Theatre Development Fund – TDF: The only sounds you hear at a Mummenschanz performance are laughs coming from the audience. Using masks, props, puppets, and their malleable bodies and imagination, the members of the inventive Swiss mime troupe conjure humorous vignettes in complete silence. A pair of people with putty faces that can be sculpted into any expression; a giant foam mouth that devours everything in sight; two creatures crying toilet paper tears -- scenes like these don't need dialogue or music to tickle your funny bone and touch your heart.
1 comment:
Mummenschanz feels like something I either saw on TV at a young age on an early morning program, or something out of a fever dream – and either way, something strangely familiar. This type of puppetry fascinates me. The puppeteers have such a fascinating gap to fill between the puppets and the audience. The puppets shapes are incredibly vague and which allows for incredible flexibility in manipulating the shapes with movement to create whatever they want or need to create. However the other edge of that coin is that the puppeteer needs to be direct enough with the movements they choose to be able to transfer the appropriate life into these fabric forms and performance objects. Because the shapes are so vague, the audience has the potential to interpret the object to be many different things, so the puppeteers, while they do have immense freedom, also need to be very direct in order to convey the story they are looking to tell.
Post a Comment