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.
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