Puppets

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Who’s That Wonderful Girl? How “Nanalan’” Found New Success on TikTok

      by

      She’s Mona, the puppet heroine of “Nanalan’,” an old Canadian children’s show that has found a new audience on TikTok.“Nanalan’” hasn’t been on TV in years, but it’s the hottest show on TikTok.A Canadian children’s program that made its debut in 1999, it has had a resurgence in recent weeks, thanks to its growing popularity on the social media platform, where it has been watched millions of times.A big part of the show’s appeal lies in its fiendishly catchy songs. One of them includes the lines: “Who’s that wonderful girl? Could she be any cuter?”The girl in question is Mona, a little green puppet with pigtails sticking out from both sides of her head. No, she could not be any cuter.The “who’s that wonderful girl?” earworm comes from a scene in which Mona enters a room dressed as a princess. Her grandmother, Nana, is singing the song while accompanying herself on organ. Nana’s dog, Russell, then appears in the garb of a royal courtier.The clip took off in mid-October, after a TikTok user posted it with the caption “When the clothes you ordered arrive and you treat the family to a fashion show.” The video has been viewed over 9.5 million times.

      @nanalanofficial Thewhole video can be viewed on Nanalan Official yu Tube #whosethatwonderfulgirl #wonderfulgirl #nanalan #princess #barbie ♬ original sound – nanalan’ official “Nanalan’” joined TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms this year. But it didn’t make much of an impression until the video of Mona in her princess regalia began circulating, said Jamie Shannon, who created the show with Jason Hopley. The pair started making “Nanalan’” shorts in 1999, and the series ended up airing on CBC, Nickelodeon and PBS for Kids.In addition to reposting old content, Mr. Shannon, 51, has started making new videos with the “Nanalan’” puppets for social media. He discussed the show’s newfound audience and weighed in on why nostalgia reigns supreme online. The conversation has been edited and condensed.How did you get into the puppet business?I was traveling in Europe, I think it was 1990, and Jim Henson passed away. He was such a big part of my childhood. And I was like, “Well, that’s exactly what I want to do.” I was already kind of a puppet maker and an actor. So I kind of combined it all.For many people online, this is their introduction to your show. What should they know?It’s wild. Fifty-two percent of our audience on TikTok is American. “Nanalan’” is short for Nana Land, which is what I called my nana’s backyard. It’s about a little girl in that backyard. Mom drops Mona off at her nana’s everyday and goes to work, just like a lot of people’s situations. We were so lucky to do it without scripts, improvised.When did the show end?In 1999, we made the original set of three-minute shorts. We did that again in, I think, 2000. In 2003, we made a bunch of half-hour episodes, and that was it.Jason Hopley, left, and Jamie Shannon, the creators of “Nanalan’,” film a scene featuring the puppets Nana and Mona.via Jamie ShannonUntil social media discovered “Nanalan’.”We had a huge viral breakout in 2016 as well. Somebody did this hilarious thing. In one of the three-minute episodes, Mona’s describing the garden to Russell: “There’s a cooshie and a peepo.” Someone put the words up on the screen, just the silly words and then it went crazy on Tumblr. It became one of these things where people were like, “Try not to laugh.”Sorry — a peepo?A pea pod. I’m trying to imitate a kid imitating what a parent told them, but they don’t quite remember the word.Why do you think TikTok has embraced Mona?The world is so, so difficult and scary right now, and the show’s very comforting. Everything looks soft. There’s no special effects. It heralds to what I think people want to see, which is just something that’s real and authentic in the, you know, fake, fake, fake world. Everything’s A.I., and people don’t know what’s real.

      @nanalanofficial Replying to @Brooke backyard dance party #nanalan #dance #puppets #deli #delidancechallenge ♬ original sound – BREANNA🩷 Mona recently joined Cameo, a platform that allows celebrities to send video messages to fans for a fee. What’s that like?I was trying to join Cameo so long ago, and I guess they weren’t accepting puppets. It’s great, I love it. It’s like four or five videos a day. Touching stuff, too. People say, “Grandma died, can you …?” So I do a lot of pep talks. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

      by

      La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

      by

      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      At Edinburgh Fringe, Small Shows With Big Ambitions

      by

      This year, the stronger productions in the open-to-all event were on a par with many in the more prestigious, curated Edinburgh International Festival.Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s festival, I had lunch with a Scottish friend and her young son. The boy was enthralled by the colorful posters plastered all over the city advertising upcoming shows in the Fringe, the scrappy sidebar to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival. This year, the Fringe — which runs through Aug. 28 — comprises over 3,000 shows, and many posters featured eye-catchingly silly titles. My friend’s son was particularly amused by “Sex Job,” “My Sleepybum” and “A Shark Ate My Penis.” His delighted guffaws were a fitting prelude to my stint in Edinburgh.There was plenty of laughter at “Hello Kitty Must Die,” a musical inspired by Angela Choi’s cult novel of the same title. In this zippy farce, Sami Ma plays Fiona Yu, a Chinese American lawyer fed up with being fetishized by white people and shouldering the unrealistic expectations of her out-of-touch parents. She reconnects with a mercurial childhood friend, Sean (Lennox T. Duong), and they embark on a ludicrous killing spree reminiscent of the movie “Heathers,” with musical numbers including a hymn to a silicone dildo.The all-female cast is hugely talented, and their portrayals of obnoxious men were particularly striking for their impressively rendered physicality, whether the swaggering gait of a self-styled Lothario, the slumped posture of a feckless gamer, or the pompously militaristic bearing of the protagonist’s father.“Hello Kitty Must Die,” is another adaptation of a novel, with musical numbers and a standout all-female cast.Justine BarbinElsewhere, two dance productions explored somber subject matter with impressive subtlety. “Woodhill,” by the activist theater company LUNG, examines the failings of a real British prison where a conspicuously high number of inmates have died by suicide. The story is told in a series of fragmentary voice-overs — interviews with lawyers, prison staff and bereaved relatives — while performers act out the relatives’ grief through dance, set to thumping electronic beats and strobe lighting. It’s a powerful spectacle, and the message — that Britain’s prisons need urgent reform — hits home.“Party Scene,” by the Dublin troupe, THISISPOPBABY, has a similar aesthetic. It depicts four gay Irishmen who are active in the “chemsex” scene, in which people hook up for sex under the influence of methamphetamines. The men’s choreographed dancing is pointedly joyless in its zombified roboticism; for all their synchronicity, they seem lonely and abstracted. The show evokes the existential bleakness of a comedown, of morning-after remorse and shame. And yet it doesn’t lapse into preachiness: The nightclub atmospherics are sufficiently appealing, in themselves, to suggest good times. (On the way out I overheard a theatregoer say to his friend: “I felt like it made me want to do chemsex …”)From left: Liam Bixby, Anderson de Souza, Carl Harrison and Matthew Morris in “Party Scene.”Olga KuzmenkoFor budgetary and logistical reasons, many Fringe shows are relatively small productions, and there are always many for solo performers. One of these is “The Insider,” by the Danish company Teater Katapult, in which Christoffer Hvidberg Ronje plays a lawyer implicated in a huge tax fraud. We find him in a transparent interrogation cell, weighing up whether to spill the beans in return for a reduced sentence. He does lots of sweating, writhing and shaking while oscillating between hubris and remorse. The protagonist’s back story provides some intriguing psychodrama — an obsession with transcending his modest provincial origins led him to embrace a ruthless social Darwinism — his uncomplicated moral abjectness makes for a one-dimensional portrait. It’s an open-and-shut case, in every sense.In another one-man-show, “The Ballad of Truman Capote,” Patrick Moys plays the renowned American author as he prepares to host a masked ball in 1966. Written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the play is a maudlin monologue in which Capote muses gnomically on his childhood and career. (“Being published is not like being loved”; “My creative life is an unmade bed.”) The problem is not the lack of action per se, but the monotonous timbre of the reminiscences: Capote’s elliptical inwardness makes for dull company.Holding the audience’s attention is a perennial challenge with a single actor onstage. In a smart revival of Cyriel Buysse’s Flemish classic, “The Van Paemel Family” by the Antwerp troupe SKaGeN, the actor Valentijn Dhaenens sidesteps this difficulty by playing all the play’s roles. He takes three of the 13 characters in the flesh, and the rest appear in the form of prerecorded scenes digitally projected onto a screen.The story revolves around a farmer who falls out with his two sons after they side with striking farmworkers during a period of social unrest. Mr. van Paemel is slavishly loyal to the landowner for whom they all work, and believes organized labor is a scourge. Even when he and his family are driven off their farm by rent hikes, and his daughter is cruelly taken advantage of by the landowner’s son, he prefers to maintain his beef with his sons, rather than focus on those responsible for his plight.There was something uncanny about seeing the real-life Dhaenens interact with his vaguely spectral digitized selves. This eerie visual texture, neatly complemented by the doleful tones of an accordion, made for a memorably unique aesthetic. The play dates from 1903, but the story’s central character is a timeless archetype: The embattled patriarch who clings stubbornly to every reactionary shibboleth even as he gets shafted from all directions.The standout Fringe show was Lara Foot’s stylish adaptation of “The Life and Times of Michael K.,” J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel about the struggles of a poor man during a fictional civil war in South Africa. The play is a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on “War Horse”, and Michael K. and his elderly mother are represented by puppets that are manipulated and voiced by onstage performers.The interplay between puppets and actors made “J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.” a Fringe standout.Fiona MacPhersonMichael K. is a borderline simpleton, kindhearted and determined, but naïve; something about the puppet’s plaintive expression and scrawny frame evokes a pathos that fits the story perfectly. Yet this somewhat desolate tale is mitigated by moments of humor, such as when the famished Michael comes unstuck trying to eat a sandwich. Being a puppet, he can’t actually do it, so the three men controlling him hungrily take a bite each, on his behalf.People think of the Fringe, which is open to anyone who can pay the accreditation fee, as defined more by quantity than quality. Yet the stronger Fringe shows were pretty much on a par — in intelligence, aesthetic ambition and technical execution — with several of the productions I saw at the more prestigious, curated International Festival. The difference was mainly a question of scale.For all its bustling, chaotic energy and anything-goes philosophy, the Fringe’s organization was impressively slick, although there was, inevitably, the occasional blip. My heart went out to the cast of “Exile for Two Violins,” whose performance at the French Institute was marred by noise pollution from a street party next to the venue, complete with a P.A. system blasting pop music. This delicate meditation on the life and work of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok could probably have done without the accompaniment of loud rhythmic clapping, periodic cheers and whistles, and the booming strains of the White Stripes’ garage rock anthem, “Seven Nation Army.” The performers plowed on — heroes, one and all.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      At 89, Still Making Art (and Bread) With a Message in Vermont

      by

      Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater is going strong and, at 89, so is he. But what will happen to his company when he is gone?Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.In addition to directing, Peter Schumann plays musical instruments, sculpts, paints on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard, and creates posters and printed chapbooks.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.A horse puppet taking the field in “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant.”Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said of his sourdough rye bread, which he feeds to audiences.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter baking the bread in outdoor ovens, he brings the loaves into his kitchen to cool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHoward Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.The troupe presents free or modestly priced circuses, pageants and other performance arts on summer weekends.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.Guides help audience members navigate the woods.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSome of the puppets during the circus performance.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.INSIDE A BARN last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.One of the circus performances.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”Bread and Puppet Theater performs all over the world, and travels domestically on a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesArt inside the bus, which reiterates Schumann’s uncompromising faith in what he calls “Cheap Art.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesVisitors tour a makeshift gallery featuring Schumann’s bedsheet paintings.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.That seems an understatement.At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral,” Schumann said. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.” More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      The International Puppet Fringe Festival Draws the World of Puppetry to New York

      by

      This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival surveys puppetry traditions from around the globe, and celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer Ralph Lee.Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play.“People have this misconception that it is just for, like, birthday parties or children’s television shows,” said Manuel Antonio Morán, the artistic director of the festival, which is produced by Teatro SEA, the Latino theater that he founded; his own agency, Grupo Morán; and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where Puppet Fringe performances will run through Sunday. “Yes, it is for that, too,” he said in an interview, but in many countries, it’s “part of the folklore, it’s part of the tradition.”A donkey puppet is another part of the musical “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFolklore and mythology continually inspired Lee, who collaborated on this year’s festival despite his declining health. His work, including incarnations of the ghost of Henry Hudson, a mermaid and Coney Island sideshow characters, will appear in Brendan Schweda’s “Barnacle Bill the Husband,” one of a special group of brief, intimate works for small audiences. On Saturday, the festival will host a round-table discussion with Lee’s troupe, the Mettawee River Theater Company. But the greatest breadth of his creativity will be on display in two exhibitions: “Theater Unmasked: Photographic Glimpses of Ralph Lee’s Work,” on view through Sunday, and “Myths, Legends and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee,” which is on display through Aug. 31. (The festival’s exhibitions and outdoor performances are free; indoor shows are $20 each, and day passes $75.)“What I want people to experience while they’re here is that the world is whatever you decide to make it for yourself,” said Matthew Sorensen, who curated the shows of Lee’s work.The more than 60 pieces in “Myths, Legends and Spectacle” cover six decades and range in tone from the fiercely haunting raffia-haired mask of a Japanese demon from the play “The Mask of Kitamura” (1983) to the 11-foot-tall, sweetly smiling Grandmother Earth puppet from “Nanabozho,” a staging of a Native American tale (1980). And everywhere, Lee gave castoffs new life: Piano keys serve as puppet teeth, and can lids as eyes. An open mailbox becomes the head and jaws of a dragon; the ribs of a baby carriage form its body.This exhibition “opens up people’s ideas about materials,” said Casey Compton, Lee’s widow and frequent artistic collaborator, as she helped install the show. Many, she added, illustrate Lee’s method of taking “what’s just right there” and “exploring what it can do.”This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee, pictured here in 1998 alongside some of his creations.Sara KrulwichBeyond Lee’s creations, an innovative approach to materials also distinguishes the other festival offerings, like “Sapientia,” a 10th-century play by Hroswitha of Gandersheim, sometimes called the West’s first female playwright. The title character, a Christian, opposes the pagan emperor Hadrian, who responds by torturing her young daughters. Scapegoat Carnivale, a Montreal-based theater company, stages the play as satirical object theater: Hadrian is portrayed by an espresso pot, Sapientia by a hand mirror and the children, who in the story are miraculously spared pain, by teacups. The torture devices include an iron and a George Foreman grill.“The objects are able to kind of deconstruct and reveal almost the absurdity, but also support the miraculous nature” of the play, said Mia van Leeuwen, who worked on the adaptation and directed it.Another humble substance stars throughout the Puppet Fringe: paper. “You can bind it together, you can rip it, you can make a pop-up of it, you can chew it up and spit it out,” said Yael Rasooly, an Israeli puppeteer who does all of those in her slightly macabre solo show “Paper Cut.” Rasooly, who will also teach a puppetry master class at the festival, portrays a secretary whose Hollywood fantasy world is made up of old movie magazine cutouts.A more joyful exploration of paper’s possibilities unfolds in “The Paper Play,” which the Taiwanese company Puppet Beings Theater will present outdoors at the festival and indoors in a separate performance on Sunday at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Consisting of two parts — one a gentle fable and the other a celebration of its medium’s transformative powers — this American premiere exemplifies the Puppet Fringe’s less spooky side.Behind the scenes at the International Puppet Fringe Festival.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe family-friendly fare also includes four productions from Teatro SEA. In “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote,” a musical Morán wrote with Radamés Gavé, don’t be surprised to see Cervantes’s 17th-century characters duel with “Star Wars”-style light sabers. They will also speak both English and Spanish, a bilingual approach adopted by all Teatro SEA puppetry shows. Another production, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s urbanized “Little Red’s Hood,” will be performed once in Spanish and once in Mandarin.“From the beginning, I’ve been wanting to be a very inclusive festival,” said Morán, who founded the biennial Puppet Fringe in 2018. (The second edition was held in 2021 because of the pandemic.) That has meant featuring shows in different languages, producers from minority groups and female puppeteers like Heather Henson, who has curated two festival short-film programs from Handmade Puppet Dreams, her company’s collection of works by independent artists: “Frights and Delights,” featuring fanciful ghosts and monsters, and “Kidscapes,” a series for children.Puppetry “is very cross-disciplinary,” said Henson, who noted that her father, the renowned puppeteer Jim Henson, often produced art that “would have never worked on the stage.” Jump cuts, extreme close-ups and scene dissolves can make puppet films more exciting — or unsettling.But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.” More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Puppetry So Lifelike, Even Their Deaths Look Real

      by

      Members of the puppetry team for “Life of Pi” discuss making the show’s animals seem all-too-real on a very crowded lifeboat.Fair warning: This article is riddled with spoilers about puppet deaths in “Life of Pi,” the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about a shipwrecked teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean. He shares his lifeboat first with a menagerie of animals from his family’s zoo in India — large-scale puppets all, requiring a gaggle of puppeteers — and eventually just with a magnificent, ravenous Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker that takes three puppeteers to operate.Now in previews on Broadway, where it is slated to open on March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, the play picked up five Olivier Awards in London last year. Puppetry design by the longtime collaborators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell was included with Tim Hatley’s set in one award, and, unprecedentedly, a team of puppeteers won an acting Olivier for playing Richard Parker.Caldwell, who is also the production’s puppetry director, and two of those Olivier-winning puppeteers, Fred Davis and Scarlet Wilderink, sat down at the Schoenfeld one morning last week to talk about bringing the show’s puppets to life — and then, in several scenes, to vivid and often gruesome death. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Foreground, from left: Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Finn Caldwell. Behind the tiger, from left: Andrew Wilson and Rowan Ian Seamus.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt’s a very crowded lifeboat. Who all is in there, and how complex is that dance?SCARLET WILDERINK That is such a beautiful way to describe good puppetry. Because it is a synchronicity like dance that looks completely unchoreographed. Well, what have we got in there? We’ve got hyena. Rat for a short time.FRED DAVIS Zebra. Orangutan. Tiger. And Pi.FINN CALDWELL In the end of the first act, where we see the tiger’s about to kill the hyena, and the hyena’s killed the zebra and everything else — we call that section Megadeath. How many puppeteers do we use in Megadeath?WILDERINK Three, five, six, eight, 11.CALDWELL Eleven puppeteers. That’s the most puppeteers we’ve ever used on a show in one sequence.Richard Parker is such a cat. He seems plush and furry with padded paws, and he hogs the bed. How do you figure out animal movement?CALDWELL We look at anatomy. We look at pictures of skeletons of tigers, blow that up to a real tiger size and start marking on pieces of paper on the wall where the joints are all going to be. Because when we build on a framework, our armature, it wants to move like a tiger, because the limbs are all the right length. The joints want to move in the right way.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi, with Richard Parker, eventually the last surviving passengers aboard a lifeboat stranded in the Pacific Ocean.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesDAVIS In terms of bringing it to life, we start off by looking at videos of tigers moving in different environments — when they’re relaxed, when they’re hunting, analyzing their foot patterns and how their weight shifts from one paw to another, how their tail flicks when they’re feeling a certain way. One thing that is always challenging for us to do is the noises. Because no human has the same lung capacity or vocal cords as a tiger.WILDERINK One of the most helpful tools for us is imagination. If the puppeteer is really seeing the thing, the audience will see the thing. The tiger’s fur, you know, he doesn’t have real fur. But if you imagine the softness of it, this sort of stretchiness of their skin, the weight — like if he collapses into Pi, how do you make him look like he’s soft in his lap? It’s part of the design because we’ve got all those bungees that tie all of the armature together, which makes him look like that. But the sensory stuff, I think, is in our minds.What is it that makes the audience believe?CALDWELL It’s you and I as 3-year-olds going, “There’s a doll. Should we agree that this is real and play a game together?” That’s the same offer that you make to the audience: “Here’s a tiger. Do you want to agree that it’s real with us?” That means that they then take part in the creation. Intellectually, we know it’s a puppet. But really quickly, most people want to buy into the game.Why is violence sustained by puppet animals so shocking and affecting?CALDWELL If it was the real animal, you’d be really worried about the situation. You’d be like, “Is that a real hyena?” With a puppet, no matter what it’s playing, all you have to worry about is what it’s telling you onstage. The puppets are only there to be themselves, so that when you start to wound them, all the audience is thinking is, well, (a), I’ve taken part in bringing this thing to life, and now you’re killing it in front of me, and (b), this is all that’s happening. All you’re getting is the pure story, the pure thing that’s happening, and so I think you get the straight emotional connection to it.The puppetry team also built and operated a hyena, a zebra, a goat and an orangutan.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd yet you really do not expect to hear a puppet’s neck crack.WILDERINK It is so rare that you get to do something so grisly with puppets. That’s why I love it so much. If the zebra is being attacked, the orangutan is being killed, the goat’s being killed, I love hearing the audience react to it and then be surprised by their own reaction. Because they don’t realize how invested they are until it happens. They feel the shock and the pain of the orangutan dying, and then they’re surprised by the fact that they believed it so much.DAVIS One of my favorite things that’s happened: The goat’s head came detached from the goat’s body. Something got broken in there. Through that last scene in the zoo in Pondicherry, where the goat gets brought on and shoved in the tiger cage, the puppeteer’s doing a dutiful job of keeping the body and the head attached. And then we get in there and the goat gets attacked by the tiger. As the tiger, you don’t know that the head’s come off the goat. So the neck breaks, and then you see that it’s actually disconnecting. What we decided in the moment, we left with the body, left the head on the stage. The tiger went away, came back, picked up the head and then left. We spoke to the actors afterward and they were like, “I was crying. I’m scarred from seeing that happen. Why did you do that?” I’m like, “Well, you know, it’s a tiger.”Seven puppeteers who operated from “Life of Pi” shared the Olivier Award for best supporting actor in 2022.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesI’m wondering: What did winning the Olivier mean to you?DAVIS It was really big. It’s also really validating, because I think when you’re involved with the puppetry that we’ve done over the last few years, we believe and invest in these puppet characters as much as anyone would a human character.It’s acting, yes?DAVIS It is acting. But I think a lot of the time, from an outside perspective, it cannot be considered acting or judged as harshly as acting. We want people to be looking at it and considering it worthy of criticism. That’s what was so heartening: that what we were doing was believable enough that people wanted to judge it.WILDERINK I had people from all over the world — puppeteers, puppet theater companies — contacting me on social media, saying how many waves it’s created in their communities. It felt very special on a global scale.CALDWELL It was just amazing that the industry sat up and took notice. It mainly just feels like a door opened — and an invitation to what we can do next. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      For France’s Protesters, the Streets Are the Ultimate Stage

      by

      The country has a long history of demonstrations, which often feature overtly theatrical elements. Our Paris theater critic marched along on Tuesday to soak up the spectacle.In large-scale theater and dance works, bodies moving in space have a momentum of their own; their collective power often feels like it could move mountains. Yet no number of monumental performances can compare to the enveloping force of tens of thousands of people, announcing as they did in Paris this week: “We are the show.”Street protests — a time-honored French tradition — are generally not for the agoraphobic, but on Tuesday, the crowds were the biggest on record this century. France’s Interior Ministry estimated there were 1.28 million marchers, while trade unions said there were 3.5 million. In Paris, the crowds were so large that some protesters branched off on a different course, along the Left Bank.The mountain the protesters were trying to move, for the sixth time in two months, was President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the legal age of retirement by two years, to 64. Yet beyond that particular policy, demonstrations are frequent enough in the country that they have taken on a ritualistic dimension, and often feature overtly theatrical elements designed to grab the attention.In late 2019, the Paris Opera Ballet made international headlines by performing an excerpt from “Swan Lake” in the cold outside the Palais Garnier, to protest a previous attempt at a pension overhaul. The Comédie-Française, France’s most prestigious theater company, joined in with a Molière performance from the theater’s windows and balcony. (Perhaps to avoid a repeat, both institutions’ bespoke pension arrangements are excluded from this year’s proposed changes.)Artists taking an active role in protests is nothing new in France. During the revolutionary events of May 1968, a number of theater venues were occupied, and performances were staged outdoors and at factories. One company from 1968 hasn’t stopped since: the Théâtre du Soleil. That egalitarian troupe, led by Ariane Mnouchkine, is such a stalwart of demonstrations that even protesters who rarely go to the theater look out for their creative street performances.At regular intervals during the protest on Tuesday, Mnouchkine gave the signal for a spectacle she called “the attack of the crows.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, its performers were easy to spot from afar, with a giant white puppet, known as Justice, that towered above the surrounding protesters. The slim figure was carried by four bearers on a palanquin, while the company’s actors animated its arms and billowing skirts from the sides. Blood was smeared on Justice’s solemn-looking face, which, like the rest of the puppet, was created by the Théâtre du Soleil’s own technical team.More on FranceRestoring Notre Dame: Experts are trying to revive the centuries-old acoustics of the cathedral, which caught fire in 2019. Here is how the building’s architecture plays a role in the endeavor.Trials by Fire: During her first year as France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra faced chaos and scandals in soccer and rugby. With the Paris Olympics looming, her toughest days may be ahead.Art Invasion: Mosaics by a street artist who calls himself “Invader” have become part of the fabric of Paris. They are everywhere — if you look for them.A Staunch Protester: Jean-Baptiste Reddé has hoisted his colorful signs in nearly every street protest for over a decade, embodying France’s enduring passion for demonstrations.Mnouchkine herself, 84, kept a watchful eye on the proceedings. Justice was created in 2010, she said in an interview, for another strike against pension changes. The puppet has never appeared in a stage production, but she has seen her fair share of demonstrations, including in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015. “We immediately felt that people were happy to have a symbol to rally around that wasn’t just a giant sound system,” she said. “They also want something beautiful, something that carries emotion.”At regular intervals, as the march plodded forward, Mnouchkine gave the signal for what she called “the attack of the crows.” Ten or so members of her company ran forward with black birds on sticks, ambushing Justice. To classical music and thunderous drum beats, Justice leaned forward, then back, fighting the crows off with a small sword; two assistant directors oversaw the struggle, directing the actors in real time. To the delight of protesters, Justice won every time, then took a celebratory spin and gave a bow.Marching not far from the Théâtre du Soleil, a street theater company called Les Grandes Personnes had also brought two oversize puppets, both regulars appearances in their shows: Céline, an older white woman, and K.S., a young Black man. Brought to life by one person each, they bounced along to the sound of horns and cheering marchers, while a nearby performer held a sign that said: “I don’t want to die onstage.”Yet artistic contributions to the march were fewer and farther between than I expected, an impression Mnouchkine confirmed. Two years of pandemic-related closures and cancellations have also left their mark, with fewer theaters willing to go on strike this week.A crow puppet carried by members of the feminist group Rosies.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPolice on the Place d’Italie, where the demonstration ended.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPerformers from the street theater company Les Grandes Personnes at the demonstration on Tuesday.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesBringing theatrical craftsmanship to strikes is “a tradition that is getting lost,” she said. While one of the performing arts’ main unions, C.G.T. Spectacle, brought a truck equipped with musical instruments and a sound system, the performances seemed a little subdued.There was more attention to spectacle in the protest style of feminist groups like the Rosies, who draw their name from Norman Rockwell’s feminist icon Rosie the Riveter. Dressed in blue overalls, with makeup that made them look like overworked zombies, the women’s collective has developed a small repertoire of choreographed protest songs, which anyone can learn through videos or workshops.When I spotted them, dozens of Rosies were dancing to Gala’s 1990s hit “Freed From Desire,” which had become “Women On Fire,” with French lyrics about pension reform. From the back of a truck, two women led the motley group, which punched the air to the beat.It was a joyful flash mob, but the strike’s greatest piece of theater remained the spectacle of so many bodies in the streets of Paris — wave after wave, subsuming any individuals, claiming the city as their stage for the day. Many chanted and held signs, but the vast majority simply moved as a collective.Demonstrators on Tuesday protested, for the sixth time in two months, President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise France’s legal retirement age.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMost of the time, there was a warm, carnivalesque atmosphere, but a crowd’s mood can also change at the speed of light. Nearly four hours into the march, some people around me suddenly stood still, then started walking backward. Something in the air had shifted, as if a coup de théâtre were about to change the narrative; press photographers near me took out their safety helmets.Minutes later, when the sea of people parted, it became clear a group of black-clad protesters, their faces hidden, were ready to face off violently with the rows of police officers on the other side of the boulevard. I hurried back to a less volatile area. Later, when I reached the end point of the march, the Place d’Italie plaza was hazy with tear gas and surrounded by police officers, with people streaming confusedly into the few streets that weren’t blocked.It was a staggering sight, like an immersive show gone out of control. Yet the march also brought out communal emotions, together with a sense of freedom and open self-expression, that even the best theater can struggle to replicate. As collective experiences go, I won’t forget this one any time soon. More