Kim W. on Object Theatre

This kind of thing is seen more often in Europe right now, but there's a subset of puppetry which turns various found objects into puppets. Aficionados and practitioners call this "Object Theatre" most often, but it's also been called "object puppetry".  We all sometimes do this kind of puppetry on a small scale: when trying to describe a complicated event to a friend, we spontaneously may have reached for a couple of random things on the table to help illustrate our point: "okay, let's say this salt shaker is me, and the ketchup is the car I saw -- and the pepper mill is the bike.  So if I was standing HERE, then the bike swerved out of the way of the car like THIS, and then..."

I found a blog maintained by one Richard Allen, who's pursuing a PhD in this very discipline; or, in his words, "on the practice and research of objects in performance."  He's got an exhaustive, if somewhat opinionated, definition of "object theater" on his blog:

"Object Theatre is a term that has been ghettoised as a sub-category of puppetry, often used to describe a performance style that contains the animation of tilitarian, or pre-existing 'found' objects rather than those constructed for theatrical effect (such as the puppet). As a result, practitioners of 'object theatre' commonly share what I consider to be the key principle of puppetry: the transformation of an object into a subjectified character (a box of spoons becomes a village, a sieve the head of a girl). Puppeteers often claim that it is precisely the puppet/object's lack of a programme of acting or conscious ego (it's very object-ness) that makes it such a potent tool for the theatre, yet paradoxically, the process of puppetry often imposes it's own programme of acting propelled by the will of the performer. The objects are rarely allowed to act for themselves; the subject is forcibly imposed onto them, as they become a medium for the performers and audiences subjectifcation. The object adopts the role that character performs conventionally  for the actor.  I would argue that this ghettoisation misrepresents what thinking through a theatre of 'objects' might mean."

http://richobject.wordpress.com/

There are a handful of people here in the U.S. who work with Object Theater; one company, LorenKahn, is based in New Mexico, and is a two-woman company, offering shows incorporating not just traditional puppets, but feathers, life rafts, glasses of water, and themselves.  LorenKahn's site has a collection of videos of some of their works:

http://www.lorenkahnpuppet.com/

Closer to home, New York is home to Tiny Ninja Theater, a company born when founder Dov Weinstein -- who's studied puppetry -- became fascinated with little ninja toys that started turning up in vending machines in New York in 1999.  Something prompted him to get a bunch and use them to perform a rendition of Shakespeare's MACBETH; that debuted at the Fringe Festival in 2000.  Tiny Ninja has since gone on to do adaptations of ROMEO AND JULIET as well as three original works, all
using tiny dime-store plastic toys as puppets.

http://www.tinyninjatheater.com/company/

Our Zone

Cropped from image found here.

This is wildly divergent thematically, but I read a quote recently about The Twilight Zone that seems to me to contain some important wisdom for us in shaping this show.  To wit:

“The Twilight Zone was shaped by Rod Serling. His instincts led him to a pattern he & I agreed upon as the bottom-line basis for buying stories for adaptation and for his own originals:

"Find an interesting character, or a group, at a moment in crisis in life, and get there quickly; then lay on some magic. That magic must be devilishly appropriate and capable of providing a whiplash kickback at the tag. The character(s) must be ordinary and average and modern, and the problem facing him (her, them) must be commonplace.

"The Twilight Zone always struck people as identifiable as to whom it was about, and the story hang-ups as resonant as their own fears, dreams, and wishes. Allow only one miracle or special talent or imaginative circumstance per episode. More than one and the audience grows impatient with your calls on their credibility. The story must be impossible in the real world. A request at some point to suspend disbelief is a trademark of the series. Mere scare tactics will not fill the bill. A clever bit of advanced scientific hardware is not enough to support a story. The Twilight Zone was not a sci-fi show.”

-Twilight Zone producer Buck Houghton (via Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone)

Special thanks to Old Hollywood for the inspiration.

Lest the myriad readers of our 'blog (Hi mom! [My Mom: "What's a 'blog?"]) think I'm trying very hard to make Zuppa's first horror play, let me clarify that I'm not interested in exploring madness or weirdness for the sake of weirdness.  That's not the connection I make with this.  The connection I make has to do with fantasy.  We are leaning in some respects toward building a fantasy, and when I use that word, I do not mean the bookstore section.

The first thing this quote reminded me of is another favorite of mine from Mr. Buster Keaton: "You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest."  In other words, it's more important that the plot be simple and straight-forward so that we can build elaborate structures off of it.  That's what the grounded nature of the guidance from Serling reminds me of.

The other thing I take from this and appreciate is the idea that there is a singular piece of magic, or imaginative circumstances (great term).  For us, this is the puppetry, and how it can transform interactions and influence reality.  The puppetry is the thing - and the only thing - that carries us into Oz, so to speak.  And once we get there, it's all about our fears, dreams and wishes.

ETC Article: November

Wonderful Weirdness & OZ

When I was growing up, we had one regular option for movies beamed directly into the house, and it was called UHF.  (Those of you under the age of 25 might want to Google it.) Sure: VHF had actual reception quality and lots more interesting toy commercials, but only UHF had channel 50, which showed a movie just about every night and several on the weekends.  I love movies, so I endured the constant static and frankly terrible films, but when the holidays rolled around (and for me, “the holidays” start with Halloween)  I didn’t have to.  Holiday-themed films would enter heavy rotation on the VHF stations, and two Hollywood ones would air over and over again: It’s a Wonderful Life, of course, but also The Wizard of Oz.

It’s weird: We’ve had some head-spinning progress with the development of The Puppeteers in the past month.  As quickly as we lost an actor from the show, we gained one of Scranton’s favorites: Heather Stuart.  After some lost time from that kerfuffle, Heather, Conor, Elizabeth and I managed to rush to the theatre in a weekend and determine a tremendous amount about characters and the play’s direction, so that we are now creating the story itself.  The actors even brought along their own puppet creations, thereby effectively doubling our cast.  The designers are working right alongside, adapting brilliantly to what we come up with in the room, and there are some exciting possibilities percolating toward promoting the shows in an interactive way.  You can as always follow this behind-the-scenes business (and join in the conversation) at The Puppeteers’ development ‘blog.

One defining moment in our development that weekend at the theatre was in discovering connections between the story that is sprouting up around our characters like a field of poppies, and the vast world of Oz created by L. Frank Baum.  There’s the superficial similarities of course - the old-fashioned puppet-show aesthetic reminds us of Professor Marvel’s wagon and Oz’s colorful cast of characters - but there’s also a deep thematic resonance.  Our story is about strangers with problems finding one another and exploring a weird new world together.  We’re going to be taking our audiences along with us into an uncharted territory of transformation, laughter...and maybe a little fear?

It can be easy for me to forget how I felt about the antagonist - that weird wicked witch - in that old movie when I was young.  Now she seems little more than a caricature comprised of some long-forgotten Salem misconceptions.  However.  When I really cast my mind back, I can remember part of what I looked forward to all year was the utter thrill of that witchy theme music, and what it might portend.  The giddy border between terror and excitement is a place we love to to explore when we’re young.  We give it names as adults.  Nerves.  Anticipation.  Stage fright.  It’s all the thrill of the unknowable.

The unknowable is what we embrace and return to over and over at this stage of things.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has some much-quoted (and often truncated, not to mention translated from German) advice on that: "...[H]ave patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

The days of our next meetings in Scranton are December 11th and 12th, and 18th and 19th, and by the end of that we aim to have a sequence of plot to follow.  In a little under a month we’ll begin rehearsals in earnest, and in a little over a month we’ll have our last piece of the puzzle - you, the audience.  It’s going to be improvisation, so the thrill of the unknown will still be there for all of us, but by January we’ll all be having our own journey to Oz in technicolored VHF clarity.  We can’t see the details yet, but what’s coming through is weird in the most wonderful ways.

How "Real" Are They?

I'll admit that this post is on the borderline between "this could be helpful" and "this is just freakin' cool," but.

Back when Jim Henson was developing the first Muppet Movie, one of the things they wanted to check out was how the Muppets would look on camera "in the real world," outside of a studio. The only way to check that out was...to do some live-action "screen tests.

Like this.





Kermit and Fozzie get downright existential in part two.

Now, no one was ever supposed to see these other than the filmmakers. But you can tell that Henson and Oz are having an absolute ball with this. I found out about these clips from an online forum I belong to, and the discussion prompted by these clips was especially lively -- and someone made an especially telling comment:

What always blows me away in the unscripted muppets things is that they never break character. NEVER. There's no swearing or anything. It's just...Kermit and Fozzie, hanging out.

Another person said this:

There's something about a puppet that requires suspension of disbelief from the audience. The puppet is clearly a real, physical object that exists in the actual world, but it is also an imaginary creature, and when we treat it as alive we enter into a sort of conspiracy with the puppeteer that's very childlike in its way. For children it's easy to go back and forth between a play world where teddy bears and stuffed frogs can talk and the real world of rules and obligations, and for the rest of us believing in puppets (if only for the length of a youtube clip) is a reminder of that time.

Another commenter reported that he was watching the clips on an iPod on commuter train on the way home from work, using headphones, and halfway through the second clip burst out laughing -- and had to explain to his startled seatmate, a stranger to him, what he'd been laughing at. "Here, let me show you, he said, showing him the clips. And then the second guy started laughing, which attracted even more attention. And by the time the train finally pulled into the station, he was playing the clips through a third time for a small audience of eight total strangers all huddled around his iPod window, all of them laughing. They stood on the platform for a good three minutes in lively conversation about "what was that and where did you find it?"

The clips, and the thread, were a wonderful testimony to what Henson just got about what puppets could do, and why they work. The comment about how kids just sort of accept that stuffed bears and dogs and staplers or what-not can sometimes talk is dead-on, I think.

One last clip -- okay, now I'm verging into "I just want to post something cool" territory, but it also has a good statement about Henson's legacy. At his memorial Harry Belafonte first spoke a bit about Henson's legacy worldwide, and then sang a version of his song "Turn The World Around," which was apparently Jim Henson's absolute favorite Muppet Show sequence.

Kim W. on "Raised by Puppets"

Kim is amazing and research-crazy and I've asked her to contribute information to the 'blog.  She's also responsible for the study guide content ETC produces.  She also has some 'blog access problems so, for now at least, she post through me.  Below is a sort of response to my post of October 27.


Puppets.  Jeff pointed out how this lead to AVENUE Q -- part of how that came about was a sort of meta-commentary on shows LIKE "Sesame Street," which sought to teach kids using puppets.  The creators of AVENUE Q were speculating on, "well, what would it look like if someone used puppets to teach more adult concepts like 'how do I handle an adult relationship' or 'how do I figure out my life's purpose' or 'what is the Internet'?"

Plus, there's something titillatingly subversive about puppets - something that culturally we all think of as "kids' stuff" -- singing songs like "The Internet Is For Porn".  ...Although, AVENUE Q isn't even the most "adult stuff with puppets" that's out there -- there's also the all-marionette movie made by the guys who did SOUTH PARK -- called TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE.  This was a spoof of action films, complete with a "love scene" that would have been graphic enough to flirt with an NC-17 rating if it were real people.

Found here.  Warning - some disturbing puppetry at link.

Then there's something called MEET THE FEEBLES, a very early film by Peter Jackson.  (In his Oscar acceptance speech, he briefly mentioned it, only to thank the Academy for turning a blind eye TO it.)  It's kind of a cult classic now, and....well, the person who showed it to me described it to me beforehand as "Imagine a cross between THE MUPPET SHOW and HOLLYWOOD BABYLON."  ....That's not too far off -- I'd say it's more like, what THE MUPPET SHOW would have looked like if they were doing a burlesque show rather than a vaudeville one, and Jim Henson had done an internship with PLAYBOY MAGAZINE.  It's...quite something.  (I hesitate to recommend it to you for research purposes, for fear of really skewing the show in some unforeseen way.  However, once you've opened the show, maybe see it then, for amusement's sake.  And have a bottle of something very strong by your side when you watch.)

I suspect that this is another aspect of having grown up with puppets -- it's so much a part of all our childhoods that the idea of taking something so "of childhood" and putting into an adult realm makes it subversively funny.  And I wonder if we may be the first generation for which this would have worked; don't forget, the very first season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE had Muppets in the cast.  But the audiences then -- all of whom would have been little kids in the 60's -- didn't really seem to go for the idea, and the writers also loathed working with them.  (An early writer on the show came up with an oft-quoted response when he was asked to write a sketch for the Muppets for one episode -- "I don't write for felt.")  So the Muppets were retired after that first season.

Then again, shows like HOWDY DOODY and KUKLA, FRAN, AND OLLIE were on in the 50s and 60s, which seems to kill my theory.  Perhaps the media saturation was not as great?

Two Contemporary Puppet Shows

Discuss.  (Fair warning: the second of these can be a bit, well, terrifying.)


Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo.


"The Narrative of Victor Karloch" Trailer from Kevin McTurk on Vimeo.

Meeting Recap: Oct. 2-3 in NYC

The Cast: Todd d'Amour, Elizabeth Hope Williams and Conor McGuigan.

Last weekend we met for the first time as a cast: Todd d'Amour, Conor McGuigan, Elizabeth Hope Williams and I all gathered in Paradizo Dance's studio for the weekend and went through a thing or two.  Here's how we progressed in our first preparatory meeting for our rehearsal period:

October 2nd:
We got a bit of a late start, which was just as well, since it meant that I could catch Conor and Elizabeth up on some basics of acrobalance.

• For roughly an hour we worked on basing and flying angel and thigh-stand.
• Once all met, we reviewed some of the basic commedia dell'arte characters and their physical characteristics, eventually branching out into interpreting them into more modern contexts.
• From there we moved on to some scenario work.  We took one of the Scala scenarios - Flavio's Disgrace, a production of which I had just directed with the students of Marywood - and worked on how to learn a story by the story and incident, rather than by lines or character.  This included:
• Breaking down a story into simple, single actions
• Learning how to memorize simple action sequence
• Learning the sequence from different perspectives
• Varying the basic circumstances of the scenario
• In the scenario work, we examined some style elements; namely:
• "One thing at a time."
• Committed physical choices and gestures.
• Rhythmic unity.
• We moved on to examining clowning from there, including:
• Practicing "just being" with an audience.
• "The Interview" exercise.
• Brief review of "1-2-3" clown types.
• We ended the day with conditioning by working with the commedia animal forms we learned from Angelo Crotti:
• Dog
• Cat
• Frog
• Lizard/Crocodile

At the cap, we had some casual conversation about the show to come.


October 3rd:
The day began with discussion, and moved into exploring themes, largely through improvisation.

• There was much ecstatic dancing to big brass music.
• Acrobalance: In addition to practicing thigh-stand and angel poses, we worked with head- and hand-stands and learned shoulder-sit.
• We began a discussion of themes and ideas for show content.  Some of this content included (Players - please add to this list as you remember; both for new subjects I missed and ones you want to fill in.):
• Vast economic disparity, then and now.
• Spending vast amounts on entertainment in times of great struggle.
• The entertainment people resort to when they're poor.
• Culture gaps between the young and the old, and the conflict that creates.
• Todd's story: Mom finally getting to Yankee Stadium.
• New archetype relationships: e.g., master & apprentice.
• Inherited knowledge as something going extinct; are our brains changing into ciphers instead of strongholds?
• Seeing faces in everything (pareidolia) and making faces in everything (simulacra).
• Puppetry as themes, puppetry as practice.
• Practical actions performed live on stage (i.e., building something, cooking, etc.).
• Possible preference for "base characters"; definite priority for getting in-depth with a character.
• The differences of demeanor when you change who you're around.
• Unexpected transformation.
• We warmed up with a little further scenario practice.
• We applied some of the themes through two basic improvisation scenarios:
• Teaching, Building & Destroying: A master teaches a student something, and eventually an interloper destroys that thing.
• Pizza Making - Master: E; Apprentice: T; Interloper: C (this is also the one that made me realize the WEIRD initial thing)
•  Carpentry - Master: C; Apprentice: T; Interloper: E
• Feng Shui / Painting - Master: T; Apprentice: E; Interloper: C
• Self-Defense - Master: T; Apprentice: C; Interloper: E
• Old, Young & Compromise: An older person and a younger one come into a conflict through a disagreement in culture, and eventually a third enters to resolve the conflict.
• Video Games - Old: C; Young: E; Interloper: T
•  Lost / "Coke Machine" - Old: T; Young: C; Interloper: E
• Math - Old: E; Young: T; Interloper: C
• After a break, we examined acting with objects.  After choosing an object from the room, the performers improvised a scene with that object as though it were new to them, and they were having a dialogue with it that included emotional response.
• As a final action, we did a few things for the video camera:
• Improvised marionette dancing incorporating acrobalance and oral accompaniment.
• Two improvised scenes along the lines of the others.
• We closed out with upper-body conditioning - push-ups, pull-ups and one-minute handstands.

All-in-all, a great weekend.  I look forward to the next one in November.  In the meantime, let's collaborate here! Look for thematic posts from me in the coming weeks, and start a little writing yourselves about whatever you will (but be sure one or two have to do with character[s], too).  Avanti!