The Thing Happens

A third-generation puppeteer aims to create the puppetry equivalent of abstract painting

By Basil Twist

Puppetry today is primarily reviewed as theatre and occasionally as dance, if it is reviewed at all. In my work, the distinctions often blur. Visual art magazines assessed my shows, alongside the usual reviews of paintings and installation art. One critic wondered if my visual stagings of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka were, in fact, ballets, rather than puppet shows.

I have been an advocate for pure puppetry. With Symphonie Fantastique, which inaugurated the Dream Music Puppetry Program at the HERE Arts Center’s Dorothy B. Williams Theater in 1998, I was aiming for puppetry that’s boiled down to its essence—the puppetry equivalent of abstract painting. I was trying to strip the puppet show of the familiar devices of character, plot, narrative and other elements associated with theatre, and yet still retain the substance of puppetry.

A figurative puppet always has a story attached to it; the moment it appears, it shows a particular personality and distinct characteristics. This is not a bad thing. But the pureness of puppetry happens at that precise moment when an object comes to life. It’s the same magic as when I was a kid sitting at the dinner table, and I tied a little knot on a napkin to make it look like a witch. The people around the dinner table saw what I had done and were transported into another reality. Part of it has to do with the surprise of seeing magic pop out of the mundane world. This thing happens, and you believe that an inanimate object has a soul. 

I wrestled, for a long time, to re-create in puppetry the visual interpretation of music, which seemed to me the purest of the arts. It had already been done in Busby Berkeley’s designs and the work of German animator Oskar Fischinger, who worked on Fantasia (although that film resulted in something that was mostly narrative and representational). I attended, in 1992, a festival of music and puppetry at a marionette institute in France, seeing baroque operas made for puppets and avant-garde French compositions that involved the manipulations of strange musical instruments. It was pretty obvious to me that something was missing.

After doing some research, I came across experiments in abstractions along the lines I was searching for: The Futurist Giacomo Balla had staged Stravinsky’s Fireworks for the Ballets Russes in 1917, a performance that apparently few remember today; I saw a recording of Alexander Calder’s sculptural staging of pieces of music. I came back to New York in 1993, determined to pursue my goal of creating “pure” puppets shows.

There is a unique and totally complete artistic experience that is puppetry. Try, for instance, to look back into the past. Can we remember, as we go back to our childhoods or as we delve into our ancient selves (before man had language), the clarity of seeing the spirit in things of this world, in rocks and trees or action figures and dolls, in sand and clouds and the strange patterns and shadows in fire and on the bedroom wall? This has nothing to do with the suspension of disbelief, as my brilliant friend Paula Vogel once corrected me—but simply with belief. What could be more primal and sacred and pure?

There is a full spectrum—360 degrees worth—of different uses and applications and meanings of puppetry within a theatrical piece. And these applications, from the practical staging of some outlandish effect to the more metaphorical devices (such as the doubling of a character), may harmonize with all sorts of intention that a playwright or director might have. It has been my privilege to collaborate with accomplished artists of other disciplines, like Paula (for her play, The Long Christmas Ride Home), and Jonathan Sheffer and the Eos Orchestra (Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Copeland’s America). In these instances, I try to bring an appropriate application of my craft to forward their larger projects. But I know that for an audience, the event of a puppet coming to life on stage—even in the midst of or alongside a separate art form, such as the one called “theatre”—stirs a singular part of the soul. Puppetry is a form of creative expression, distinct from theatre and dance, music and visual art, storytelling and poetry. It is not a subset or collage of any of these. Puppetry is its own art.

San Francisco native Basil Twist is the director of the Dream Music Puppetry Program at HERE Arts Center in New York City. His puppet works include Symphonie Fantastique, Petrushka, The Araneidae Show and the upcoming Dogugaeshi Project. He is also collaborating with composer Ushio Torikai and director Lee Breuer to develop puppetry for the opera Red Beads for Mabou Mines.

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