Friday, January 15, 2010
Local Theaters Are Pulling Strings
NYTimes.com: "The humble puppet, often crafted from rags, paper or even wire, is having its moment in Chicago theater. Once relegated to puppet-specific stages, the use of marionettes alongside actors in mainstream productions is “exploding,” said Roell Schmidt, the director of Links Hall performance space."
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6 comments:
I think that the increasing popularity of puppetry in theater is awesome, with projects like avenue Q becoming such great successes it really opens up a lot of opportunities to pushing the envelope with puppets artistically and how they're used in theater. This summer in New York I visited a puppet company that had a majority of its designers that were in their early twenties, at that at the time they were working on this commercial project in which they made robot puppets and were breaking apart all these toys to create the skeletal form of the puppets, and it was really amazing to see the innovative process that they went through to create them.
I's interesting that they mentioned it saves them the cost of hiring actors....but then who are they paying to operate the puppet? I assume most still have some type of voice over as well, so you're still hiring someone to manipulate the puppet as well as perform a character.
I wondered the same thing about having to still pay someone to operate the puppet. I don't think that's a very good justification for using puppets. I do think that the combination of puppets and actors could be quite powerful in some shows, as long as there is something to gain. If nothing is added artistically to the show by the inclusion of a particular puppet, then it could come off as looking quite silly.
I love the popularity puppetry is gaining. It seems that people are finally willing to see just how dynamic and engaging puppets can be (when done well.) One of my favorite movies when I was young, Lanbrynth, was a masterful fusion of puppetry and live action--and went on to become a cult classic. Avenue Q seems to have cemented it. Puppets are finally here. I wonder where this will take us if playwrights start writing roles specifically for puppets. It'll be interesting to see where the industry takes this in the next few years.
This development is something that will make theater more interesting half the time and more gimmicky the other half. Some productions will use puppetry to enhance story-telling, while others will decide that puppets are cool and they might be able to sell more seats if their production has puppets. Hopefully the former situation will become more prominent; perhaps this new "explosion" can be used as a way to explore other cultures' theatrical traditions, such as Japanese bunraku.
The increasing popularity of puppets is an interesting dynamic to look at. Avenue Q seemed to make it so that puppets could become more commonplace in theaters today. I think they could be used for various different plays to help enhance stories, or tell stories in different ways. As others have noted, it just depends on the production because if the puppets are used incorrectly, they could just become gimmicky and not add to the production
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