Transcriber: Moe Shoji Reviewer: Nadine Hennig
(The puppeteer breathes as the puppet moves)
(Character speaks in invented language)
(The puppeteer breathes as the puppet moves)
John Farell: That was a part of the opening scene
from our piece called "Anerca",
a play about the collision of cultures, set in the Arctic.
Carol Farrell: Now, if I asked you, "What did you see?"
I expect we would get a variety of responses.
JF: A shaman performing a ritual.
CF: An Eskimo holding a stone to her chest.
JF: Someone watching geese fly over head.
CF: A woman praying.
JF: An object that seems to be alive and thinking and feeling.
CF: We work with puppets,
and puppets work with your imaginations.
They are not alive, you know that they're not alive,
and yet somehow they manage to evoke a sense of life.
Puppets are iconic by nature. They boil down essences of life.
JF: And they scared that daylights out of me as a kid.
(Laughter)
I have a vivid memory of the day I stopped being just afraid of puppets.
I was in the store room of the Al Boutroule Puppet Theatre
in Liège, Belgium, sandwiched between floor to ceiling racks
of 100-year old puppet archetypes.
Demons and princesses, ghouls, simpletons, kings and queens.
All staring at me at a very close range.
(Laughter)
And I felt this primal fear stirring up in my stomach.
And I thought,
"I kind of like this!"
(Laughter)
CF: That childhood epiphany came to John two years after he had quit law school.
(Laughter)
And I had left my job as a theatre professor
and we formed Figures of Speech Theatre.
We wanted to create whole worlds from scratch
by finding new ways of working with puppets and actors,
movement and music, mask and shadow.
JF: And ultimately, metaphor.
I only realized this later but I think what scared me as a kid
was the puppets I had seen, with their jerky movement
and staring eyes, seemed like mockeries of life.
They were like metaphors for life's primal carnality.
CF: I think John's "I kind of like this" moment was a realization
that we could tap into that power of the puppet
and choose what we wanted to do with it.
The metaphor might be carnal as John said,
or we might be portraying material that was environmental by nature,
or spiritual, or psychological.
JF: There are two school of thoughts in the puppet world.
One holds that the puppet is just a tool,
an instrument, like a violin,
a means through which I, as an artist, express myself.
CF: The other school says that puppets are vessels,
objects waiting for the spirit that wants to reside in them,
a spirit that's out there in the ether somewhere.
And then my job as an animator is to get my ego into the back seat,
and allow that spirit to pass through me as cleanly as possible,
and enter the body of the puppet.
JF: We are like way far into the second camp.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
CF: I tell you, animating a puppet on stage
feels like meditation.
In rehearsal, we spend a lot of time "listening" to our puppets,
trusting that they know how they want to be in the world.
This character, for instance, has her own sense of time
as you probably noticed.
So, when we work with her
we're asking you as the audience to go with us
to a place where the time has slowed way down.
JF: For me, as a performer, it's like the moment she comes to life
I just cease to exist. I'm gone.
And yet in some way, I am more myself at that moment
than I am in day-to-day day life.
CF: Our work has always been an exploration
of how different forms on stage
- puppets, actors, movement, mask -
can be layered to express complex ideas
without having to yackety-yak about them.
The woman in "Anerca", for example,
is a metaphoric embodiment of the culture that is not our own.
JF: So our presence behind her, completely visible to the audience,
is a quiet way of saying:
"This is not a documentary or a diorama.
This is a creation drawn from our imaginations."
CF: Once upon a time, John and I were reading a bed time story to our daughters.
It was a Comanche story about a girl named "She Who Loves"
who saves her village from drought.
The story really resonated with us, so we took it with us
when we all headed off on a wonderful fellowship to Japan
with the Japan-America Friendship Commission.
We went there to learn more about different Japanese theatre forms,
especially the masked drama called "Noh",
and traditional puppetry form called "Bunraku".
And oddly enough, our concept for staging this Comanche Indian legend
inspired by Noh and Bunraku began to take shape in our heads.
JF: This is "She Who Loves".
In the original story, both of She Who Loves' parents
have already perished in the drought.
And all she has left in the world
is the buckskin doll they made for her before they died.
Now in Noh drama, being dead is no impediment to getting a great role.
(Laughter)
In fact, Noh is filled with ghosts.
So we decided that we would make the ghost of She Who Loves' mother
a central character in the performance.
Here is the fragment from the performance.
A moment in which She Who Loves' mother comes to visit her daughter asleep
for one last time.
I am the ghost of the mother.
In autumn, seeking the radiant light, she goes to the moon viewing spots,
making her mountain rounds.
Scenes from the past come to mind as if present.
A husband.
A village.
A horse.
A child.
The anguish of parting from my daughter
brings me to this place where I drew my last breath.
The past, though remembered,
does not return.
There is nothing we can hold in this world.
This I know.
Like thistle down,
we can only let go.
What will become of my beloved child?
She says,
or seems to say,
and then like a flame flickering out,
she disappears.
(Applause)
We're always asking ourselves:
why use a puppet in this scene, in this play?
What can a puppet do here
that an actor, or a mask, or a shadow wouldn't do better.
CF: The ghost of the mother is an ephemeral being,
so her body has no substance.
But then using my hand for her hand says
that she is not entirely gone, she is still partly of this world.
And her face is more of a mask that's just gently held in place
and then can be simply let go.
Now, I can't physically do that, as an actor.
(Laughter)
But the puppet can.
JF: So, in every moment of performance,
we're using the very forms we work with
to pack meaning into the scene,
to expand the audience's experience of this moment on the stage
into something larger, something metaphoric.
CF: And speaking of "larger"...
(Laughter)
using puppets also gives us the opportunity
to work in whatever scale will enhance the meaning of the material.
For Portland Symphony Orchestra's "Christmas Carol",
we created the three Spirits of Christmas:
Past, Present and Future.
JF: This is the spirit of Christmas Past, performed here by our partner, Ian Bannon.
CF: She's from another realm or maybe she is a projection of Scrooge's mind,
a hallucination or transmogrified memory.
So simply portraying her in this form as a puppet, on this scale,
lifts that character out of the everyday, ordinary world
and into the extraordinary world.
JF: Also, she is magic.
Scrooge can touch the hem of her dress,
and be transported through time to scenes of his youth.
CF: Which is huge, right?
I mean, that's huge and it's also delicate.
(Laughter)
And it's magical.
And that is the realm of the puppet.
We'd like to conclude by returning to the woman from "Anerca"
to illustrate one of the most remarkable qualities of the puppet,
which is its ability to suggest transcendent realities.
JF: I'm going to narrate through what would otherwise be a silent scene
to give you a kind of inside the head of the puppeteer perspective on this.
Towards the end of "Anerca",
the shaman woman decides, for very complex reasons,
to take her own life by freezing.
Since she is a puppet,
she is dependent upon us to help her,
which we do by removing her parka.
Now by this point in the performance,
the audience is pretty totally committed to the idea that she is alive.
I surrender to her will.
I'm no longer manipulating her.
But rather watching her from a great distance
as she moves away from life.
With a minute gesture, she draws our attention to the fact
that she is made of wood and cloth and string.
If an actor were to remove his own skin to show us what lies below,
it would have much the same effect.
Suddenly, we, as audience, as witnesses,
have to grapple with the sudden realization
that she is just stuff.
And yet she lives, trembling on the edge of her own extinction.
And if she is just stuff,
what are we made of, really?
What spark animates our beings
and holds us in light?
Then she stands
and moves away from the rocks
that anchored her metaphorically to the earth
and begins the process of dying.
The poignant, painful, slow moment
of looking upon the world for the last time.
Until the final moment, the final metaphor,
when the hand of the animator separates from her body.
And she is gone.
(Applause)
(Cheers)
CF: Thank you.
(Applause and Cheers)
JF: Thank you very much. CF: Thank you.