This ain’t your kids’ puppet show

World Puppets Portland is a reflection of the human condition

By Tanya Whiton

TORU SAITO: with his handcrafted Bunraku puppets, showing at June Fitzpatrick Gallery through September.

You say ‘puppet’ to people and they automatically think ‘squeaking hand puppet’ — their eyes glaze over,” says John Farrell, co-founder of Figures of Speech Theatre, a Maine-based puppet company. A recipient of national awards, with 20-odd years of touring and performing under his belt, Farrell still confronts Disney-fied notions about his art on a regular basis.

But in World Puppets Portland — the second international festival of puppetry coordinated by Figures of Speech and Portland’s Downtown District — performers from England, France, Germany, Bulgaria, and Australia will challenge the widely held idea that puppet theater is strictly “family” entertainment.

Drawing on a variety of aesthetic and cultural traditions that range from England’s bawdy Punch and Judy show to Japan’s deeply restrained Noh drama, the festival is really an exploration of alternative possibilities for engaging an audience. Mime, improvisation, clowning, masks, storytelling, and, of course, puppets, are all employed at some point in the two-week program. Even the performances designed specifically for kids are conceptually much more sophisticated than, say, a talking raccoon.

When asked what, if anything, unifies this diverse roster of events, Farrell launches into a rather abstract discussion of objects as metaphors, signifier and signified, and how a teapot can equal a conception of home, before eloquently closing his ramble with this thought: “All puppeteers have a shared sense that there is a power that dwells in a puppet figure — I would extend that to objects as well — that connects [the audience] to a primal part of their minds, where a belief in animism has not been suppressed by culture.”

Attributing conscious life to objects and natural phenomena links puppetry to storytelling in its essential form, stripping away the conventions of character and plot to reveal a universality that can be contained in the merest household object.

The reductive, cartoonish animism found in a lot of “family fare” doesn’t do justice to the imaginative power of children or adults. And in a theater climate where many companies spend a great deal of time and money revising tired classics and traditional staging, it’s exciting to see artists working to recover a sense of wonder for themselves and their audiences. Farrell hopes that a deeper associative understanding of objects and their significance encourages onlookers to contemplate human interconnectedness from a different perspective.

“We’re really stretching the boundaries of puppet,” he says.

Some of the companies participating in World Puppets Portland don’t use puppets at all, but employ conventions associated with other itinerant performing styles: juggling, physical comedy, and interaction with the crowd. France’s Velo Theatre (Bicycle Theatre), for example, performs a surreal, entirely silent piece titled Appel D’Airý(The Call of the Air). In it, a man whose senses are deadened by daily routine creates his own miniature cinema in which objects come to life. Writer/Directors Charlot Lemoin and Tania Castaing (who got their start performing on the back of an antique postman’s bicycle) articulate the confinement of habitual living by creating two avenues of escape for their character: madness, or a return to the childlike primacy of the imagination; all via acting and the manipulation of objects.

“The juxtaposition creates connections in the mind of the audience,” says Farrell.

Contrasted with Velo Theatre’s non-verbal approach to relaying a distinct narrative is the rowdy style of England’s Hand-to-Mouth Theatre. Their two productions — Piggery Jokery and Punch and Judy — rely on blunt slapstick. Piggery Jokery’s two characters, Green Man and Traipsing Woman, were created by Hand-to-Mouth partners Martin Bridle and Su Eaton as mythical predecessors to the familiar brawling husband and wife duo, Punch and Judy.

VéLO THéâTRE: performing their Appel d’air at St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, Friday through Sunday.

When they first brought the show to the United States in 1999, Bridle made up a bogus academic history for Piggery Jokery, in part to make fun of New Age appropriation of the Green Man figure; an emblematic “natural man” found carved in churches all over Western Europe.

“Piggery Jokery was designed by us to look like a forerunner of Punch and Judy,” says Bridle. “Although it’s an invention of ours, it’s born out of a knowledge of a mass of English traditions concerning the seasons, and the circular nature of things.”

Figures of Speech’s contribution to the festival also takes as its inspiration an ancient tale. But the difference in content and approach is as radical as the differences between Velo Theatre’s surrealist stance and Hand-to-Mouth’s boisterous physicality. He and his wife Carol, Figures of Speech co-creators, present She Who Loves, an adaptation of a Comanche Indian story about personal sacrifice and redemption. Using masks and music (composed and performed by Carl Dimow and Andrea Goodman), in addition to Farrell’s carved puppets and Carol and daughter Delia as actors, Figures of Speech renders a lyrical, multi-cultural fable that Puppetry International Magazine described as “. . . a piece which exists at the intersection of Art and Nature, Earth and Spirit.” A piece our own Robert von Stein Redick described as “a wholly original multicultural artifact,” when he saw the show back in January.

“Our intention is to awaken a sense of life’s fundamental essence, connecting people with an awareness that life is ultimately about the spirit,” says Farrell.

On a more existential note, Bulgaria’s Credo Theatre stages a version of Nikolai Gogol’s classic “The Overcoat.” A darkly absurdist story about a clerk who loses his coat and dies of exposure, “The Overcoat” is brought to the stage through a combination of mime, clowning, and spoken dialogue. Credo founders Nina Dimitrova and Vassil Vassilev have performed “The Overcoat” in festivals all over the world, receiving seven international awards for Best Performance. The BBC said of Credo’s adaptation [that] “. . . seeing their performance, one realizes the new concept of theatre: it is clear one should go back to one’s roots, to a simpler style of theatre with much more intense emotions and passion. They make magic on stage out of next to nothing at all.”

The play of light and shadow, one of the simplest ways to create images for an audience, is the basis of Das Meinenger Puppentheater’s show The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The German company adapts Hans Christian Andersen’s tale for an experience that encompasses the audience in the white silk of a parachute.

“Shadows call up a sense of the division between human life and divine life,” Farrell comments, pleased with what he sees as a spiritual commentary in the format of Das Meinenger’s piece. “In this case, the membrane on which that happens is projected on from both sides.” Three-dimensional cutouts of the story’s scenes are projected onto the “narrator’s bed sheets,” which enclose the audience, creating an effect of being inside the story, inside the action on stage.

Other festival events include a piece for young children by France’s Lulubelle Compagnie called Et Rond Et Rond, which explores the shape of the circle, one of the first forms children are able to perceive; a parade by Portland’s own Shoestring Theater; and goofball Australian Richard Bradshaw’s animated shadow show. There will also be an exhibit of a private collection of Japanese puppets called “The Master’s Eye: Puppets of Japan,” at June Fitzpatrick Gallery at MECA, that will show in conjunction with the festival and through September 30.

Creating magic, or a suspension of disbelief, with simple props and few resources has often been the hallmark of experimental theater, particularly with work that engages in some kind of social commentary. While the social questions addressed in World Puppets Portland are fairly subtle and often personal, it could be argued that making art in the margins — far removed from the Disney-fied hand puppet — is inherently political. And most of the companies performing are well acquainted with the scrappy art of artistic survival.

Talking raccoons may be easier to comprehend, but it isn’t often that we get told the rough, raw, folk versions of the stories co-opted by our sanitized corporate entertainment culture. In puppet theater it is possible to tell the stories as they were initially told: The tin soldier ends as a lump of molten metal shaped like a heart, Punch whacks his wife Judy over the head, and a man dies because no one will give him a coat. These stories are not without a shot at redemption, and in fact the redemption found in them, with or without words, is a much more accurate reflection of the human condition than that often seen in television and film, or even on the stage. In this theater of the margins, we can see ourselves the way we are no longer visible elsewhere.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@ime.net.