These puppets shows are not for kids, y'all

ARTS
These puppets shows are not for kids, y'all
Austin puppeteers are bringing the art form back to its original audience: adults

By Robyn Ross
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, October 25, 2008

Connor Hopkins, whose Trouble Puppet Theater Company opens an adaptation of "Frankenstein" on Thursday, is looking forward to a show with "video projection, live music, fire and lots of slime, blood and electricity." This is the man whose first Austin project was a strip show starring transgender puppets that came back from the dead.

Hopkins also created cannibal puppets in a musical about the Donner Party, an ill-fated westward expedition of American settlers in the 1840s. The puppets were built around plastic gallon jugs filled with Vienna sausages and ketchup. For his show about Bastille Day, he made puppets with detachable heads and a rigged up a blood-spurting guillotine.

It's not for kids, y'all.

"The reaction you get most of the time as an adult when you say you're doing puppet shows, is people look at you and think you're a freak," Hopkins says. "I'll hand out fliers for a show, and people take it because they think it's for a band. They see that it's a puppet show and then hand it back."

That's changing, though, as Austinites are introduced to puppetry for adults who, through history, were the art's original audience.

Over the summer Ricki "Geppetto" Vincent and his Geppetto Dreams Puppet Company performed a puppet burlesque starring a sexy pig named "Miss Mimi." Like many of Vincent's characters, Miss Mimi is a bunraku-style puppet manipulated with rods held by three on-stage puppeteers. Geppetto Dreams is now staging its Halloween show, "Tales from the Nauseous Fairy," a puppet show for adults with Sunday matinees for kids.

Vincent's company has its own theater, quite a feat for the puppeteer who's been in Austin less than two years. Hopkins has planned a full season of puppetry ("mostly about grim moments in history"), and the Austin Puppet Society, which he started, has 40 members who trade ideas online. And First Night Austin, the all-ages New Year's Eve arts event, has become a showcase for enormous puppets that enchant young and old alike.

Talk to the hand

"What attracts a lot of people to puppetry is that you get to do everything — you get to write the show, make your actors, make your set," Hopkins says.

The freedom of the art form is one big draw for Sachi DeCou, the creator of the Austin Bike Zoo. The Bike Zoo, which features giant animal puppets on custom-built bicycles, gave performances at First Night and at Maker Faire. Part bicycling statement, part art project, the Zoo includes a moth, a praying mantis, a butterfly and an 80-foot rattlesnake on wheels.

"In terms of telling a story, you can be a lot more fantastic and creative with the story through puppets than is possible in a lot of other arenas," DeCou says. "You'd never really see a butterfly that's 17 feet tall — it's so eye-opening and bizarre, and it definitely carries you into another world."

And as long as puppets move in an expressive way, the audience will accept that they're "alive."

When Hopkins used to do shows at bars, he would use a puppet to greet and poke fun at the crowd until someone yelled or tossed a cup of beer at it — and at that point, he knew he could start the show. "Nobody throws a paper cup at something unless they actually believe that it's alive in some way," he says, "however minimal and ironic it may be."

At one of Vincent's shows in Southern California, a wealthy patron got into a heated argument about class divisions with a puppet. "Finally," he says, "I got the puppet in his face and said, 'I've got a show to do, and if you haven't figured it out, I'm a puppet! I used to be part of somebody's couch, and you're sitting here having a fight with me.' He stormed out and told the curator that he'd never come back because of the rudeness of that puppet."

Puppetry as a subversive art

It's not that unusual for puppets to be debating issues of the day.

"It's a people's art form," Hopkins says. "It doesn't exist in this sort of rarefied theatrical atmosphere, and the shows have always been about things that are of more consequence to the average person."

Trouble Puppet has staged shows about the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago and in the spring will perform a version of "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's dark novel about the meatpacking industry. Though Hopkins describes his work as black comedy, the serious subject matter is traditional for puppetry.

"Puppets were a grown-up thing for many, many centuries before they ever became a child's thing," Vincent says. "Puppetry's been traced back as far as the plays of Aristotle, where puppets were fetishes used in those performances. Shadow puppets were used to tell the history of one's tribe; the puppets were made out of animal skin and dyed and the shows were done with torchlight behind more animal skin.

"'Punch and Judy' was actually speaking against taxation and the crown and getting away with it — when anyone else who made the smallest little utterance was getting their head chopped off, the puppet shows were making the noise."

Puppets are still making noise. Bread & Puppet Theater of Vermont, known for its antiwar demonstrations in the '60s and '70s, helped revive street theater and large-scale political puppetry in the United States. Demonstrators protesting the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 used large puppets and effigies to capture media attention.

Local artist Beth Ferguson worked with Bread & Puppet in the '90s before embarking on a traveling bicycle circus that included puppet shows. At demonstrations, "bringing a puppet show felt like you were doing something, as opposed to being another body standing around," she said. "A puppet performance was a positive image that might have some heavy content but was colorful moment of solidarity and peace."

But even something made of papier-mache or cloth can invite controversy. In 2003, Ferguson's Cycle Circus traveled to St. Louis for a theatrical demonstration against the World Agricultural Forum. The group planned to perform a puppet show about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, but police confiscated their materials and arrested company members on suspicion of planning a violent protest. The puppeteers were released after hours in jail but spent the rest of their tour focused as much on legal work as performing.

Dreams of a puppet center

Since moving back to Austin, Ferguson has used puppetry at First Night and as a teacher for the Theatre Action Project, which employs puppets to help children develop communication skills. For the past two years she has organized a community carnival in central east Austin that includes puppets.

"Puppets are something that's not sterile," she says, contrasting them with movies and concerts. "Bringing street theater and cultural events to our communities is saying we don't want to live in a sterile community — we actually have art and cultural exchanges where dialogue happens. Parading through the neighborhood creates conversation."

It's a conversation local puppeteers hope to continue. Vincent dreams of an Austin puppetry arts center that would be a tourist destination, performance venue, and space for workshops (build your own animatronic Halloween mask!).

And it could happen: "In one year's time, Geppetto Dreams had a successful puppet film fest, numerous free shows and workshops around town, ran a successful movie night and proved that people will spend 15 bucks to come see a puppet shake her butt," Vincent says.

Hopkins has applied for a program-expanding grant from the Jim Henson Foundation, but he mentions an even bigger idea he picked up while performing at a puppet festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Puppetry is such an important part of Slovenian culture that when the country became independent from Yugoslavia, it transformed a former military headquarters into a national puppet theater.

Could the United States repurpose military buildings for puppets?

Would that mean we had a puppet government?

Hopkins smiles mischievously. "I think there's only one way to find out."