>>PREVIEW
SHORT STORIES
Opens May 22
Hugo and Ines, Object Theatre
Calgary International Children’s Festival
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Puppetry is a collision between visual art and theatre, an art form in which handcrafted objects stand in for living actors and provide an alien but strikingly beautiful fusion of exhibition and performance. Learning the craft, then, is as much a technical skill as it is an artistic one, with would-be puppeteers agonizing over joints, building materials and strings before even creating the tool they will use to create their performance.
If turning wood or plaster into an actor is a stupefying magic trick, then what Ines Pasic and Hugo Suarez are able to create is nothing short of a miracle. Without any joints but their own, using only a T-shirt and false nose, the pair create puppets with their own bodies. Based on mime, rather than traditional puppetry techniques, Pasic and Suarez’s performances draw literally from their bodies. Likewise, Short Stories, their latest production, opening at the Calgary International Children’s Festival, is a series of vignettes based on extracting hidden meaning from everyday situations.
"In your body, there are infinite possibilities to find characters, to imagine what you can find in the universe," explains Pasic. "We are a mural of what exists in the universe, of what is outside of us and inside of us. And as artists, we are just the bridge who make it visible."
Though few people are likely to contemplate their body parts with the kind of depth that Pasic and Suarez find themselves doing, the pair’s performances demonstrate the surprising inherent characters of such ignoble body parts as the knee, belly and elbow. Ginocchio, for example, is a ukulele-playing busker created by Suarez’s knee, with the knee’s naturally limited movements transformed into a literally slow character that Suarez himself takes advantage of. Alternatively, the character of the belly is a nervous woman wracked by self-esteem issues, drawing explicit attention to that ubiquitous, fat-retaining area. "With the belly puppets, we are speaking about this problem in a funny and comic way," notes Pasic.
The two began their original collaborations in 1989, eventually calling themselves Teatro Hugo & Ines. Suarez had already been performing street mime for nine years before meeting Pasic, who is a graduate of the Sarajevo Music Conservatory. The act didn’t begin with the same exacting movements the two have now mastered. In contrast, productions now require a minimalist precision, one that Pasic likens to a simple melody, that doesn’t allow for a great deal of improvisation. But in their early days, the two were able to simply play. "We had no money and a lot of time, and just wanted to have some fun," she says. "So with our hands, our feet, we started discovering something like a humanoid character. And after we have a lot of fun with this play, after a tour, little by little, this fun moment was the basis for a lifetime of artistic work."
With this body of artistic work now spanning nearly 20 years, it seems natural that a company of such economy would be so imminently transportable, with four months of the year devoted to international tours. Yet, says Pasic, there is more to the production’s simplicity than simple economy. In many ways, the show’s obvious economy is also a deeper metaphor for the restricting influence of ever-pervasive "things" – an especially interesting lesson in the realm of puppetry and its animated objects.
"It’s to be free from exterior, be free of things and find the maximum in ourselves," Pasic says, adding that this same minimalism is intrinsically liberating. After all, while not everyone can create a puppet, everyone is gifted with their own physicality. If a performer without a puppet can try her hand at puppetry, then the craft is within anyone’s reach.
"There are people who (do) not have technological means to express themselves, but not for this," says Pasic. "If we have ourselves, we have the possibility to create – to be creative because this is a part of our nature. I think this is the beauty and motivation we see in our work." |
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