intensity to comprehend the American Gothic vision. And it is not Nick Cave’s spewing forth that is his American Gothic work. It came when he started to try to find answers for the questions he had posed about the nature of humanity. And this is one reason why American Gothic Culture is vastly different than the usual Euro-Goth scene. Goth is about the darkness. Goth is about vampires, funerary motifs, ghosts. It finds these images to be helpful as some sort of anodyne to the blandness of contemporary culture. Goth also dips into fetishes quite liberally; leather, rubber, corsets, etc. Goth Culture seems to say I am the darkness. I want to be a vampire. I want to be as spectral as a ghost. I want to be cool. Don’t dream it, be it.
American Gothic Culture seems quite Other, by comparison. Even the darkest of the dark within the American Gothic spectrum, for instance Ambrose Bierce or Joe Coleman seem to have other fish to fry. Instead of being cool, their work seems to scream, “Why is it so dark? Huh!” Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a fever pitched cry of black despair fuelled more by cosmic anger at the insanity surrounding him than by any desire to laugh at the rubes. Even the extremely sardonic and gory humor of EC Comics can be seen as a series of serious questions. The man who pulls the face off of an ugly woman with a hot body trying to get her to unmask says more about the mysteries and problems of beauty in this dark world than has ever been written in a fashion magazine.
Pulp Artist Virgil Finlay Examines Darker Themes
In fact the hallmark of real American Gothic work is a recognition of the evil, the bleakness, the absurdity, the darkness of the human condition. And that’s the answer to another implication: Why don’t folks with an American Gothic perspective sell out to the commercial forces the way Hippies, Beats, Punks, Rappers, etc ad nauseum seem to do? It’s because there is no point in becoming huge. There is no progressive utopian Romantic goal to achieve. The end is already seen in the beginning. That doesn’t mean that Tom Waits, Cormac McCarthy or other successful American Gothic folks aren’t happy to be selling a few books and discs. But the truth is they aren’t driven by commercial imperatives. If they didn’t sell a thing their viewpoint wouldn’t really change.
America's Premier American Gothic Novelist: Cormac McCarthy
Fascinatingly American Gothic Culture houses both Christians and Atheists quite comfortably. But by Christians I don’t mean the contemporary commercial mega-church consumers. I mean folks like Johnny Cash, Flannery O’Connor, David Eugene Edwards. Nick Cave has been seemingly close to Christian faith at times. And by atheists I don’t mean the Richard Dawkins variety of confident hucksters, I mean the bleaker, more honest souls like an Ambrose Bierce or H.P. Lovecraft. And it was Lovecraft who admired the Puritans for their darkness.
In Night of the Hunter Devout Unromantic Christian Lillian Gish Plays a Woman Not Conned by the Imitation
But the point is this: These aren’t the gullible folks. These folks don’t seem to have nice positive attitudes. They aren’t trying to boost anyone’s self-esteem. They aren’t Romantic in any sense of the word. (Another big difference with Goth Culture.) There is no collusion between Disney and American Goth. There is no cute version of American Gothic Culture. And most interestingly American Gothic sensibility is in no way Postmodern.
Postmodern Culture thrives on postmodern irony. It lives on the deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe into Madonna into Lady Gaga. It lives on surfaces, since surfaces are deemed to be the only reality. It takes style as substance, content as merely social conditioning. It laughs at seriousness as pretension. The old Modernism was way too serious, though in disassembling everything they paved the way for the ironic hordes. Who to say that Beverly Hills 90210 isn’t as good as James Joyce?
American Gothic trumps postmodern irony with bitter irony. And bitter irony is fairly impervious to deconstruction. Who can deconstruct the Texas Chain Saw Massacre? I don’t mean you can’t make fun of it. Sure you can. But you have to get into the dark EC Comics mode to do it. But I mean put the DVD into your machine tonight. See who wins? Leatherface or postmodern irony? There is no contest. Your most postmodern child will wither before such an onslaught. Why? Because although there is humor to be found there, ultimately this thing is too damned serious to be turned into a deconstruction of itself. Tobe Hooper really believed in the power of the chainsaw. The same goes for The Road (film or book), Winter’s Bone (ditto), Nick Cave wailing Saint Huck or Tom Waits who uses humor all the time, yet really can’t be touched be postmodern irony.
Bernie Wrightson's Mementos as a Three Dimensional Model
The reason that academic theoretical babble about appropriation or deconstruction don’t get to far down the American Gothic road is because instead of ironic appropriation you have junkyard salvage, instead of deconstruction, you are faced with a much older stronger concept: destruction. American Gothic Culture is entropic. It sees the limits of a culture, our own, that is based upon endless progress and positive vibes. American Gothic Culture sees the good effects of negativity: The meaning behind the word No.
This isn’t to say that every artist I’ve mentioned was consciously saying No to the mindless optimism of the larger culture. But I do believe a good many of them have. There is a sense of realism in the face of the endless facades. American Gothic Culture is not an active movement. There is no town I could recommend for you to hang out in for American Goth trappings. There is intelligence, sorrow, black humor, history and even sometimes deeper strands of questioning and faith to be found in American Gothic outlook. At it’s best the American Gothic sensibility is a lot like the character of Ree in Winter’s Bone or even Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is grit and integrity in the face of the American nightmare, which it projects as the growing dimming entropic reality of the American future.
Ode to a Failing Country - Jennifer Lawrence as Ree in Winter's Bone
We’ll leave this introduction to American Gothic Culture here. But it is obviously one form of Anadromous Life being birthed in our times, one culture going against the stream of endless propaganda and the hype, a real question mark in the face the growing fiction of the 21st Century.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
7/25/11
Dark Cloud Coming
My head’s been in a cloud lately. I don’t mean I’ve been distracted by airy dreams. Rather I’ve been pondering the growing cloud of digital information that seems to be drifting into view across the peaks of technological development: What we all soon will be calling “The Cloud”.
The Cloud is Forming on the Horizon
The concept of the Cloud has been morphing into existence ever since binary information could be transferred through a telegraph pole. And now since so much of our world has been translated into code and stored on servers we find ourselves getting closer to a decisive point in… well I was going to write ‘human development’, but that is definitely the wrong idea. Progress? Nay. Evolution? Hardly. Extinction? Too dramatic, but perhaps actually closer to the truth.
What is The Cloud? Let me give you my brief non-techie explanation. The Cloud is the aggregate of servers that contain the repository of information that is circulated digitally. It could be something only contained within local computers or data parsed and stored in a variety of public or private servers. In short it is where our digital info is stored as opposed to the Internet, which is a way to access the Cloud. Now I’m no specialist in these fields so please don’t try to nail me down to an exact definition here. I’m fully aware that there are much more precise definitions. You can find them on the Cloud… and that IS the point.
But here is what I do know something about: the raw data that is being transferred into the Cloud for safekeeping and pecuniary interest – music, film, books, photographs, audio recordings, news and anything else that can be translated into digital bytes. Now of course this is all old news to you I’m sure. It shouldn’t come as a shock to you that CD’s are giving way to downloads or that newspapers are having troubles surviving.
But let me give you a scattering of various factoids related to this digitization of reality. Did you know that in Spain they hardly make DVD’s anymore because most people just download mostly bootlegged copies of movies? Or the fact that the promotional wings of many American music distributors are in the process of whittling their physical CD’s down as they try, desperately, to get their music heard on radio stations. Instead of receiving an album a radio station now is often sent an email with a link and then told that they have received the music.
Or how about this question: What is going to happen to public libraries the more we devote ourselves to downloading virtual literature? There are a host of strange issues here. If the library lets you download a book is it yours? The answer so far is no. Or consider the strange things happening in the competition to develop better digital readers. So you connect your computer to the Cloud to receive your digital copy of a book. Now you’ve bought this book outright. But what if the company has made an erratum that needs to be fixed. Well guess what? The next time you plug in to your source to get another book it’s very possible they may “fix” your book for you. And here is where the darkness of the Cloud really starts forming.
Now if someone walked into my house, uninvited, to correct the errors, or worse the legal problems, in one of the books on my shelves, especially a representative of the company that sold it to me, I’d be pretty salty about it. But people don’t seem to realize that when things like this happen digitally it’s the same thing. And that it because nobody looks at all this digital tackle like it represents anything in particular. It is after all just zeros and ones, dots and dashes. And as we transfer more of our creative life to the binary we surrender to a strange record and erase mentality. We have a pad or pod or lapdog and we fill it with virtual baubles until we get full. Then we all erase to make more room. And no matter how much memory we have we will always fill it up with bigger and bigger files. And that is why the Cloud is coming into a prominence. Rather than keep all of your digital gunk on your simultaneously shrinking and expanding computers why not just keep it in the Cloud until you need it?
Well there are quite a few reasons actually. But let me put my cards on the table before I give them to you. Anyone who has walked into my house knows that I possess a rather formidable library of books, records, and movies. Without blowing my own horn I will state this: when I moved up to Alaska the contents of my container weighed over 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilos). Most of that was my library. And yes that nails me down to a very specific geographic spot. So if you want to talk about the curse of material possessions I’m guessing that unless you own a collection of marble statues I’m in a better position than most of my readers to reflect on the obstinate nature of matter and it’s temptations.
As I was moving from New York City one of my good friends told me to sell it all and just find it again online. I didn’t follow his advice and gladly. First of all, a lot of this stuff is nowhere to be found. Secondly, as the Cloud grows above us my private library is mutating from being a collection of hard copies to a collection of material originals. And most importantly what is on my shelves is not subject to revision against my will. It will remain politically incorrect, dangerous and tactile. The books will smell from age. The records will develope scratches. The CD’s and DVD’s will scuff and need polishing. This knowledge will remain in time not reconfigured in the Cloud for future consumption patterns.
But I know what people already think. If you don’t own so much crap you can be more mobile, you can travel more, you can make friends around the globe and go visit them. In a weird way it can be argued that the new resident of the global scene in more like Saint Francis who gave up his material possessions and lived in simplicity to spread the gospel. Well no one I know who has divested themselves to live globally (and I do know several of these types) is living simply. And what is the point of visiting people around the globe who live as cut off from their geography as you do. Because ultimately that is what this is all about. All of our cellphones, GPS systems, laptops, iPads, portable music machines, social networks are scything us off at the legs from our geographical relationship to the soil. Ironically so many people pay lip service to the environment while in the exact same instant that they are severing their connection to the actual rocks and trees and real human beings that make up this messy life.
And finally for me the real problem with the Cloud is this: that by consigning our knowledge and art to the virtual void we hasten the New Dark Age. This is too serious a discussion to follow right this moment. Essentially we are leaving our knowledge in a repository that is actively being studied for its weak links in order to be destroyed. As recent events in this moment of history have revealed clearly: If you think the unthinkable can’t happen you are clearly not living in this world. If you think that the Internet will never be taken down… Or that the Cloud will always preserve your memories… Well I hope you are prepared for the storm. Live real.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
4/5/11
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
A Country of Its Own
Sometimes it seems that we live under the illusion that what is, what exists right now, is pretty much the way things have always been. Our movies help us to believe this prestidigitation. We see some contemporary actor in a historical setting and we automatically assume something like, “Right. That is how it would have been.” And of course what we now consider to be heroic prevails: usually someone fighting for the right to pursue their deepest desires against forces of containment and repression and to naturally in some way come out of it victorious. There is always the temptation to believe that we have at last come to pinnacle of history, or even better evolution, and can now look back at the miserable past with the confidence that at least we don’t have to live in that slop anymore.
Or perhaps we can imagine a Romantic epoch where the knights and princesses of old would be as clever and cynical as we are now and still, while eating our cake yet still possessing it, get to have all of the old trappings of royalty and nobility. The distant heroes in our fictional myths are always the people we would believe to be the hero now, in this quicksilver moment; the princess who understands medieval politics from a contemporary post-feminist perspective, the boy who fights to be himself no matter what others may think, the decadent aesthete who, while drenched in delicious vice and squalor, is far more admirable than the hypocritical religious folk who look down their self-righteous noses at him.
And so it is possible to both imagine the darkness of the past to be now safely behind us and paradoxically to feel that had we lived back then we would have changed everything, we would never have given into the blindness of that age.
And indeed every era does have a blindness to it, especially our own. And while it is impossible to entirely escape all of our ‘sightlessness’ nevertheless we can actually use the past to call into question the blindness of our times. Things that seem obviously self-evident to us at this moment can be called into question by using the past as a measure of the present, much as we measure the past by our current beliefs
Johnny Rotten with the Sex Pistols 1977
Nick Cave with the Birthday Party, ca. 1983 from a piece of Vinyl called Drunk on the Pope’s Blood.
Here are a couple of examples: People today take it for granted that there has always been music that expresses existential anger or rage. Punk, Metal, forms of Industrial or Rap often specialize in this kind of expression. But I can tell you this with certainty, prior to say Iggy Pop or the Sex Pistols,depending on how you reckon the origins of Punk rock, there was never such a thing in music… anywhere: no tribes in Africa or on the Amazon, no Jazz nor Pop, no obscure Russian folk styles. There were tribes who might use music to stoke the warriors for war. But it was not the bellowing inarticulate rage of the postpunk world. There was no sense of bewildering aimless raging loss. (Feel free to challenge me on this.)
What Makes This ‘Cute’?
Or take another example: It is easy to think that cuteness is an eternal concept; that people have always looked at creatures with big eyes and said “Awwww how cute!” But again, the concept really isn’t that old. The word ‘cute’ in English hardly goes back two hundred years and then it was closer to the word ‘acute’. ‘Cute’ in contemporary usage means something more akin to ‘baby-like’. And what am I doing even suggesting that there is something off with ‘baby-likeness’? I’m sure there are a few people who might read this who are already wondering why I’m even going on about the word. But that is exactly the point. ‘Cute’ things are beyond the pale of discussion. It’s like questioning a baby. What sort of sick monster would suggest there’s anything wrong with a baby? And I’m sure the Disney Corporation came to exactly that conclusion when they changed Mickey Mouse from looking like a rodent to looking baby-like by giving him a round head and huge eyes. And my what big eyes so many cartoon characters have! The better to smuggle ideas in with!
The Evolution of a Cartoon Rodent
Disney stands in a preeminent position here in raiding the past and changing it. Starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and moving on through much of their oeuvre they have consistently deformed the past by making it both a wonder land and a commodity. It’s hard to convince many people today of how brutal many fairytales were in the past before being bowdlerized by Walt and company. Read the original Grimm’s Brothers. But then again those fairy tales came before the concept of ‘family friendly’ entertainment. Many folks today, of many religious and agnostic stripes, simply give all ‘family entertainment’ a free pass because, well, it’s just so ‘cute’. Never mind that some of the propaganda concepts buried within them are amongst the most self-serving and selfish that could possibly be imagined. The message can often be summarized as, “You can be whatever you choose to be.” Or “Don’t let anyone ever tell you ‘No’ ”. But has anyone in the past ever had such messages so relentlessly driven down the gullets of their young?
Everything is Magical!
The answer would be no. Those old fairytales did more than just warn you about the dangers of the forest. They told you that life had darkness in it. And that in order to get through the dark forest, you’d better not leave something as silly as bread crumbs.
The past was truly different than the present. The people living there, while subject to the same lust, greed, envy and pride as we all are, did not have the same outlook on the world that we do. Jane Austen was not a contemporary woman just waiting for the 21st Century so that she could escape the 19th. No one had a ‘geeky’ ‘fanboy’ mentality about anything collectable prior to somewhere in the late 20th Century. We folks today are far more self-conscious than anyone ever has been in the past, thanks to all of the equipment we have for recording voice and image. And it is quite possible to see that not that long ago people had a fuller understanding of how to make music than we do. There were people who knew how to eat together, how to hold discussions, how to make shoes. These things are often lost or problematic to us.
In the last very few years things have already disappeared that once seemed like part of human nature. Whatever happened to letter writing? Serious book learning is imperiled in many quarters. The relationship to music is changing yet again as people enter a sort of record and erase mentality. CDs, interestingly enough, will probably die out, but in a rare streak of good news the vinyl LP will probably survive as a kind of specialty artifact.
For me the thing to keep in mind in all of the chaos of rapid change is that the past can come to our aid in helping to both measure what is lost and to strengthen the good things that remain and inspire us to experiment anew. Maybe dinnertime has become a media feeding frenzy for you and yours. But with a little thought and a few simple rules you can probably bring good discussion back to your table. Maybe you live now in a highly distractible world. Well turn the stuff off and read an actual book. There are dozens of ways to begin to reclaim human existence from the swirl of technology and the bloated media illusion.
But first an foremost I would suggest that you turn off the drone of the present on occasion and discover that the past is a country with rights of its own and it has words for us that we would do well to heed.
I will let C.S. Lewis have the last word from his essay entitled: On the Reading of Old Books
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.”
And a little further on he writes…
“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
1/18/11
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