>>PREVIEW
FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES
Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Directed by Tim Sutherland
One Yellow Rabbit
Runs March 8 to 25
Big Secret Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
For those familiar with Disney’s animated version of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, seeing Jiminy Cricket squashed underfoot might just be enough to crush all those wasted dreams wishing upon a star. But at last year’s staging in the Martha Cohen Theatre, the result was anything but tragic.
"Killing the cricket was such a viscerally fun thing to do for the puppeteer, but the audience response was extremely joyous as well," says Peter Balkwill, a member of Calgary’s premier puppet company, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop.
In fact, the death was such a resonant set piece that the Trouts’ latest work is composed exclusively of elaborate puppet deaths, bound together in what amounts to an exhibition of 28 scenes, curated by a wild-haired puppet named Nathanial Tweak. Leaping from moments of serious introspection to joyful indulgence over the course of 39 deaths, Famous Puppet Death Scenes is a showcase of an imagined canon whose fragmented narratives, though invented by the Trouts, follow in the footsteps of plays like Punch and Judy – puppetry at its most violent and popular.
"We’ve invented the damn things as if there’s this great history and as if we’ve selected, from each of these famous plays that everyone knows the plot to, just the crucial climactic moment when the hero leaps off the cliff or when the villain is given his just rewards," says Trout member Judd Palmer. "They’re not vignettes or little shorts – they are fragments of imagined larger works. So, in some way, you can look at each piece in the way that you would a puppet hanging on a shelf."
While most of the Trouts’ previous productions – including their previous adaptation of the epic Beowulf and the Trout-created The Last Supper of Antonin Carême – had their premières in Calgary, Famous Puppet Death Scenes opened at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, with subsequent productions in Victoria and Regina. Though this means that Calgarians have had the rare disadvantage of seeing the Trouts’ work after other audiences, it has also afforded the Trouts time to polish the performance – a process Balkwill and Palmer estimate sees three or four changes before the production is complete.
"Calgary’s always seen the first rickety thing out of the box and it’s kind of nice to give it a good run so that, when we bring it back to Calgary, by and large our biggest group of friends and familial audience members, they get to see something that’s had a little bit of honing to it," says Balkwill.
"These are mad, mad things to put on, puppet shows," adds Palmer.
As polished as the show may be, one of the most fascinating elements of puppetry lies in the simple suspension of disbelief that turns a moving block of wood into an empathetic character. These beautiful, carved objects only exhibit an uncanny resemblance to life because the audience allows them to – making audience members at least as accountable for the cavalcade of puppet deaths as the Trouts themselves.
"Obviously (a puppet) is not alive to begin with, so there’s something about the collective decision that we make – a kind of conspiracy between audience and performer – that we’re going to believe that this thing is alive anyway," says Palmer. "Which is the source of what’s wonderful and beautiful about puppetry, and what’s ridiculous about it."
"The audience has found a vast amount of humour and a joyous response to the nature of death, and then countered at moments with moments of deep contemplation," says Balkwill of the show. "We don’t dwell on the morbid elements of death. We don’t want people to think that it’s just going to be this morose thing that they come out of feeling, ‘ugh.’ It really is an uplifting show."
But, of course, empathy can only extend so far. While the audience may genuinely empathize with the carved victims of Famous Puppet Death Scenes as the cruel fist of fate and brutal circumstance literally pounds them down, puppetry’s ability to render humanity as something as absurd as a carved toy will always lend it a welcome playfulness that can lighten even something as sombre as the subject of death. After all, according to Balkwill and Palmer, death is only one of two things that a person is inclined to do with a puppet immediately after picking one up.
"Die and make it have sex," says Balkwill.
"So the next show will be Famous Puppet Sex Scenes," adds Palmer, sarcastically.
"Puppet humping," concludes Balkwill. |
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