[chris] Soggy Puppets

I got into puppetry back in the mid nineties as the result of a baby-sitting gig. A woman had hung a poster at my college which advertised an opening for a babysitter, explicitly of the freaky, geeky, and artistically unhinged variety. A zebra-striped Plymouth full of us confusingly-coiffed and bookishly angst ridden nerds showed up at her place, were hired on the spot and soon moved on to her farm. The poster turned out to be Jeanne, the director of the New York City Village Halloween Parade, a mother of a gifted child whose brain for the following years we saturated with Lord Buckley, Sufism, Devo and what-have-you.

Naturally, we sitters got involved in the Parade, the preparations for which happen on the farm every summer. Marionettists, dancers, and un-categorizable object manipulators would gather with hot glue guns, carloads of bamboo and ostrich feathers to build enormous skeletons suits, transforming-moth puppets, and huge spiders designed to crawl down from the rooftops along the parade route. It was there that I met my friend Basil Twist as he was building a flock of bats out of a heap of broken umbrellas.

Some years later I moved to New York City and found Basil holed up in his basement playing with a fish tank he'd found on the street. He had the brilliant idea for a show which would effectively transcend the clunky-ness found in most puppetry. By manipulating puppets in a tank of water, fabrics could flow in delectable slow motion, beams of light could be given solidity, the water itself could be manipulated to effect changes in responsive objects.

We formed a four person team that winter and spend countless hours in the damp darkness trying out as many materials as we could - silk (which looks great in the air but awful in water), alka seltzer (unimpressive), plastic bags (gorgeous), spandex (nice, and doesn't rot over time!), mylar curtains (which turned out to be so sublimely beautiful that they ended up dominating the heart of the show).

As we'd sit there raptly watching curtains of fringe cascade slowly to the tank-bottom, we grew ever more convinced that abstract objects were enough to create a beautiful organic spectacle. By closely following a piece of music, by manipulating our pile of junk and cloth to respond to every note of a symphony, we could create 1000 gallons of synesthetic beauty like we'd never seen before. It was puppetry still, fraught with tangled strings and rods, but there was no squeaky voiced princess, no dialogue or plot whatsoever. (As pure musical abstraction, the best explanative comparison may be with those Oskar Fischinger animations at the beginning of Disney's "Fantasia").

The result of all this effort was a show entitled "Symphone Fantastique", which is performed to a recording of Hector Berlioz's symphony of the same name. We opened in 1997 at HERE arts center in the West Village, expecting to run for a month or so, but thanks to an unexpected, drooling review by the NY Times's Ben Brantley, and the freakish proclivities of NYC theater-goers, we ran there for almost two years. Over the next years we'd every so often take our stinking wetsuits and crates-full of junk out of the warehouse and perform in various European and American cities. Maybe some of you Chicago-based public radio geeks caught us at Ravinia where we dispensed with the pre-recorded Ormandy version and tried instead to keep up with NPR's Christopher O'Reilly (of "From The Top") as he hammered out Liszt's dastardly piano transcription?

These days we've all gotten involved in other projects and crap day jobs, but every now and then I'll answer the phone and hear our producer say "Wanna play with the puppets again?" In August, I'll head off Argentina for a while to perform at the Pablo Neruda Theater in Buenos Aires. If I'm lucky enough to make it though the next rounds of the Quest, I'll possibly be able to give y'all the low down on it via a contest submission.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg