A one-year old is shown a rubber duck. It seems to be jumping and saying: “Quack quack.” The one-year old looks at the duck, looks at the person saying “quack quack”, looks back at the duck – and bursts into delight. It seems to me that this is the beginning of the beginnings of theatre conventions and – which to some extent is the same – the very beginning of puppet theatre.
A drama theatre scholar is only too eager to speculate about the phenomenon of theatre which handles inanimate objects. The main subject of such speculations would be the nature of the actor’s profession, controlled by the director’s and author’s idea similarly to the way a marionette is controlled by a puppeteer. “The great actor is the same as an excellent puppet, which the author pulls by the string and in every line determines the true position the puppet should put itself into,” writes Denis Diderot in 1770 in his Paradox of the Actor. A century and a half later Gordon Craig would bring forth his concept of “über-marionette” – an impeccable actor, who is ready to renounce his or her ego for the sake of imagination and inspiration.
However, let us come down to earth. In Russia “puppet theatre” is the name of a state cultural institution, which you may find in pretty much every big city (and sometimes even in really small towns): here parents bring their kids to see Puss in Boots, The Little Round Bun, and The Three Little Pigs because that is the done thing. However, productions of these stories may vary because they are created by people who are very passionate about their work and, willing or not, live in the 21st century. In one theatre company the Little Round Bun is moved by strings, in another theatre it is put on the puppeteer’s hand like a glove or is controlled by the system of rods, in the third it is painted on a flat surface, in the forth it may be performed not even by a puppet, but by a live actor.
Puppet theatre has its own traditions, secrets of craft, and is even open to experiment. Puppets can be made by a designer from wood or fabric, Styrofoam or silicone; a director is capable of creating a video projection and playing with different scales. However, the subject of the show seems to remain unchanged: a group of preschoolers with mixed results enjoy interactive acts (“Where did the wolf go?”), bad music, and unraveling of the plot. I.e., it is totally the same as in average children’s theatre easily doing without puppets.
At the same time there is one curious thing: hardly any “drama” production for children can do without deliberate props, such as human-sized costumes of animals, huge colorful sets, movements of actors similar to those of marionettes and Punch (Petrushka). In both cases the show is prone to conventionality – it is hard to imagine a fascinating children’s performance, which uses the language of psychological realism. And what can be more conventional than a story told by moving objects?
Still, in the professional milieu the expression “puppet theatre” implies a totally different kind of phenomenon. First of all, we are talking about author’s theatre, the main means of which is the magical process of reviving the inanimate, about “the pure puppet theatre”, i.e., a certain kind of art where we can realize the things, which are impossible anywhere other than in a chamber space with a man and an object. This includes the fantastic Duda Paiva, who comes in heart-piercing contact with the puppet he controls. And Rezo Garbriadze, whose wooden figures invisibly acquire the features of the world, which is much more subtle (and in this regard more real) than our mundane world. And the Moscow theatre company named Shadow, which is endlessly ironic and charming, creating small-scale, almost table-type productions, whose miniature quality becomes its principal strength, inaccessible to other art forms.
However, the epithet “author’s” used in reference to any form of theatre, including puppet theatre, in most situations can be replaced (without losing anything) by another epithet – “director’s”. Speaking of this category, there are reasons why in front of one’s mind’s eye there appears a whole constellation of directors, whose art, in the first place, is expressed in the interpretation of this or that literary source. Boris Konstantinov, Yevgeny Ibragimov, Alexander Yanushkevich, Oleg Zhugzhda – these names are the first to come to mind; perhaps this is because these artists are most often nominated for Best Director in Puppet Theatre at the Golden Mask festival. Each of the directors is recognizable because of his stylistics, each of them is mostly adult-oriented, their works are very well known beyond the professional circle of puppeteers.
In the second place, what is implied is the theatre of illusion, and here number 1 is Philippe Genty, French director who is very-well known in Russia. This is large form, impressive surrealist circus, based not on history, but on phantasm; here actors and puppets are replaced with bodies, faces, objects, and their hypnagogic combinations. That is a living example of what the transgression of a puppeteer can lead to: Genty also started as a director in the theatre of marionettes. You must have seen on the internet a video of his famous etude: Pierrot notices the puppeteer, discerns the strings, and starts tearing them off of himself until he falls down motionless – lifeless, but free. As for gigantic spiders, flexible little people, and an elephant-sized palm of a hand – all of those will come later.
The tradition of introducing techniques of performative art into puppet theatre and vice versa is an entirely separate subject. One of the most impressive puppet performances I have ever seen – Panopticon by Michael Vogel at the Gulliver Theatre in Kurgan – was completely devoid of puppets per se; instead of those, strained and lost characters were dealing with parcels made of crumpled paper, turning into some kind of post-apocalyptic moths and caterpillars. Of course, in the recent years there have also been the musical and movement-based works of Ruslan Kudashev at the Bolshoi Puppet Theatre in St. Petersburg where the puppet occupies only the second or sometimes even the third place.
From the other side this symbiosis reveals itself even more distinctly. The faceless puppets/bags in Yuri Pogrebnichko’s productions; the endless tricks with objects in Dmitry Krymov’s work. The two babies made of rag with a rope around their necks which are ferociously twisted in the air by Valérie Dréville in Medea. Material by Anatoly Vasilyev. The bone-chilling Dead Class by Tadeusz Kantor, where the border between the humans and the human-sized puppets is erased. Lastly, there is the dummy, wrapped in sackcloth, which is being worshipped by the morally crippled characters of Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis. And about half a hundred more examples, including the famous ending of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Inspector General, where the dummies appeared in the silent scene instead of the actors.
Each year it gets more and more difficult to determine where one art form ends and another begins. For instance, which category of the Golden Mask award Robert Wilson’s production of Pushkin’s Fairy Tales fits into: drama (the production plays on the stage of a drama theatre, the roles are performed by drama actors), musical (an entire orchestra is involved in the production, actors are singing and dancing during the whole performance), or experiment (as synthesis of everything). One of the experts joked during a similar discussion: “Wilson is puppet theatre.” Why not?