[music]
Ada Ava was one of the very first shows we started to make and we began with the question of
what kind of a story would work best in
this medium of shadow puppetry.
We landed on the idea of identical twin
sisters who live in a lighthouse and run the lighthouse.
We thought that if you see identical twins in silhouette there's already sort of a story being told.
One of the sisters passes away and for the rest of the story we watch Ada cope with
her loss and readjust her daily routine around the absence of her sister.
I had recently lost my grandmother and witnessing my grandfather just his daily
routine around her absence provided the emotional fuel Ada Ava.
One night carnival comes to town and sets up shop right outside the lighthouse.
Ada is drawn into the carnival and finds herself in a mirror maze where
she discovers who she thinks is her lost twin sister.
By the end of the story she's discovered that she's gotten more than she bargained for.
[footsteps]
What we do is cinematic shadow puppetry.
We have live music, live Foley and all the imagery is created live as well.
And we started out a lot smaller where we didn't reveal the process of how
we were creating the imagery. Then as we started developing the medium, we started to flip
the shows around to kind of reveal the chaos how the images are created and
share that with the final image of the show.
Ada Ava's pretty influenced by Hitchcock's Vertigo and also we got excited about the styles
the German expressionist films like the Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis.
We added some more, this kinda horror elements.
[music]
During a Manual Cinema show all of us are manning these old-school overhead
projectors combining a mix paper shadow puppets with live actors performing in silhouette.
Some of us came from theater, from music, and visual art and we never expected to do
more than one little show with one single overhead projector. We just liked
working together so much and we liked working with the medium of shadow
puppetry and music so much. Before we knew it we sort of had this company.
Manual Cinema is a pretty collaborative group. We have 5 artistic directors and we all have a lot of
different skill sets that we bring.
We came together kind of a visual team and
a sound team. Julia Miller discovered an overhead projector in her
garage and decided she wanted to play with this this medium of Shadow Puppets.
We started performing in Chicago and
a kind of blossoms from there.
Our process begins with the outline of the story
that we work pretty collaboratively on. The outline is story boarded like an animated
film so we'll do kind of a rough and dirty puppetry sequence where we'll just
film everything and edit it together and then we try to figure out how to do that in real time.
A lot of rehearsal process is just us trying to like do it fast enough.
We're really inspired by the constraints that our medium provides us.
Stories are told nonverbally and that constraint has led to a lot of creativity and new ideas.
We started to see the possibilities of using this medium with cinematic language.
Things like scene changes and cuts and fades to tell stories. Our first show the
audience really loved it and we decided to kind of continue.
We began just doing pans and zooms and when we figured out how to do rack focus that was really exciting
because the mediums pretty two-dimensional so we're always trying to figure through
the puppetry how to add more depth. That's where a lot of the exciting
innovations that we come up with
happen. Trying to figure out how to articulate that type of camera technique
onto the projector.
Some of the tricks in the show really impressive are actually the simplest.
We had tried really hard to figure out how to make mirror puppets.
Creating all these super articulate tiny mirror puppets that had to be operated exactly
at the same time and they just weren't working and then we realized that if you
have two lights in different places shining at the same place you
automatically double your shadow because they're not coming from the same spot.
So that was kind of an "aha" moment of oh, we can have two projectors up at the same time but
we just interchanged where they were showing light.
Wish I had a puppet show you.
Resetting is really important because this is what the show looks like at the
end so resetting you kind of go backwards and place them all in
chronological order because we move so fast if you don't have a puppet
where it should be, it can be no good.
So this is one part of a two-part mirror maze, so this will go on one projector
and then another slide that has black where the light is and cutouts where the
black is goes in front of it. So the ideas that it's a whole basically
hallway of rectangles.
[music]
And then when you cross, it kind of transforms your silhouette.
[music]
With our work we really ask the audience to engage with the imagery and how it's being made,
because we're revealing the mechanism.
Originally when we were behind the screen, I feel like there was a more casual energy because we weren't
performing the show in front of the audience. They couldn't see us.
Then when we flipped it around I felt strangely exposed. We could feel the
audience a lot more and we weren't hidden behind the screen so we are a
lot more present in the room with them which was really nice to kind of
interact with them in that way. So we give audiences different kind of agency
where they're allowed to focus on either the mechanism of the show and how it's
being created or the final product and just watch you know the movie version of
the show and I think that engagement is sometimes missing from live theater and
film. Bringing them together
asks the audience to be present and participate.
[music]
I studied theater in college and it was a pretty physical approach. Like doing
masks work and clown and I moved to Chicago to work on shows but I kind of
stumbled onto a couple puppet companies. It was just really explain to me to
see you
these inanimate objects you know come alive. So I started to work on a couple
puppet projects and then suddenly it was just the only thing I was doing.
Making puppets come alive is a combination I feel like trying to figure out the
breadth of the puppet and what technically the motion is. It's a medium
that's based in action and gesture so ideally a puppet it's pretty easy to use if
it's designed well. It makes a proposal to you as what action it wants to do
because that's what it's designed to do and then you have to just kind of fill the action.
There are about 300 shadow puppets and slides that go into the making of Ada Ava.
With the puppets you have a very limited palette of what you can express
but sort of taken together you can build a very complex emotional scene.
There's a puppet who can lift her head up and down or puppet who can reach her hand
out and taken individually these puppets are very limited but strung together
cinematically in a kind of montage, they can add up to quite a bit of storytelling.
It's a good example of the minute work that we have to do in this medium. This is
probably one of the smallest puppets that we use over the course of the show.
It's about less than an inch tall and in this scene the only action I have to do is
walk the character Ada up the slope of the hill to her front door. She's just gotten
rid of her sisters personal belongings and all she has to do is turn around and
look back in doubt about what she's done and then make the final decision that
yes she does actually want to throw away her sister's possessions and continue
walking. Then the scene is over. A very short scene with a very simple
rudimentary puppet. All the puppet can do is walk forward and backward and turn
around but with those simple gesture is you have to sort of convey a lot of
emotional information.
When we started integrating live actors that was really exciting because humans can move
so much quicker and do so many more things than the puppets. Puppets can only
do one or two things max but when you have a live actor they can accomplish a
lot more. So suddenly we had far shots and close-ups with the puppets but then
medium shots we could use live actors.
[music]
Our storytelling is all visual and gesture.
That is a great opportunity to
create music that reflects the interstate of our characters.
The music becomes a narrator.
For the most part contemporary film music is very much in the background. It's very subtle. It's kind
of felt more than it's heard. Our shows are, you know the music is a much
more active participant in storytelling.
We're trying to create soundscape and score.
Our sound design is in four channels. Sounds really occupy all four
speakers and we really emphasized and exaggerate our sound designed to make it
more three-dimensional.
[music]
What we're creating among the puppeteers and musicians and all the technology and
puppets we're using is a dance.
[music]
We have to sort of feel each other all working together on telling the same story.
[music]
It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of rehearsal.
Getting everyone kind of breathing together, breathing as one.
[music]
When we are doing a good performance you can feel that everyone is sort of on
the same page and moving as a single
organism and when we get that feeling it's the most rewarding satisfying part
doing this work.
We all have different skill sets that we bring. I feel like when I see the work,
all the details are there. Like there's so much thought put into every level from
the sound design to the puppet design to the puppetry and the acting.
That I just feel like it allows us to have a more full-bodied piece of work because
there are so many brains.
One advantage of our work is that it's non-verbal.
There's no language barrier.
We were invited to take Ada Ava to the Tehran International Theater Puppet Festival.
Iran has a tradition of shadow puppetry
and theater and music that goes back thousands of years and it's such a
beautiful tradition. It was really amazing to to take our work there and
and have it resonate with people.
Initially when we came to New York we're supposed to be doing a three-week run of
the show and then we got this really wonderful New York Times review.
So we thought if we're already here, the show's here, you know. Let's do it again
and again and again. We ended up extending one week and then extending two more so we
actually doubled the length of doing the show.
So yesterday with our 50th show of Ada Ava in New York.
People like to describe the medium as low-fi high-fi.You know our tools are really
simple. It's paper, plastic. We're not especially nostalgic for old technology
or old films exclusively but we're also using these overhead projectors which
are you know twenty years or thirty years old and aren't really a big part of
people's lives anymore.
But for us it's really about finding the things that
excite us and finding the things that serve the storytelling.
[music]