Ronnie Burkett returns to Calgary with his latest production, Billy Twinkle.

DETAILS

Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy presented by Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre
Thursday, March 18 - Sunday, April 11

More in: Theatre

Master puppeteer Ronnie Burkett has been immersed in the world of puppeteering since, depending on the telling, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry or by the famous “Lonely Goatherd” sequence in The Sound of Music. In Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, Burkett’s latest touring production, that world is exploded in the memories of its titular puppeteer, a cruise ship entertainer who finds himself washed up in middle age before the ghost of his mentor comes to show him the light. But if the setting is specific to the particular kind of place where craftsmen fret and debate about the specific methods of stringing a puppet, the story is not intended as a zoo exhibit on the peculiarities of dolly wigglers.

“In terms of Billy’s world and his mentor’s world and his peers, it’s a very specific world of apprenticeship and training,” says Burkett. “And within this very specific realm, you can explore universal human emotions.”

“But in the specifics,” he adds, “we couldn’t be further apart.”

Although Billy begins the play teetering on the edge (literally as well as figuratively) of the cruise ship where he’s been plying his trade for too many lost years, Burkett is careful to say that he’s never found himself in such a self-loathing place. In fact, even his puppetry style is different than that of his titular characters; to create many of the cabaret-style puppets used in the performance — like a stripper marionette capable of a live striptease — Burkett had to consult an 80-year-old expert to fill the gap in his knowledge. The only substantial resemblance between himself and Billy, says Burkett, is that they both started young and obsessed.

At age 14, Burkett landed a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to attend an international puppeteer conference in Michigan. Just as Billy cuts his teeth with an early, touring cabaret show, Burkett has been performing professionally since his mid-teens, onstage in New York by the age of 19 with the influential American puppeteer Bill Baird — the same puppeteer responsible for “The Lonely Goatherd.” For both Billy and Burkett, enthusiasm for the craft is what drove them into the puppets’ strings.

“I think the thing that Billy and I share, and the thing I borrow most from my life, is Billy as a kid, and Billy just hungry and rabid to learn everything about puppeteers, and pestering puppeteers, one in particular,” he says. “It is a craft where you have to learn to make stuff that’s traditionally been passed down from the old boys to the young boys.”

In Billy Twinkle, all of Burkett’s “old boys” are unified in Sid Diamond — Billy’s mentor and eventual cautionary ghost. And while Burkett isn’t haunted, his own late mentor, Martin Stevens, continues to influence his work. In a field where mentorship has often been the only way of learning a complicated art form, sometimes the oldest knowledge is the most reliable.

“I just spent the last two days in the basement of the Detroit Institute of Arts looking at my mentor’s work from the ’30s and ’40s, kind of rethinking my whole approach now,” says Burkett. “I wanted to go and see what made him so great.”

“I think [Stevens] was a complete theatre artist,” he adds. “He had a delicacy and an elegance to his figures. This is what middle-aged marionette guys do — we’re always trying to reinvent the wheel…. The more I think about it, the guys in the early 20th century were just figuring it out on the fly, so I went to see what they figured out. Nine times out of 10 the thing they figured out at the beginning was the right way to do it.”

Though short on specifics, Burkett suggests that his next show will be a return to the fundamentals of his craft, informed by the early American masters. As in his last production, 10 Days on Earth, he’ll rise out of the playing space and leave the acting entirely to the puppets, rather than the very substantial role his physical presence plays in Billy Twinkle. But a back-to-basics approach isn’t the only way that Burkett is honouring the tradition of puppetry — he also recently provided a strong incentive to the next generation of puppeteers to the tune of $25,000.

In 2009, Burkett won the prestigious Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, which, at $100,000, is the richest prize in Canadian theatre. Despite being a writer, performer and designer, Burkett took the prize in the “designer” category, perhaps speaking to the complexity of the puppet genre. But where Burkett managed to finagle his mentorship out of the old boys at puppetry conferences, Clea Minaker, an artist best known for creating live shadow puppetry backdrops during Feist’s concerts, managed to draw Burkett in solely on her reputation.

“I asked a few people I trusted who they thought was of note, up-and-coming, and everyone I talked to mentioned Clea’s name at the top of the list,” he says.

With the $25,000 portion of the award designated for a protégée in hand, Burkett passed it on to someone already known for showing the same obsession that brings all good puppeteers along. That and one other thing.

“She’s a great person, and it’s always a delight when someone new and up-and-coming isn’t an asshole.”