BY SCOTT T.

CUM M IN GS

Moses, cardboard hero of

Blind Summits The Table, presented
by Chicago Shakespeare Theater
as part of the inaugural
Chicago International Puppet
Theater Festival
NIGEL BEWLEY

30 AMERICANTHEATRE JULY/AUGUST1 5
the Most of the
AS TODAYS CUTTING-EDGE PUPPETEERS PEER INTO THE SOULS
OF ANIMATED OBJECTS, THEYRE SEEING THE FUTUREOR RATHER,
THE ETERNAL PRESENTOF THE THEATRE
ACCORDING TO MOSES, THE COCKY CARDBOARD television advertising, at the spectacles that open the Olympics.
hero of The Table, a production by the inventive London-based
puppetry company Blind Summit Theatre, there are three com-
mandments of puppetry: 1) Focus guides the audience to see things
that are not there, 2) Breathing is the key to convincing manipula-
tion, and 3) A fixed point gives the figure a realistic sense of weight.College calls a puppet moment, a time of sustained cultural
Is that so, Moses? The self-described funny little puppet on
a table discusses these trade secrets as part of a 75-minute perfor-
mance that is part stand-up comedy, part lecture/demonstration
Blair Thomas, founder of
Chicago International Puppet
and part Bible story about the Old Testaments sea-parting prophet
and the last lonely hours of his life atop Mount Nebo. What began
five years ago as part of an alternative Passover observance at the
Jewish Community Centre in London has become a hit wherever
Blind Summit and its artistic director, Mark Down, take it.
The metatheatricality of The Tablea puppet show about
puppetsis emblematic of a current fascination. Puppets are
everywhere these days: on Broadway, in Hollywood movies and
Moment
Playwrights, from Sarah Ruhl in The Oldest Boy to Robert Askins in
Hand to God, write them into their plays as characters. They turn up
more and more in opera. Late-night puppet slams are cropping up
around the country. We live in what Claudia Orenstein of Hunter
interest in animated objects as a form of artistic expression and a
tool of commerce and mass entertainment.
Puppets are also a hot topic for serious academic investigation.
Orenstein, Dassia N. Posner and John
Bell are the editors of the new Routledge
Companion to Puppetry and Material
Performance, a 2014 volume of wide-
Theater Festival
ranging essays aiming to set the agenda
for puppet scholarship for the next gen-
eration. Influenced by contemporary
thing theory and object-oriented
ontology, the book argues for a para-
digm shift from the idea of the master
puppeteer pulling all the strings to a
view of puppets as having their own life
and agency. If we will only listen, the
reasoning goes, puppets have things to
tell us about what it means to be a per-
son and what it means to be an object.
In mainstream theatre, the current
puppet moment might be traced back
to 1997 and Julie Taymors historic
production of The Lion King, which,
with well over $6 billion in revenues, is
JOE MAZZA now the most successful single show in
the history of box-office entertainment.
Avenue Q and War Horse have kept puppets in the spotlight, and
King Kong, a blockbuster musical from Australia featuring a 20-foot
ape, is reportedly getting ready to take Manhattan.
Are puppets on Broadway simply the novelty du jour? Or are
they signs of a marginalized performance practice coming into its
own as an art form? Is the expanding sense of what constitutes a
puppet confusing the matter or opening up new possibilities for
creativity and experiment?
s

JULY/AUGUST15 AMERICANTHEATRE 31
 To gain some perspective on these questions, I
traveled to two festivals earlier this yearthe first-
ever Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
and Puppet Animation Scotlands creatively titled
Manipulate: Visual Theatre Festival #8 in Edinburgh.

FESTIVALS ARE CRUCIAL TO THE SURVIVAL

of puppet theatre companies, particularly those with
an interest in creating serious work for adult audi-
ences. Not only a source of income, they also provide
a showcase where presenters can shop for new work
and artists can exchange ideas and learn from each
other. The biennial Festival Mondial des Thtres
de Marionnettes in Charleville-Mzires, France,
is perhaps the most important, but there are dozens
more each year, mainly in Europe (such as the Puppet
is a Human too Festival in Warsaw, or the Suspense

JOE MAZZA
Puppetry Festival, presented by Londons Little Chinese Theatre Works of New Yorks
shadow-puppet play in Chicago.
Angel Theatre). In New York City in the 1990s, the
Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater
was a revelation to American practitioners and general audiences, but
since the fifth and final Henson festival in 2000, the U.S. has lacked
a major international puppet theatre festival.
Blair Thomas has set out to change that. A Chicago theatre
artist for 30 years and artistic director of his own company since
2002, Thomas saw how the international work at the Henson festi-
vals inspired the American puppet community. He also experienced
how, from 1986 to 1996, the biennial International Theatre Festival
of Chicago changed what theatre artists in Chicago were doing,
including Thomas himself (whose response to the 1988 Windy City
appearance of Barcelonas Comediants was to found Redmoon Theater

with choreographer Laurie Macklin).
Thomas figures that if he can establish an international puppet
festival that becomes an institutional presence in Chicago, then the
art form may be advanced around the country. And if in the process
Chicago becomes the puppet capital of the U.S., so much the better.
Thomass strategy for launching the festival was as simple as
it was ambitious. Chicago is the city that collaborates, he likes
to say, so he began pitching the idea to area institutions large and
smalltheatres, museums, universities and other presentersthat
already had an established interest in puppets, experimental theatre
David Commander performs Sacrament
Burger in Chicago.
VLADIMIR TELEGIN
Theatre AHKEs
Mr. Carmen at Manipulate
or community-based arts. The idea was to assemble a coalition of
organizations, each of which would produce one or more events in
keeping with their regular programming but under the festival ban-
ner. So the educational center of the Art Institute could contribute
a family-oriented day of workshops and puppet shows tied to their
major James Ensor exhibit; the madcap Neo-Futurists could host the
equally zany David Commander and his toy-
theatre cast of action figures, Barbie dolls and
plastic animals; Chicago Shakespeare Theater
could bring back Blind Summit (after a successful
visit in 2013); and Chicago Childrens Theatre
could revive Blair Thomas and Michael Smiths
popular 2008 adaptation of Oscar Wildes The
Selfish Giant. In this way, one festival would serve
multiple constituencies.
Thomas recruited Claire Geall Sutton, a
veteran of the citys Department of Cultural
Affairs and a key organizer for a 2001 citywide
event called Puppetropolis, to come on board as
managing director. The imprimatur of a gener-
ous lead grant from the MacArthur Foundation
emboldened organizers to forge ahead and reach
out to more funders and presenters.
JOE MAZZA

Chicagos packed cultural calendar in

warmer months prompted the decision to sched-
32 AMERICANTHEATRE JULY/AUGUST1 5
ule the festival in January and risk the hassle
of a winter storm. In the end, the weather
was cooperative, and over 12 temperate days
without rain or snow, the inaugural Chicago
International Puppet Theater Festival pre-
sented more than 50 artists and 80 events
most of them sold outfor a total audience
of more than 14,000.

THE SHOWS IN CHICAGO RANGED

from the kind of traditional, family-friendly
work often seen at schools, libraries and public
fairs to edgy, experimental performances more
common to galleries, lofts and tiny black-box
theatres. Veteran Dave Herzog presented
JOE MAZZA
cute, colorful, well-crafted trick marionettes
that can juggle, blow up a balloon, swing on a Kirk Murphy, Ines Zeller Bass and Eric Bass of Sandglass perform D-Generation in Chicago.

trapeze or instantly transform from a magician

into a fairy. His circus figures contrasted with THE SANDGLASS EXCLUSIVE: MIND GAMES
the mesmerizing Le Petit Cirque of Laurent The only company to appear at both the Chicago and Edinburgh festivals was the
Bigot from France, who uses a table-top toy venerable Sandglass Theater of Putney, Vt. Since 1982, co-artistic directors Eric
circus reminiscent of Alexander Calder, rigged Bass and Ines Zeller Bass have been creating puppet work for adults and children
with 16 tiny microphones to perform a con- distinguished by its precision in design and technique, its seriousness of purpose, and
cert of odd, cleverly generated sounds. New its commitment to community engagement and international collaboration. Case in
Yorks Chinese Theatre Works (inspired by point: Their next project will team Sandglass with El Salvadors Teatro Luis Poma on
the pioneering work of Kansas-born Pauline an adaptation of Nathan the Wise, G.E. Lessings 1779 verse drama about religious
Benton, who brought Chinese shadow pup- tolerance.
petry to the West in the 1920s) performed At Manipulate in Edinburgh, Eric Bass dusted off his signature work Autumn
a traditional Chinese shadow-puppet play Portraits, a solo piece created in 1980 and performed hundreds of times since then.
in the halls of the Field Museum. Contrast Each of its five vignettes presents a distinct puppet characteran Irish vaudevillian,
this with the innovative shadow theatre of an old crone, a monk from the East, a Jewish cobbler, and so oncaught in an
Chicagos own Manual Cinema [see sidebar] existential predicament.
or Canadian artist-illustrator Daniel Barrow, In Chicago, Sandglass presented its latest work, D-Generation: An Exaltation of
both of whom use multiple overhead projec- Larks, which features five autumn portraits (or a little past that): Rose, Henry, Florence,
tors (in very different ways) to create manual Elwood and Mary are all wheelchair-bound seniors living with late-stage dementia in
animation in real time. a nursing home, where they are cared for (and operated) by three puppeteers (Eric
The variety of work programmed by Bass, Ines Zeller Bass and Kirk Murphy). Directed by Roberto Salomon and based
Thomas points to a question that is fascinat- on a series of workshops Sandglass did in care facilities, D-Generation asserts the
ing artists, audiences and academics: What humanity of those whose minds are gone by inviting them to use their imaginations
constitutes a puppet, exactly? What, in other and then turning those impulses, however kooky, into a charming, loving play-within-
words, is its nature and essence? How does it a-play. The figures are sculpted with exquisite realism by Coni Richards, and digital
help us to explore and understand the larger animation by Michel Moyse and original music by Paul Dedell amplified the tender
world of what cultural anthropologist and beauty of the piece.
folklorist Frank Proschan dubbed perform- While Sandglass spends much of the year on tour, the company returns to Vermont
ing objectspuppets, masks, ritual and fetish in the summer for a two-week training intensive, and in the fall for homegrown festivals
objects, and other material things endowed they produce in alternating years. Puppets in Paradise is a family-friendly weekend of
with agency through display, manipulation, music, toy theatre and puppet shows staged in the country gardens of local landscape
storytelling or performance? architects. The more ambitious Puppets in the Green Mountains is an international
No one in the U.S. has done more to festival which, in September 15, will focus on the theme of immigration and cross-
instigate consideration of such questions border identities and feature companies from Cuba, France, Germany, Canada and the
than artist, activist and scholar John Bell, a U.S. It is all in dogged pursuit of Sandglasss civic and artistic mission to bring their
10-year veteran of Bread and Puppet Theater, puppetry to the worldand the world of puppets to their community in southern
a founding member of the theatre collective Vermont. Cummings
Great Small Works, and director of the Bal-
lard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the
University of Connecticut. Bell takes issue with those who regard puppet. The youthful giants constructed by Royal de Luxe in the
puppets as quaint, primitive or outmoded, arguing that a wide array shipyards of Nantes, Frances, the fabric crankies used by the Appa-
of forms and practices should be seen and studied as puppetry. lachian folk duo Anna & Elizabeth to illustrate their songs, even the
If a performance is mediated by focus on an object and its eight large panels made by street artist JR and carried side-by-side
manipulation, Bell says, then to my mind it is in the realm of the by New York protest marchers to create the eyes of chokehold victim
JULY/AUGUST15 AMERICANTHEATRE 33
Eric Garnerall need to be seen as puppets. For Bell, its not a matter
of fussing about nomenclature but of taking the opportunity to better
to understand contemporary culture and its values, preoccupations
and actions by looking at them in the wider context of the history of
performing objects.
Blair Thomas sees this kind of serious thinking as crucial to
the advancement of puppetry. Nothing becomes really important
unless there are ideas behind it, he argues. This is what I learned
from working in spectaclespectacle can be fantastic experientially,
but it has to be embedded with social, historical or political ideas. It
has to have relevance, so that people outside of the form have a way
to enter into it.
And so, as part of the festival, he teamed with curator and stage
director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig and the University of Chicagos
Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry to launch the
Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium, a day of unexpected conversations
at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago between performing
artists and thinkers in other disciplines.
One of those conversations focused on the peculiar ways in
Manual Cinemas Mementos
which puppets fluctuate between the animate and the inanimateor,
metaphorically, between life and death. Blind Summits Mark Down,
lead operator and voice of the puppet Moses in The Table, pointed out
that it is not puppeteers who make puppets come alive. The puppet
lives in the audiences imagination. We try to steer that, and perhaps
persuade it to go somewhere exciting, but to be honest we dont have
a huge amount of control over it.
Dan Hurlin, creator of such stunning puppet works as Hiroshima
Maiden and Disfarmer, extended the thought by suggesting that
spectators may identify more with puppets than live actors, because
they are more of a participant in pretending they are dead or alive.
No matter how great the performance, there is always a part of you
that knows that at the end of the show the actor is going to go out
and have a beer or a glass of wine and then go home to bed. Puppets
dont do that. They only exist in the present of performance. And
that makes them agents of presence.
FOR THE PAST DECADE IN EDINBURGH, SIMON HART HAS
been pursuing a mission similar to the one adopted by Blair Thomas
in Chicago. Hart is artistic director and CEO of Puppet
Animation Scotland, an arts organization that produces
two different festivals on an annual basis. One is a series
of puppet shows and workshops for children and families
that tour to village halls and community centers all over
Scotland. Started in 1984, it has grown into the largest
performing arts event for children in the United Kingdom.
The other is Manipulate, the international visual theatre
and animation festival for adult audiences that he launched
in 2008 in an effort to nurture, promote and otherwise
instigate visual theatre culture in Scotland.
When we started, Hart explains, there were two
ideas: first, to bring great international work to Scotland
and find an audience for it; and second, through this work
and our master-class program, to encourage Scottish art-
DREW DIR

ists to create work of a similar scale and ambition, which

Mori in Chicago.
ideally would go back and tour internationally.

MANUAL CINEMA ON THE VERGE: LIFE AND DEATH IN L.A.

ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE
offerings in Chicago was the world pre-
miere of Mementos Mori by Manual Cin-
ema, a local group that is moving into the
national spotlight. The companys medium
is light and shadow, but to label them a
shadow-puppet theatre feels misleading.
They use low-tech cardboard cutouts,
overhead projectors and high-tech video
cameras and sound systems to perform
silent animated films frame by frame in
real time. A gaggle of actors, puppeteers,
technicians and musicians assembles the
show on the spot, mixing a raft of ele-
ments and special effects in surprising
ways. Chances are you have not seen any-
thing quite like it before.
Commissioned by the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago, Mementos
Mori is Manual Cinemas most ambitious
project to date. Amusing and macabre at
once, it tells a story about the Angel of
Death, presented as a femme fatale, and
a little girl with a Game Boy who trade
places in a way that threatens to throw off
the order of the universeor at least Los
Angeles, where the action takes place. The
piece is projected on three screens, two at
stage level and one on a master composite
screen above. Part of the fun is watching
the dance of the performers as they
navigate a maze of cables and tech tables,
shifting from operating shadow puppets to
being silhouetted as puppets themselves.
This is shaping up as a breakout year
for Manual Cinema, which was started
in 2010 by its five co-artistic directors:
Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman,
Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter. On the
heels of the Mementos Mori premiere,
they contributed 10 short videos to an
exhibit at the Chicago History Museum on
The Secret Lives of Objects. In March,
they teamed up with the London group
Erratica on a video opera based on the
1499 Spanish proto-novel La Celestina,
which was presented as a site-specific
installation in the Patio from the Castle of
Vlez Blanco at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. And Ada Ava, their 2011 piece
about septuagenarian twin sisters moving
between life and death, runs through July
5 at Manhattans 3-Legged Dog Art &
Technology Center.
Manual Cinemas unique and versatile
aesthetic has already taken them in a lot
of directions, including into music videos
and movie trailers. Figuring out which
direction matters to them most may be
their next big challenge. Cummings

34 AMERICANTHEATRE JULY/AUGUST1 5
 The first Manipulate, which took place
in Dundee, presented four companies whose
work staked out Harts territory of inter-
est: Belgiums Compagnie Mossoux-Bont,
Frances Vlo Thtre, Hollands Duda Paiva
and English marionettist Stephen Mottram.
Says Hart, The dominance of the spoken
word in theatre from Shakespeare on is so
incredibly powerful that much of this type
of work never gets to the U.K., let alone to
Scotland. The festival shifted to Edinburgh
in 2009, and since then it has been based
at the Traverse Theatre, which provides
facilities, ticketing services, technical staff
JOE MAZZA
and enthusiastic partnership in exchange
for a piece of the box office.
Over the years, the four original compa-
nies have been joined by Austrias Editta Braun Company, Germanys
Figurentheater Tbingen, Neville Tranters Stuffed Puppet Theatre
from Amsterdam, and Londons 1927. In 2014, Joyce McMillan,
longtime theatre critic for The Scotsman, called Manipulate one of
the unsung miracles of the Scottish cultural scene.
Manipulate is expressly a visual theatre festival with a strong
but not exclusive interest in puppets and animationthe 2015 event
included three-day professional workshops on contemporary shadow
theatre by Italian master Fabrizio Montecchi and on working with
objects by Polina Borisova from Russia. There was also a screening
of short puppet-animation films by Claire Lamond and a Snapshots
series that showcased excerpts from traditional puppet works in
progress. Strictly speaking, the only featured work of puppet theatre
in 2015 was Autumn Portraits from Vermonts Sandglass Theater [see
sidebar], but there were solo dance pieces from Belgiums Sandman/
Sabine Molenaar and the Czech Republics Andrea Miltnerov, both
of which transformed the dancers bodies into abstract forms driven
by unseen forces. U.S.- based Paper Doll Militia and Edinburghs All
or Nothing each performed aerial dance-theatre pieces.
The most satisfying entries came from two well-established
European companies whose work has been described as theatre
of objects. Each combined elements of puppetry, material perfor-
mance, toy theatre, shadow play, physical comedy, music and design
into highly theatrical shows loosely based on mythic narrative. Vlo
Thtre, based in the south of France, performed And Then He Ate
Me, a lyrical deconstruction of the Little Red Riding Hood tale
refracted through the prism of Bchners drama Woyzeck. The wild
men of Theatre AKHE, a performance collective from St. Petersburg,
performed Mr. Carmen, in which two deadpan, whiteface clowns
with scruffy beards wreak havoc as they compete for more and more
astonishing ways to write out the names Carmen and Jos (from
Mrime via Bizet) onstage.
Simon Hart created Manipulate so that Scottish audiences
could experience a type of European theatre driven more by images,
objects and movement than by text, character and plottheatre that
leaves a lot of room, he says, for the individual audience members
to join the dots in a way that is satisfying to them, and to interpret
something in a way that may be radically different from the person
beside them. In an American context, this aesthetic can be traced
back to the avant-garde impulses of Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson,
Richard Foreman and others once categorized by Bonnie Marranca
as theatre of images and more recently designated postdramatic
theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann and others. The implicit argu-
JULY/AUGUST15 AMERICANTHEATRE 35
Sam Deutsch in The Selfish Giant at
Chicago Childrens Theatre.
ment of Manipulate is that puppets are a valuable element of this
experimental traditionwitness the work of Lee Breuer and Mabou
Mines, from Shaggy Dog Animation (1978) to La Divina Caricatura
(2013)but are not essential to it.
MANY OF THE ARTISTS FEATURED IN A SPECIAL SECTION
on puppets in the February 04 issue of this magazineBasil Twist,
Janie Geiser, Dan Hurlin, Erik Ehn, Jon Ludwig, Sandy Spielerare
still, more than a decade later, among the leading figures in the field.
Whether that is a sign of stability or stagnation in the American pup-
petry movement is a matter for debate. Chicagos Manual Cinema
is on the rise, and Jessica Grindstaff and Erik Sankos New York
Citybased Phantom Limb Company premiered Memory Rings in
June in Nashville, but there is ample room in the national spotlight
for a younger generation of puppet artists pushing the form in new
directions.
Some of them, we can hope, will come through the training
programs led by Bart P. Roccoberton Jr. at the University of Con-
necticut and Janie Geiser at CalArts. In New York City, the Dream
Music puppetry program at the performance space HERE and the
Puppet Lab at St. Anns Warehouse continue to nurture emerging
artists and incubate new work. And this June marks the 25th anniver-
sary of the National Puppetry Conference at Connecticuts Eugene
ONeill Theater Center as a mecca for training and experimentation;
the 2015 conference features workshops in writing for puppets (Ron-
nie Burkett), experimental puppetry (Alice Therese Gottschalk), the
body as puppet (Hugo & Ines), puppet mechanics (Jim Kroupa) and
marionette design, construction and manipulation (Phillip Huber
and Jim Rose).
In 2004, Twist argued in these pages for puppetry as its own art,
a form of creative expression, distinct from theatre and dance, music
and visual art, storytelling and poetry. And he continues to pursue
his vision of pure puppetry, most recently in the swirling, dancing
fabrics he deployed in his response to Stravinskys Rite of Spring. But
more and more, performing objects, figurative or abstract, are being
integrated with these other forms to generate new hybrid possibilities.
And different types of puppetsbunraku-style figures, marionettes,
shadow puppets, toy figures, giant puppets, animationare often
found in a single work. As Thomas says, Puppetry today is a mashup
of work. The field has such plurality. And audiences love that.
Scott T. Cummings, professor of theatre at Boston College, is
a scholar of contemporary theatre.
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