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      Elka Schumann, Matriarch of the Bread and Puppet Theater, Dies at 85

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      She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.A 1995 performance by members of the Bread and Puppet Theater. For many years they put on a puppet-heavy, Woodstock-like annual festival called Our Domestic Resurrection Circus.Craig Line/Associated PressThe Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.She also managed The Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which she printed on posters, Ms. Schumann wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”Ms. Schumann with her husband, Peter, in 2003. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.Associated PressElka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm. More

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      Rezo Gabriadze, Who Created Magic Out of Puppetry, Dies at 84

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      His productions, vivid and fanciful, played all over the world, including at Lincoln Center.Rezo Gabriadze, a playwright, screenwriter and director whose fanciful avant-garde stage works, many using puppets, were presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and numerous other outlets as well as at the theater named for him in his home country, Georgia, died on Sunday in its capital, Tbilisi. He was 84.The Rezo Gabriadze Theater in Tbilisi confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Gabriadze was known for unconventional works that challenged the audience’s imagination. In his play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” for instance, which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, branching out into acting, portrayed a man who thought he was a car.More often, though, Mr. Gabriadze’s stage works were populated not by human performers but by puppets. Perhaps his best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play first staged in Dijon, France, in 1996. It examined that pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories. Some involved human characters, but there was also a love story between two horses, as well as an ant with a dying daughter.“Writ terribly small, with the delicacy of lacework,” Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a production at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2000, “‘The Battle of Stalingrad’ compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed. And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Perhaps Mr. Gabriadze’s best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play seen here at The Kennedy Center in 2000. It examined the pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories.Mario del Curto/’The Battle of Stalingrad’Another scene from “The Battle of Stalingrad.” It “compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed,” wrote a Times critic. “And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Vladimir Meltser“The Autumn of My Springtime,” first seen in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002, was a story about a bird that drew heavily on Mr. Gabriadze’s memories of his childhood. “Ramona,” seen at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2015, was a love story between two trains.These and other works were full of striking stage pictures and cleverly made, adroitly maneuvered puppets designed by Mr. Gabriadze and his expert team.“As characters either powerful or weak,” Mr. Weber wrote, “his puppets, long faced, with a clattery-boned droopiness, seemingly constructed from bird legs and seashell fragments held together with string, share a frailty that feels, well, human.”Mr. Gabriadze, who early in his career was a sculptor and then a screenwriter and film director, was most at home among his puppets.“The puppet theater is the ideal place for me because you can draw, sculpt and truly create your characters,” he told The Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 2017, when he brought his two-trains-in-love story to the Spoleto Festival USA in that city. “This is the maximum of freedom you can achieve in art. I make and do everything in my theater myself. I write the plays, choose the music — I am completely free in my decision-making.”Revaz Gabriadze was born on June 29, 1936, in Kutaisi, in what was then Soviet Georgia. In a 2002 interview with The Times, he recalled having his imagination opened up after World War II when American movies began making their way to Georgia.“Our generation was ‘Tarzan-ized,’” he said. “Tarzan, feminine women, men in tuxedos; this was the first time we saw these things, and it was one part of our spiritual nourishment.”He was artistically inclined.“In my father’s family, the men worked stone,” he told Le Monde in 2003. “They built churches or bridges. There are many delicate and ancient bridges in Georgia. Maybe that’s where my first vocation came from, sculpture.”Those skills would prove useful when he began carving and constructing puppets. But other careers came first.After working for a time as a journalist, he gravitated to filmmaking, writing dozens of screenplays and directing a few movies. “I was making tragicomic films,” he said. “I was always watched by the authorities, and I lacked diplomacy.”Georgia was still under Soviet control, and it was the era of Socialist Realism in film and other genres. Realism, Mr. Gabriadze said, just wasn’t his thing.“I can understand the human urge to put things in order,” he told The Times. “But you can’t divide life between fiction and fact. ‘Tom Sawyer’ may be a novel, but it is also an encyclopedia of childhood.”In Mr. Gabriadze’s play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, branched out into acting, portraying a man who thought he was a car.Michal DanielHe opened his puppet theater in 1981. (In 2010 it unveiled a newly renovated space designed by Mr. Gabriadze and featuring a deliberately crooked clock tower.)In the early 1990s, with Georgia embroiled in civil war, Mr. Gabriadze relocated to Moscow for several years, working at the Obraztsov State Puppet Theater, where he began to create “The Battle of Stalingrad.” The piece, he said, was in part a response to the civil war. But, like many of his works, it also drew on memories from his childhood.“I was 6 years old during the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said. “I remember the word echoing through childhood.”While taking his puppet productions all over the world, Mr. Gabriadze continued to pursue his love of art. In 2012 the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow mounted an exhibition devoted to his paintings, graphic works and sculpture.Full information on his survivors was not available. A son, Levan, produced some of his shows and, in 2018, made a film about his father’s life called simply, “Rezo.”In an interview with the travel blog Intrepid Feet First, Levan talked about his father and his work.“The thing about Rezo is that he lives in his own bubble,” he said. “We all do. But Rezo brings you into his.” More

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      ‘Bill’s 44th’ Review: Where Are All the Party People?

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      This poignant, comic puppet play, by Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck, is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness.There are shows so delightfully unexpected that you hesitate, when writing about them, to give anything away. “Bill’s 44th” is one of those — a poignant, comic puppet play for grown-ups about a birthday party whose guests fail to appear.Perhaps they had been to one of Bill’s shindigs before. They might have anticipated the forlorn tray of crudités, with celery sticks browning at the ends. Or foreseen that he would spike the punch to near-lethal levels, then want to bust some disco moves. With his bald papier-mâché head and thick Tom Selleck mustache, Bill is not, truth be told, the suavest of men.He is, however, enormously endearing, especially in his jaunty party hat. And in Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck’s “Bill’s 44th,” which had a brief live (and live-streamed) run last week at Dixon Place and is streaming on demand starting Tuesday, he is sweetly eager — impatient, even — to fill his solitary apartment with camaraderie and celebration.But in a wordless piece that is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness, getting ditched is not such a formidable obstacle to having company — not once the boozy punch kicks in and Bill’s imagination cuts loose.All head and torso, Bill has a middle-aged paunch that strains at his sweater. The rest of his body is built on an illusion. The hands that emerge from his cuffs belong to James and Manjuck; his legs are Manjuck’s. His isolation, meanwhile, belongs to all of us: our pre-vaccine pandemic selves, having to make do for so long without the people we wished would surround us.Let me stop right here and tell you that this not-quite-hourlong show is buoyant, mesmerizing, joy-inducing — and that I’m about to wreck some of its more winsome visual surprises, which you might prefer not to see coming. Should you read the rest of this review? Maybe not, if you’re planning to watch “Bill’s 44th.”Because this is also a show about the nature of puppetry, and puppets, it turns out, are all around us. That tray of crudités? Bill rustles through the carrot sticks and finds the makings of a cheery orange friend he dubs Cary. With drawn-on eyes and smiling mouth, this is a guest for Bill to clink plastic cups with. Soon the party balloons get faces, too, and social dynamics come into play. It’s only when Cary turns human-size that things get really wild, though, and Bill has a partner to dance with. (Jon Riddleberger rounds out the excellent team of puppeteers.)With jazzy music by Eamon Fogarty and dreamy lighting by M. Jordan Wiggins, “Bill’s 44th” plunges its audience fully into a fantasy that, for all its silliness, leads its hero through stubborn hope and bitter disappointment toward a feeling of comfort in his own skin and an awakening to the world around him.This isn’t the birthday that Bill had hoped to have. But for the audience, his 44th is a gift.Bill’s 44thAvailable on demand June 8-15; dixonplace.org More

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      Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel.

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      Fuzzy puppet sheep. A light cutting through the haze. Hand-designed dreamscapes. There’s plenty to savor in the slow return of pixel-free theater.Striding across the plaza at Lincoln Center on a Saturday afternoon, past the bronze Henry Moore figure reclining in the reflecting pool, a man and a woman debated the sheep on the hill. Up ahead, off to their left, a small woolly flock had gathered.He was sure that they were actual animals, these five grown sheep and one darling lamb, each with its own shepherd in head-to-toe black. She argued the opposite, and was correct: These were life-size puppets, their shepherds puppeteers, and this was a pop-up performance. Under one of those broad-brimmed hats, maneuvering a long-lashed, tan-faced sheep named the Shredder, was the puppeteer Basil Twist.Yet with theater beginning its cautious tiptoe back from the sterility of the screen to the vitality (or so we hope) of in-person performance, these puppet sheep had a kind of realness that I’ve craved. As they gamboled about a fenced-off oasis of genuine grass that covers the sloping roof of a darkened upscale restaurant, their casual, nameless show was some of the truest theater I’d seen in many months.Because they were there, and so was I, and there wasn’t a pixel in sight.Theater, real theater, is an art form that we’re meant to show up for, meeting it in physical space with our physical selves. We take in the sights and scents and sounds as they happen; we note the feel of the air and the ground beneath our feet. Theater is a dialogue between artists and audience that’s also a ritual for the senses — which, after such a surfeit of digital drama, are primed to tingle.Admittedly, I had fallen in love with Twist’s charming creatures online, streaming his pandemic production of “Titon et l’Aurore,” which he had directed and designed for the Opéra Comique in Paris — a show so resplendent with puppet sheep that some were stacked into towers, and others floated through the sky.The Shredder and the rest of the gang at Lincoln Center — Splinter, Machete, Bertha, Fang and the baby, Mower — were modeled on their Parisian counterparts, with rattan skeletons and woolen coats made from wigs, whose white curls fluttered in the breeze.While a critic grew fond of the sheep puppets in an online performance, that was no match for getting close to them in person.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOn their patch of pasture, otherwise known as the Illumination Lawn (not to be confused with Mimi Lien’s nearby synthetic lawn installation, “The Green,” which is essentially set design as public art), they were like an apparition reflected in the vast glass front of Lincoln Center Theater.Toddlers were enchanted, determined to stroke Mower’s face, which the lamb’s playful puppeteer, Juanita Cardenas, warmly allowed. Spying the flock, passing dogs barked, jumped back or, if they were terribly brave, strained close to investigate.There was no plot to the performance, and barely any choreography, but it was chance-encounter magic nonetheless: puppets made by human hands and operated by artists exchanging energy — and even eye contact — with their audience.Which didn’t stop some adults who filtered through the plaza from wondering what was going on, and whether there was some deep meaning that eluded them.“Just a little herd of sheep on the hill, for the sweetness of it,” Twist said afterward, standing at one end of the reflecting pool with the Shredder in his arms.Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design proves to be an emotional highlight of “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTHE FIRST LIVE SHOW I saw when theater started returning this spring was “Blindness,” which is arguably neither live nor a show. The only actor’s voice is recorded — Juliet Stevenson, whisper-close through our headphones.But we, the audience, are live: distanced yet gathered nonetheless at the Daryl Roth Theater, off Union Square, to experience a work of art together. The thing that most moved me about it could never have happened on a screen.I’d wondered since the start of the shutdown how lighting designers would ever use haze again without freaking the audience out, since the nature of haze is to make the air visible, which makes us think about what we’re breathing, which in the past year-plus has been a very scary thing. I’d worried a little about whether it might freak me out.But there came a point in “Blindness” when the lighting designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun, broke the pitch-blackness with a soft and gorgeous beam of illumination angling through the air. As I gazed at it, I realized that the theater had been filling with haze while we were submerged in darkness, that through our masks we’d already been breathing it.And so I sat there, headphones clapped to my ears, and felt tears trickle down my cheeks — because it hadn’t unsettled me, because it felt safe and because, wow, had I missed great lighting design.IT’S SO EASY, gazing into a screen, to lose awareness of your own body. In-person theater doesn’t let that happen — and this early in the industry restart, that is double-edged.To go to a small show called “Persou” — directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos at the Cell, a performance space in Chelsea — I signed a lengthy Covid liability waiver “on behalf of myself and all of my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,” whoever those might be.Once there, I realized that even masked and fully vaccinated, in a well-ventilated room, I am not wild about the idea of standing close to strangers for a long stretch of time. Also, I will actively resist if you try to get me to dance as part of your show — though that was true even before the pandemic.I don’t regret going, though. A four-piece band played music from Cyprus and Greece that I could have listened to all night, and we spent a brief but lovely part of the performance in the incense-scented back garden, under the moon and a tall, spreading tree.And I’m pretty sure I will remember for a long time the stroller-pushing woman who walked by with her little boy as the audience waited outside, preshow, on West 23rd Street. Swearing, she muttered that we were taking up the whole sidewalk, which was a valid gripe. We are out of practice at sharing collective space.THERE ARE SENSATIONS you don’t realize you miss until you encounter them again. Like the paint-wood-adhesive smell of a freshly made set, which is part of what I loved about “A Dozen Dreams,” the En Garde Arts production at the downtown mall Brookfield Place. It’s a show that can feel, with its lack of actors, pleasingly like a walk-through of an installation.“You are the actor,” each audience member is told through headphones, at the start of a trek through 12 disparate sets belonging to 12 short plays by women, each of whom speaks her own text on the recording.Solo or in pairs, we find ourselves in Ellen McLaughlin’s “The First Line,” with its maquette scale and cracked theatricality; in Martyna Majok’s “Pandemic Dreams,” which is eerily and unambiguously a nightmare; in Rehana Lew Mirza’s “The Death of Dreams,” whose color-saturated intensity and interlocking pieces reminded me of the imagery in my own pandemic dreams.A couple of sets include video of the playwrights speaking their text, and I wish they didn’t. When I see an on-screen performance in an in-person show now, a part of me just shuts down — a reaction to online theater, but probably I have always been like this. In art museums, I look for the signature on a canvas, because to me that’s proof that a human was there. Similarly, I want my theater handmade.To a gratifying extent, “A Dozen Dreams” provides that. Irina Kruzhilina, who did the visual and environment design, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, who did the lighting, offer us something we haven’t had much of lately. We are bodily immersed in this show, and very, very far from the lonely, make-do experience of streaming theater.FIVE DAYS after I watched Twist and his band of puppeteers frolic with their sheep, I was sitting under the trees at Lincoln Center, looking out over the reflecting pool. It was early evening, and chilly shadows had crept over most of the plaza. But up at the top of the Illumination Lawn, a slice of sunlight beckoned, and I went toward it.As I stepped onto the grass, I noticed something curious on the stairs, where the flock had milled about to meet the public: a fuzzy white curl, caught on some blades of green.This remnant of puppet sheep — surely that’s what it was — filled me with disproportionate joy. Off I paced across the lawn, scanning the ground like Mare of Easttown searching for forensic evidence. The grass was scattered with it: tiny puffs of puppet wool, physical artifacts of a performance that had happened live, in 3-D, in front of an audience that was close enough to touch.Call me a traditionalist if you like, but no digital trail will ever compete with that. More

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      ‘A Sense of Belonging’ for Hispanic Children, With Puppets

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      “Club Mundo Kids,” a new TV series debuting on April 10, is the latest result of a push for programming that uses Spanish to reach Latino audiences.Standing outside a home, Romina Puga paints endangered animals, plants a garden, hosts guest experts and talks about the news. She is joined by two friends: Coco, a puppet shaped like a coconut, and Maya, a plush pink puppet.Maybe most important, Ms. Puga is as likely to speak in Spanish as in English.Those are scenes from “Club Mundo Kids,” a TV news show debuting April 10 on Televisa and April 11 on Universo, aimed at young, first- and second-generation Hispanic children in the United States, where the large Hispanic population is growing, diverse and often underrepresented in television and in movies.“There is very little content being created that is speaking to U.S. Hispanic, Latinx children and telling their stories,” said Ms. Puga, the show’s 31-year-old host. “The younger generation doesn’t really have anyone breaking things down and talking directly to them in a way that is digestible.”Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States, accounting for 18.5 percent of the population, and more than one in four newborns are Latino, according to the Pew Research Center.But only 4.5 percent of all speaking characters across 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2018 were Latino, according to a 2019 study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.Broadcasters have occasionally tried to reach young Hispanic audiences, often with cartoon programming like Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer,” about the adventures of a young animated Latina and her friends. In 2016, the Disney Channel introduced “Elena of Avalor,” an animated series praised for featuring Disney’s first Latina princess. Univision has “Planeta U” a Saturday programming block of animated and educational programs aimed at children ages 2 to 8.And for decades, “Sesame Street” has featured Rosita, a blue bilingual puppet from Mexico.“Club Mundo Kids,” in contrast, puts real people in front of the camera, including a host, children and guest experts, and makes a point of talking to children ages 6 and up about Latino life in a real-world context.“It’s a real opportunity to meet Spanish-speaking kids where they are and to help them build language and reading skills, like ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Reading Rainbow’ has been doing for decades in English,’’ said Jason Ruiz, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.He added that the show, possibly alone among programs for children, “will be symbolically important for giving Spanish-dominant kids a sense of belonging by having a show aimed directly at them.”Hosted by Ms. Puga, a former ABC News correspondent, the series features a mix of live-action and animated segments that explain topics like where food comes from and why there are so many Spanish dialects.Ms. Puga said the show combines elements of the 1990s children’s programs that she watched growing up Chilean-Argentine in Miami, but with current trends, themes and explanatory segments. In an episode about agriculture, for instance, an animated cornstalk named Miguel Maíz explains how some foods act as fuel for our bodies, and Ms. Puga says the different Spanish words for corn (one being “maíz”).And in each episode, children can ask Ms. Puga and guest experts questions that relate to the show’s topic — like, why do our stomachs hurt after eating too many sweets?“Kids will see they can interact, they can be part of the conversation and that it’s also their world,” said Isaac Lee, an executive producer of “Club Mundo Kids.” Mr. Lee said he wanted to create a show where wanted Latinx kids and their friends could get accurate news and information about the country and the world in a way that reflects their realities.The goal, he said, was an “entertaining and engaging” program, said Mr. Lee, a former chief content officer at Univision and now the head of the production company Exile. The pandemic pushed filming into the backyard of a home in the Los Angeles area, but producers are using the setting to encourage children to go outside.Ms. Puga said she hoped the show would “spark curiosity and promote empathy and understanding for other cultures — all while having fun, of course.”Advocates of greater diversity in the entertainment industry praised the trend of media companies trying to reach Hispanic children with educational content that keeps them anchored in their heritage while building cultural bridges through bilingualism.One Latina advocate, Beatriz Acevedo, said the show provided an opportunity for parents who want their children to stay connected to their culture through language.“Hopefully ‘Club Mundo Kids’ will showcase the rich diversity and intersectionality of our Latinidad that the younger generations in our community desperately need to see,” said Ms. Acevedo, who has produced children’s programs and is a founder of LA Collab, a group that promotes the advancement of Latinos in the entertainment industry. More

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      With French Theaters Closed, Puppetry Takes Center Stage

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWith French Theaters Closed, Puppetry Takes Center StageThe art form, usually on the fringes of French theatrical culture, finds itself at a sudden advantage: Puppet shows’ young audiences are still allowed to watch live performances.“Hematoma(s),” directed by Cécile Givernet and Vincent Munsch, uses cutout shapes and shadow lighting to tell a story of childhood trauma. Credit…Cie Espace BlancFeb. 4, 2021, 3:11 a.m. ETPARIS — In December, while French theaters remained shut because of the pandemic, Hubert Mahela was able to perform his latest show a dozen times. The reason? He makes puppet shows for young audiences, who happened to be in school — and in need of entertainment.Puppetry, an art form often looked down on as lowbrow, lo-fi theater, has found itself at an unlikely advantage this winter in France. Primary and secondary schoolchildren are currently the only audience members officially allowed to attend performances here, as long as the local authorities grant permission.“We can’t just work through video, with no audience,” Mahela said in a recent interview. “It was such a joy to know that it’s possible to be careful and keep going.” He took his one-man show “Lisapo Ongé!,” in which he re-enacts a tale from his native Congo with expressive hand-held puppets, to schools in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris, and in the northern city of Amiens.The situation for French puppeteers is bittersweet. While it constitutes a return to their roots, as children remain their most faithful fans, many of them have worked hard to position the form as more than family-friendly fare. In France, high levels of public funding for the arts helped puppetry make the transition, in the second half of the 20th century, from a craft passed down in family circles to a well-established sector of the performing arts.Puppetry even has a capital of sorts in France: Charleville-Mézières, a former metallurgy stronghold near the Belgian border. It hosted the first World Puppetry Festival in 1961 and became home to the International Institute of Puppetry two decades later.In 1987, a puppetry school, the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette, or ESNAM, opened. While it admits only 15 students every three years, some of puppetry’s biggest names honed their craft there, including the American artist and director Basil Twist. Other training institutions have opened internationally, but in a recent interview at the Opéra Comique in Paris, Twist said he still considered his alma mater “the top school in the world” for the art form.Hubert Mahela performing his one-man show “Lisapo Ongé!” In it, he re-enacts a tale from his native Congo.Credit…Corentin Praud“France has an enormous network of cultural institutions, one of the largest in the world, so puppetry was able to carve a niche within it,” the school’s director of pedagogy, Brice Coupey, said in a phone interview.The puppeteer Grégoire Callies had a front seat for that development. From 1997 to 2012, he directed the first National Dramatic Center devoted to the form, in Strasbourg. He is currently at the helm of the Théâtre Halle Roublot in Fontenay-sous-Bois, where he set up Covid-averse performances by several artists in schools, including Mahela’s “Lisapo Ongé!”“What’s good about the world of puppetry is that most productions are nimble, they can go everywhere,” Callies said at his theater recently. “While theater productions have a hard time coming up with big tours, there is always a possibility to work.”That much was clear from “Les Plateaux Marionnettes,” a closed showcase for programmers and journalists hosted at the Théâtre Halle Roublot in late January. Over one day, five artists and companies presented short productions, most of them new. Alongside Mahela’s “Lisapo Ongé!,” multiple branches of puppetry were represented. In “Hematoma(s),” directed by Cécile Givernet and Vincent Munsch, cutout shapes and shadow lighting were elegantly woven to tell a story of childhood trauma. With “The Forest Doesn’t Exist,” Kristina Dementeva and Pierre Dupont, who graduated from ESNAM in 2017, brought an absorbing sense of Beckettian absurdity to the musings of two sock animals.Dementeva, who started working with inanimate objects in her native Belarus, moved to Charleville-Mézières from the Belarusian capital, Minsk, to attend ESNAM. “The school is very famous among puppeteers abroad, and it’s free,” she said. “Belarus has a great underground puppet scene, but there are many more companies in France, and more public support.”Yet in a country where sophistication is a point of pride, puppet theater remains on the fringes of the biggest venues and festivals. It has earned backing from major figures over the years, including the director Antoine Vitez, who had plans to fold puppetry into the missions of France’s premier stage troupe, the Comédie-Française, when he died in 1990. Still, Callies believes puppetry hasn’t managed to achieve the same level of recognition as hip-hop dance or circus, two art forms that channeled contemporary dramaturgy to bridge the gap with highbrow genres.Kristina Dementeva and Pierre Dupont in “The Forest Doesn’t Exist,” which features two sock animals. Credit…Louis Cadroas“One of the tragedies of puppetry is that the artists who want to make it erase the word ‘puppet.’ They leave it behind,” Callies said, pointing to its reputation as a childish form of expression. “It’s a French neurosis, because if you go to Germany or Italy, adults also attend puppet theater shows.”On the flip side, some puppeteers who have moved toward contemporary theater suggest that French puppetry remains fairly conservative. The renowned stage director Gisèle Vienne, who graduated from ESNAM in 1999, said in a phone interview that her work — which is geared toward adults, with complex subject matter — was mostly embraced by dance and theater artists at the time. In 2007’s “Jerk,” she even explored the darker side of puppetry’s reputation (from schizophrenic toymakers to murderous puppets) in popular culture.“The world of puppetry told me that what I was doing wasn’t puppetry,” Vienne said. “It’s a really extraordinary medium, but I have found that the most powerful puppet-based experiments happen in the field of contemporary art.”Yet there are signs that younger puppeteers are hungry to break down the remaining barriers between their craft and mainstream theater. The profession itself is changing. “It used to be very masculine. There are a lot more women now, who do very interesting work,” Callies said.The productions presented as part of “Les Plateaux Marionnettes” tackled ambitious themes, from family violence to forgotten female figures from world history (in a spirited workshop presentation by Zoé Grossot, another ESNAM graduate). The climate emergency is also a recurring concern among ESNAM’s students, according to Coupey: “Some refuse to work with polluting materials.”At the Théâtre Halle Roublot, the sheer pleasure of watching live theater came with a sense of safety. With no more than three performers onstage at any point, and precautions including masks and social distancing, the risk of spreading Covid-19 seemed as limited as it may ever be inside an auditorium.“We can even afford to work on a play with 20 characters, because we don’t need 20 actors,” Givernet, the co-director of “Hematoma(s),” said with a laugh after the show. Lowbrow or not, puppets are well suited to this moment.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More