Questions:
1)
How long have you been involved with puppets and puppet theatre?
Since the very beginning of the company, Clare had worked with puppetry in college and when we met in my first year (her third) I had a script that I wanted to perform about child abuse that had occurred in my family. We decided very early on that a puppet would be perfect to play the abused child as the use of a puppet helped to underpin our theme, the abused child never spoke, and was treated like a doll. We fell in love with the form then and resolved to use it in all our performances. It allows us to create a sense of magic on stage.
2)
What do you feel the roll of the puppet is? How can it be different from "conventional" use of the puppet?
We believe that puppetry is theatre at it's purest, the suspension of disbelief is implicit when a puppet is on stage, the actors and all the audience are in a silent agreement that for the duration of the show we will pretend that this thing is real. I think the puppet has a very important role to play in theatre, its advantages, compared to an actor, is that it doesn't need to act. All to often an actor is trying to re-create emotion, and the audience needs to believe them, if this first step fails then the audience is 'turned off' to the play instantly. However, if the puppet is manipulated well, the audience are free to project their emotion onto the blank canvas, thus they have suddenly invested in the performance and it becomes a more enriching experience. People have come up to us after shows and asked how we got the puppets eyes to move and show emotion (which of course we didn't, the eyes are fixed) I think this speaks to the capability of the individual to project feelings onto inanimate things.
This advantage is used best when the puppet is communicating an idea or theme. There is a distance between the puppeteer and puppet, in that space there is room for the audience to consider what is being said, I think puppetry is similar to Brecht's Guestic acting in this sense.
Im not really sure what the "conventional" use of the puppet is.
3)
Have you ever done site specific performance? What are your thoughts on site influencing the construction and manipulation of the puppet? (Specifically a cemetery the site)
We have, a little, the setting can of course enhance and add to the puppetry. Especially if the puppet is related to its environment, I would say it allows the audience to invest in the world the puppet comes from. However I don't feel that there are any glaring advantages, in fact some would argue that puppetry needs to stand out against a very plain background to allow complete focus. I think the efficacy of puppetry comes down to the operation, and good operation can be done anywhere, with any sort of puppet.
4)
What is too taboo for puppet theatre?
I don't think there is a subject that puppetry cant tackle within the realms of good taste, this is the advantage of good puppetry, that they can do things and speak of things that we humans cannot, or you could say its easier to hear such things from a puppet. I think this is down to the distance I mentioned earlier.
One thing that does piss me off is when puppetry is forced into a performance unnecessarily, there is a bit of a puppetry revival going on, don't get me wrong, its great that people see the form as accessible, there shouldn't be any snobbery with puppetry. But I think some people want to put it in their performances without thinking about why its there, how it enforces or speaks about the theme. And even worse when they are operated badly, nothing gets my goat more
No comments:
Post a Comment