Ian Thal, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen!
Blogs by Ian Thal
Another Two Weeks with Bread & Puppet Theater: Part III 12/24/2004 8:16:32 PM
On Becoming a Puppeteer:
The puppeteers are a mostly stable crowd of nine. We are led by Lilly, one of the new members of the touring company. With a couple of exceptions, the rest of us are either, as in the case of Catalina, Isaac, Tom, and myself volunteers who have performed with Bread & Puppet before, or, as in the case of Trudi, and Alan, actual veterans of the company. The new members are Lee and Hans. Katt is with us for the first three days of rehearsal and the first two nights of the show, but when nearly all of us fall victim to a horrible cold, she is hit the worst and is unable to join us for the rest of the run.
The stable membership over the run allows us to build up the familiarity and the mostly nonverbal communication by which we coordinate the movements of our large puppets in very cramped confines while still remaining hidden.
In the blog I had writen last year I had noted how much puppetry was like mime and how much my mime background helped me work with the large puppets on stage. This year, I began to learn how puppetry is actually a very different (though related) art form to mime. Thankfully, I am surrounded by experienced artists, in Lilly, Trudi, Alan, and even 13 year old Isaac.
We in the dumb show are called the Red Puppeteers as we have broken away from the traditional Bread & Puppet whites and are clad in red, to camouflage ourselves against the red curtain that serves as a backdrop. It's like the black outfits worn by the puppeteers of the traditional Japanese Bunraku, except that we lack gloves and hoods, so we must keep our hands and heads concealed behind the puppets in order to maintain the illusion. Once one's face is becomes visible, the audience sees the entire torso; so long as one's face is hidden, the audience focuses their attention on the puppet and will not see the red clad bodies. As a mime, I present my body as a piece of moving sculpture to be appreciated in three dimensions. As a puppeteer, I am hidden and concerned with the sculptural nature of the puppet be it three dimensional or flat. As a mime, I use my full, peripheral vision to see my place on the stage in relation to any fellow performers or props. As a puppeteer, my vision is focused, on my contact point with the puppet, and on the lines of sight between the audience, the puppet and myself.
The most important figure we work with in the dumb show is the Sleeper. The Sleeper is an iconic figure of Bread & Puppet. For those who have neither read my previous accounts nor seen Bread & Puppet perform, the Sleeper is a figure of brown papier maché in the abstracted form of a female nude. She is assembled from ten separate panels: The head, the torso, the arms, the hand and forearms, the legs, and the feet, each operated by a separate puppeteer. As with last year, I am in the role of the left arm. In the case of the dumb show, we have dispensed with one of the legs and one of the feet.
Unlike last year, when the Sleeper was simply a body lain on her side, breathing, "World on Fire" demands more complex movements, including rising from a crouching position and extending her arms and head outside the proscenium frame. It requires far more complexity. My own position as the arm requires that I not only maintain the illusion of shoulder joint by keeping my panel in contact with the torso and also keeping the other end in contact with the forearm in order to maintain an elbow joint.
Hans rotates the head so that it might rise up before of the proscenium as we all slowly take a few steps forward. Lilly raises the left forearm up high as I must follow her lead. When we begin, the arm is folded. I am resting one end of the upper arm on her shoulders at first, but as she rotates the forearm on the illusory elbow joint and reaches upwards, I have to adjust the position of my panel from her shoulders to covering her face and flush the bottom edge of the arm with the inside of her elbow. My job has become one not only of hiding my presence but of hiding hers as well.
At the cast party I mention to Alan about how excited I am about the sort of puppetry we are doing this year.
Alan smiles and explains, "I've seen what the Sleeper can do when you get a troupe of puppeteers working together for months, so this isn't as exciting to me. When Peter first introduced the sleeper about twenty years ago in Vermont he had ten of us working with it for four months just to see what the Sleeper could do. It comes alive and it can float, bro. It can float. When you understand the puppet, you start to develop a feel for what it looks like to the audience."
