Last week we did another work in progress show for our project with the working title "The Puppet Monologues". We worked for the first time with Jake Waring, and was asked his take on his experience with us and the project. Here's what he said:
Last week
I was fortunate enough to have my first experience of working with Blind Summit
on 'The Puppet Monologues'. Working with original texts from Alice Birch, David
Kantounas and Jack Thorne the challenge facing us was how and why to put these
words in the mouths of puppets.
How to
make a puppet speak? I don't suppose there is any exact science as to what
precisely you should and shouldn't do to bring a puppet to life. There are
specific techniques which make the puppeteer-puppet-audience relationship
clearer. For example opening the puppets mouth before speaking the words, as
it's no travesty to open your mouth and not speak, but you can't speak with
your mouth closed.
How to
make a puppet move? Without the ability to have facial expressions
what is
physically done with the head, arms, legs and body is all we have bar the voice
to read emotions, thoughts and story from the puppet. One of the great
difficulties I found during the week was controlling the left arm whilst also
delivering text with the head. The temptation is to follow the words with the
hands, though in reality we rarely do this. If the puppet has said a word, the
audience has received this, but if the hands and body tell the word too,
nothing else is gained from it.
Different
puppets are controlled in different ways. In 'The Puppet Monologues' Tina and
Peter have poles attached to their hands, and therefore as the puppeteer your
thoughts are with where and how the hand would move. Whereas Patrick is
controlled by the elbows, and this posed a tricky problem. We spent time
looking at the specifics of how we as humans move our arm, concluding that
impulses come from the deltoid and shoulder down the arm. As I write this now I
am confusing myself, and the key thing that I learnt from last week was that
with all aspects of puppetry there is a constant negotiation and assessment of
what you are doing in relation to the puppet. Often when battling with a puppet
problem, all that was required was for someone else to jump on the puppet and
for you to take a step back and look at what an audience would see and this
usually made everything become clear.
The
biggest and most fascinating question for me is 'why puppets?' Mark would often
bring discussions in rehearsals back to 'why a puppet?' If it is easier to read
the facial expressions of a person, there is no need for someone else to
operate them and they don't need to be taken to and from venues in a box, then
why not use actors to do these monologues? Everyone will have a different
answer to this, but at the end of the showing in Poole last Friday I found what
this means for me. There is something in the neutrality of a puppet that gives
nothing away. Without eyes to be read and the infinite possibilities of
non-verbal human communication, the text sings out with a heightened clarity,
allowing an audience to really listen. If an actor pauses after a line, we read
thousands of tiny signals from them and this will inform our reaction to what
has been said. When a puppet pauses after a line, we are left with their breath
and the choices the puppeteer makes with their movement, which I feel allows
the audience to form a richer, and ultimately more personal engagement with the
text.
I am
still trying to digest exactly how I feel about puppets after last week. I am
looking forward to the discoveries I am yet to make and how my relationship to
them will change over time. The one thing I can say for sure, is that I love
puppets, even if I'm not sure why!
See an album of pictures for the day here
