The Moon, her Face changeth like The Sea...

Animation - what is animation?
At which point exactly does a marionette, hanging motionlessly from its strings offstage, become alive?
Why am I even interested in answering this question?
Is there some kind of little secret to be found at the point where inanimate becomes animate?

Meddling about with Brecht and Puppetry

Next week the Performance Arts, Puppetry, Design for Stage, Sound and Lighting strands put on our 'site specific' version of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, at Trinity Buoy Wharf in South East London. The four Musketeers, I mean, Puppeteers, have finally been given free reign over a project and we have really enjoyed creating our little 'tea party' scene, in which the two women fighting over the play's bandit hero, Macheath, have a nice cup of tea together with rather hostile undertones. We have made two human-sized 'Polly' and 'Lucy' puppets which we operate in the Japanese Bunraku puppet style - ie. two people operate each puppet, standing behind it and providing their outer arms and hands to give the puppet live hands, with puppeteer #1 operating head and dominant hand, puppeteer #2 supporting puppet body and operating non-dominant hand. Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with the puppet build, taken on by techie extraordinaire Matt, I did make some rather fetching hats, the pink one being my favourite and bestowing eternal life onto my farmers market coffee cup.



The nomadic life of puppet...



Its good to get to grips with actual manipulation techniques at last, and, as Polly #2, I'm learning a lot from Polly #1, my most important lesson so far being: unless your concentration is totally fixed on your puppet, any expression you produce will turn you into an actor, bring the audience away from the puppet, and render you a total failure as a puppeteer! Isn't it fascinating that simply the line of your gaze determines where an audience looks, and therefore what they experience. I suppose being a puppeteer must be rather like being a parent - yourself is no longer number one - your focus is placed on something other than yourself. Its a tough lesson because I tend to get carried away and before I know it I'm acting, not puppeteering...but this is the point of puppetry...to become invisible, or at least to be visible but secondary to the puppet.

Goodbye, Our Lady.

I'm looking back on the main event of the year, Our Lady of the Flowers, my interactive "shrine" to the goddess of the bees, (performed by me, with full mask and costume) who is consumed by an unexplainable grief and a desire to unearth some dusty forgotten myth which lies in the dreams and wishes of the shrine's visitors. Valmar and I first showed at the CSSD Student Puppetry Festival and then at the Accidental Festival at the Camden Roundhouse, and it was fascinating how different two performances can be. The first one, in a black-painted, low ceilinged studio in CSSD, was an intense and lovely experience (for the Lady of the FLowers anyway..)as she sat there all day, surrounded by flickering candles and wafts of jasmine oil, accepting the 'wish scrolls' of the visitors and immersing herself in the soft melancholic sounds of Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Pentangle and other 60's folk nuggets. In that space it was easy to have full focus and concentration...behind the mask time just sped by, it was a blissfully meditative experience and one which I can't really explain or put into words, but it brought back the strange magic of puppetry to me - the intensity of emotion involved in using objects which cannot express emotion. Its the concealment of feeling, the concealment of what is real....isn't that what much of everyday life is about? And is that why so many people, young and old, 'theatre minded' and not, seemed genuinely attached to the Lady of the Flowers...the concealment of her true feelings was taken to the extreme by her mask...I think people related to that without really realising it.

Our next performance (although I'd rather call it an interactive installation)was in the cluttered, noisy, buzzing atmosphere of the Camden Roundhouse cafe. Good, in that it attracted the attention of cafe visitors who would otherwise never have known about such an event. But bad, in that it was very hard to fully 'enter into' the Lady of the Flowers in such an environment, watching people catching up with old friends, engage in deep conversation, play with their babies etc.... I suppose the conclusion is that whilst I originally intended for Our Lady of the Flowers to act like an Indian or Mexican street shrine, for everyday people going about their lives to come and pay homage to, giving their 'wish', it actually needed a very secluded, sheltered and quiet location - it needed its own little temple! So maybe if I go any further along these lines I need to start coming up with designs for mini street temples....hmm how about cob....or maybe an intricately patchworked yurt...



For the moment, though, Our Lady is going on the back burner until I find an ideal public location for another 'wishing shrine'.