Reviews
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ANIMATED OBJECTS
Calgary Animated Objects Society
January 21 to 30
With the puppet stages down and all the opportunities for puns about "strings" fully exhausted, it’s time to look back on the Calgary Animated Objects Society’s International Festival of Animated Objects – 10 brilliant days of everything from traditional marionettes to live animation and gigantic stilt-walkers. Spread over several venues, the festival played host to artists from across North America and as far away as the Czech Republic – artists whose work demonstrates the dazzling range of an art form that combines the spectacle of theatre with the raw beauty of sculpture and storytelling.
Kicking off the mainstage shows, puppetry phenom and former Calgarian Ronnie Burkett appeared at the Martha Cohen Theatre with Unstrung, an evening in which he read from his latest work-in-progress, Ten Days on Earth. Giving us a taste of this play about loneliness, whose title reflects Burkett’s own 10 days as a yet-to-be-adopted child, the puppeteer-playwright read some scenes focusing on the story’s mentally handicapped protagonist and his encounters as he works as a shoe-shiner, as well as on the fairy tale that is intended to underscore the main plot, "Honey Dog and Little Burp."
Always a consummate storyteller, Burkett’s whimsical tale of a wandering dog and his duckling charge provoked more than a few coos of sympathy from the audience while his engaging, even self-deprecating style showed the charismatic man behind a legendary master of puppet theatre.
Burkett was not the only puppeteer to forgo the strings, with professional film and television puppeteer Frank Meschkuleit’s discussion of puppetry for TV standing out as one of the most informative of the festival’s lectures. With a wry, easy wit, Meschkuleit’s simple demonstration of televised puppetry’s hidden underbelly was just as entertaining as his one-man show, The Left Hand of Frank, which he presented as its tentative final performance. The latter, a minimalist cabaret full of comic energy and ridiculous characters, was enough to make a reviewer nostalgic for the days of The Muppet Show or even Fraggle Rock, on which Meschkuleit was once a performer.
Shifting from puppets to live animation, the work of Manitoba artist Daniel Barrow served as a reminder of the festival’s diversity, demonstrating the possibility of animated objects beyond strings and foam heads. Sliding beautifully drawn, transparent overheads over one another like an animator’s cels, Barrow is able to enliven his spoken narratives with all the fluid grace of a theatrical staging and the compelling beauty of hand-drawn artwork. Barrow’s The Face of Everything, the first of two works he performed at the festival, was a sensitive, nuanced tale based on the real-life affair of Liberace and his "personal assistant," Scott Thorenson. Accompanied by an ironically lilting synthesized keyboard score by Jeff Cressman, this stunning portrait of the transformative value of pain was a rare gem, both lyrically and visually.
For spectacle, however, there was no more grand display of colour and sound than Three on the Tree’s Elemental, an epic presentation that filled Banker’s Hall with stilt-walkers, gigantic puppets and traditional Tsimpshian dance.
Capping the festivities, The Dolly Wiggler Cabaret sent the puppets and their puppeteers out in grand style, featuring a collection of the festival’s artists in a rapid-fire variety show full of old-fashioned razzmatazz. While the evening was stalled intermittently by acts whose energy seemed out of place amid cabaret panache, Mooky Cornish, the hyperbolic emcee, ran a tight sequence of acts ranging from the Czech Republic’s Cakes and Puppets’ squid chapeaux to a balloon version of Swan Lake complete with a castrating pair of scissors.
The cabaret reached its own climax with the preternaturally adept Phillip Huber, whose marionettes create an imitation of life that it at once fantastic and eerily realistic. From a scarecrow whose body flies apart as he dances across the stage to the grotesque beauty of a golden acrobat whose body contorts with the grace of a human chained to strings, Huber’s artistry provided the festival with a final, haunting conclusion.
Of course, there were some low points during the 10-day event.
With a sparsely attended central panel discussion and the odd weak show – such as WP Puppet Theatre’s grating attempt to teach five year-olds the importance of indicator species – the IFAO still has room for improvement after its second year. But if 2005’s formidable, well-rounded crop of artists is any indication, Calgary audiences should expect great things from this fledgling biennial festival. |
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