Celebration of Puppet Power
In association with our Puppet Power: Festival of Ideas in 2022 invited blogs from four artists that explored the role of puppetry in ‘celebration’ of some sort or another. Thank you to the puppeteers from around the world, who contributed their insights and their work in these challenging times.
Celebrating the Human Spirit – Conference of the Birds
by Beka Haigh, Founder of Frolicked Theatre, West Yorkshire, England
(edited Wendy Passmore-Godfrey)
@frolicked
@frolickedtheatre
Street theatre has its roots in ritual and celebration. With the history of companies like Royal de Luxe in France, Welfare State in the UK and Bread and Puppet in the United States, both outdoor arts and large-scale puppetry have had their performances and events well-rooted in a tradition of celebration and thanksgiving.
Puppetry is another way to celebrate and at Frolicked we believe that small scale puppets can have a big impact too. We like to challenge the perception of puppetry with self devised and crafted creatures and characters that populate highly visual performances for unusual locations. We celebrate intimacy and brief moments of connection with our audiences through the ways in which we interact and present our work.
Frolicked’s version of Conference of the Birds is a way of showing that we can celebrate once again. Based on the Sufi poem, this classical piece of literature features a flock of five magnificent birds who embark on a visual and musical journey through the landscape. Written in the 12th Century by Persian poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, the story follows the perilous journey of all of the birds of the world to find their ruler. Many of the birds perish, but those who make it realize that they need no king – they are the masters of their own fate. Using skilled puppetry and four-part harmony, four puppeteers guide the birds and sing their story whilst making their way through adversity to find their destiny.
Musician and composer, Chris Davies, has created a series of original songs for the magnificent bird puppets, based on the poem itself and influenced by Persian music, the choral stylings of Roomful of Teeth and bird song taken from recordings of the natural world.
(Commissioned on 2021 by Spot On Lancashire in partnership with Fylde Borough Council and the Friends of Fairhaven Lake)
The performance invites audiences to sing together as it culminates; suggesting that we all flock together to overcome differences and celebrate a hope for a unified human race, singing in harmony, in the future.
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Celebrating Opportunities - Creating during Covid
by Peter Michael Marino, producer, director, developer, writer, teacher, and performer,
PM2 Entertainment, New York,
(edited Wendy Passmore-Godfrey)
@blackoutpete
“Planet of the Grapes Live” owes its very existence to the creative team members actually celebrating the opportunities that Covid lockdowns created, as opposed to letting the restrictions hold our artistry and creativity back. As a stage performer/producer with no live theater to present in, I needed to celebrate live theater at a time when actual theaters were closed.
Celebrating the artistry and innovation of the past and embracing the Toy Theater movement allowed us to create a show that mimics the live theater experience while also doing exactly what toy theater did - bringing theater into people’s homes.
As a huge fan of the original 1968 “Planet of the Apes” film, I wanted to share my obsession with this ground-breaking sci-fi film and create something that would present the story and sociological messages with a fresh take. The film’s themes of science vs. religion, biased class systems, and mankind’s self-perceived entitlement to everything on Earth, strongly resonate with me and I peppered the script with excavated passages from co-screenwriter Rod Serling’s original screenplays.
In our comedic and faithful homage, “Planet of the Grapes Live,” an astronaut crew crash-lands on an unfamiliar planet in the distant future and are enslaved by a society where grapes (yes, the fruit) have evolved into speaking creatures with human-like intelligence.
With this show, we are celebrating a sense of play that so many of us adults have let slip away. Puppetry has always been a performance medium that entertains and enlightens all ages with a sense of play and wonder. We celebrate theater history, the arts and its many guises, the world of film and its effect on society, and we celebrate the ability to make our work accessible through digital performances.
Created and performed Peter Michael Marino
Directed by Michole Biancosino
Original score by Michael Harren
Celebrating Burst- Days
by Giacomo Occhi, Milano, Italy
@Giacomo.Occhi
(edited by Wendy Passmore-Godfrey)
Giacomo writes: I believe that theater is in itself, a moment of celebration, a meeting, relationship, comparison and growth. It is a community ritual in which actor and spectator partake. A person manifests through celebration, the will to express themselves both as an individual and as a collective being. Theater is a space and a place in which to feel, as a community, to be confronted with universal themes, to know and to learn more about them.
I believe that figure theater (puppet theater), through the imagery and suggestion creates a direct connection with the spectator and make them more involved. Personally, this genre of theatre allows me me to deal with important issues with irony and deep lightness.
Happy Burst-Day, starting from the title, recalls to mind the theme of celebration. The show explores the birth of a new life and at the same time deals with themes of loss and mourning, memory, acceptance and sharing of a dramatic event. It is a show to celebrate life, in all its beauty and through all its difficulties.
The show is built with elements and materials from the world of celebration, notably its main character is a Balloon. The life of a Balloon passes in the same way, day after day. Nothing really fills it. Until at a certain point, it swells with love: a great change that will lead it to fully experience what life has in store for it. An ironic and poetic story, real and surreal, without words, about the special life of an ordinary Balloon.
www.giacomoocchi.com
Instagram and Facebook: Giacomo Occhi
The line between Celebration and Indignation
by Daniele Rocha Viola, actress, light designer, shadow puppeteer, mask maker.
@cialibelulas
(edited Wendy Passmore-Godfrey)
The Lambe-Lambe Theater is a language of puppet theater created in 1989, by two Brazilian women, Ismine Lima and Denise Di Santos. This aesthetic consists of a miniature show (in a box) with a short duration, where there is usually, only one animator-actress and one spectator at a time. Lambe-Lambe Theater is usually acted on the street and the audience is simply a passer-by. It's a chance encounter that has the power to transform the daily rhythm and invite the viewer to enter another world.
Daniele is creating beautiful Lambe-Lambe shows experimenting with integrating shadow puppetry and social commentary.
In "Delírios" the glass bottle is used as the "box" of the lambe-lambe theater and the shadows are projected on the bottom of this bottle. It is born from a reality produced by the pandemic - with multiple interpretations. At the bottom of the bottle is ‘breath’, the imagery leading to ancestry and the connection with nature; a space to celebrate the natural elements and possible dreams. However, the bottom of the bottle also brings delusions of a dream, out of it a nightmare - the devastation of the Cerrado (Brazilian biome) and people in Brazil. The atrocities and destruction is slowly killing us.
In "Orgão de Morrer" Daniele works with eggshell and onion skin, which is also born out of the relationship with everyday life during the pandemic. She works with food scraps and can celebrate that she has food to eat. But this is not the reality many people in Brazil, which in these recent years, has returned to the line of misery with nothing to eat.
In this way, her shows are a celebration of life, of something that pulsates within us, and at the same time, they are a lament for a nation that is starving, but struggling to survive.
CELEBRATING GROWING UP
by Mélanie Lefebvre, from Tian Gombau, Castelló de la Plana-Spain
www.homedibuixat.com
(edited Wendy Passmore-Godfrey)
Tian Gombau’s show “New Shoes” speaks with poetry and simplicity of growth and the feelings that growing up entails. The 35-minute object theatre production for young children has won many awards as its universal theme resonates.
A celebration encompasses many different types and ways of celebrating something.
"New shoes" references a tradition that has been celebrated for many years in the small Mediterranean town of Vinaròs. On Santa Catalina's day, November 24, the children of the town received new clothes and a pair of new shoes, to prepare them for the coming cold of winter. The children put on their new shoes and retrieve a meringue cake, typical of the time ("La prima"), from the empty shoe box. Then they go to the river and eat their treat. It was a very special day because it meant that the shoes from the previous year had grown small ... and this of course meant that the children had grown.
This festival continues to be celebrated to this day. The cake is still eaten by the river, traditional songs are still sung, but in these modern times the children have several pairs of shoes.
“New Shoes” starts from a local event, a custom, a tradition of a Mediterranean town, to arrive at the universal human experience. Through the narrative of a small initiatory journey, of learning, discovery and of bond with nature, it reflects cultural identity, tradition, and the symbolic representation of growth stages and growing up.
The shoes of the child accumulate experiences. The size of the shoes follows over the years.
The size measures the foot, but also the age, the experiences, the way we walk through life.
The days, the years and the shoe boxes go by. Small, medium, large …