On Contemporary Puppet Theatre for Children

Tatyana Sheremet    

During almost the entire 20th century, puppet theatre was perceived by Russian audience as theatre, if not exclusively aimed at children, then at least the most “children’s” theatre of all. Despite the fact that, starting from the 2nd half of the last century, many directors-puppeteers staged their productions for adults, the stereotypes are still strong. There are, however, certain changes in perception: the statement that puppet theatre is aimed not only at children was long ago accepted by the professional community, and the majority of audience members are not surprised by it.

Since the Soviet times, puppet theatre has experienced quite a few changes. The most important change is that the actor-puppeteer stepped forward from behind the screen and became a full-fledged character of the play. We see the puppet in its traditional understanding more and more seldom: its role is performed by objects, people, body parts. Besides that, the puppet is no longer a marionette or Petrushka (Punch), but is almost always an individually made puppet, hard to be classified into a certain “camp”.  All the more so as the directors allow themselves to use various methods from the neighboring art forms (multimedia, pantomime, shadow theatre, etc.).

All these particularities date back to the 1970s, but have been used predominantly in the productions for adults. Children’s productions were more conservative in their form. The situation changed in the recent years. Quite a few parents still want to take their children to see “classical productions” of puppet theatre, where there is a marionette or Petrushka, and the actor steps forward from behind the screen only to take a bow. However, despite a different – often causing confusion – format, where there is such a thing as puppet theatre for children without puppets, theatres are no longer afraid of experiments and are trying to introduce the youngest audience members to the “new” puppet theatre.

The use of contemporary methods in puppet theatre for children is all the more interesting as it exists alongside another particularity – affinity for presenting on stage all kinds of folk Russian, fairy tale things. In general this reflects the general trend for “the traditional national”. However, in puppet theatre this is manifested in a subtler way than in the “Russian style”, fashionable today.

Thus, in the production The Snow Maiden (director – Alfia Abdulina, the project of the production design – Yuri Kharikov) at the Little Stray Dog company, the audience encounters a very non-typical pagan Russia. The story about the childless Old Man and Old Woman who bring up a girl, made of snow, is realized on stage on a large operatic scale, unusual for puppet theatre. The design is dominated by the color grey as opposed to the conventionally folk-like, predictable red.  Actors-puppeteers wear long sack-like clothes with patterns resembling wood carvings.  The kokoshniks do not look traditional either: appearing in gray shades at the beginning of the show and also resembling wood carvings, they make the actors look like pagan idols. The production was invited to a number of festivals, and everywhere the audiences were surprised by its powerful and large-scale visual concept.

It goes without saying that today – like in the Soviet times – fairy tale is one of the most popular genres in children’s theatre.  The biggest popularity ever (because of the famous animation movie of the same name) is enjoyed by the story about Masha and the bear, about the three bears, and the fairy tale about the little snow people. The audience can encounter other, less popular fairy tales: Cherkessian, Aleut.  Most often productions based on fairy tales are created in the “classical” manner, without any unexpected means – this might be explained by the desire to answer the audience’s demands in an original way. However, there are young directors, who are not afraid of experiments and are fond of “swashbuckling” approach to the canonical material. Thus, in Anatoly Gushchin’s production of Buzzy-Wuzzy Busy Fly at the Bolshoi Puppet Theatre (BTK) puppeteers-narrators, in their costumes with a statement “I love bugs”, resemble ghost busters; the performance is accompanied by Pink Floyd, The Doors, and Sergei Kurekhin’s music, and lighting and set design make one believe that the action takes place on another planet. A space-inspired interpretation of Russian folk tales is found in another production of the BTK – The Turnip directed by Denis Kazachuk. In this show, during the entire performance the sparse iconic text of the fairy tale is laced with Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Not a single blade of grass grows on the moon”, added by the director, and at the end the Turnip, dragged to the surface, “flies” into the open space accompanied by the most famous “cosmic
music – Space’s Magic Fly.

In another production for children, based on folk material, in BTK’s Speckled Hen (director – A. Gushchin), the classical fairy tale becomes a reason to discuss creation of the world and existence of superior powers. The entire action takes place behind the screen with an egg-shaped hole cut in it. At the same place there is a small stage for the small Old Man and Old Woman made of foam plastic. At the beginning there is nothing on this stage except for a pile of tree branches. However, a bit later a house grows out of it; later a worm-bench and an axe appear. All of those, as well as the following action with attempts of the puppet characters to break the golden egg, are closely followed by the Almighty – a masked actor, who bears a close resemblance to the God performed by Semyon Samodur in The Divine Comedy by Sergei Obraztsov at the State Central Puppet Theatre.  The Almighty at the BTK is making lots of efforts to prevent the short-sighted Old Man and Old Woman from making a mistake: he “switches on” the hot sun, offers them delicious fruit, but all in vain – the characters are trying to destroy the gift of their fate with increased anger. As a result, the Almighty sends them a mouse, and when the egg is finally broken, only a bunch of tree branches remains on the screen… However, life goes on. Thus, the literary material, aimed at the youngest audience, is regarded by the modern puppet directors as an opportunity to talk about complex, ambivalent subjects. This tendency gives grounds for optimism.

Besides that, in the recent time new children’s literature has come to the puppet theatre for the young audience – with its complex and very adult subjects of death, hardships of life and war. At the end of August at the BTK there was a BTK-LAB showcase: young directors presented sketches of shows, based on the books published by Samokat Publishing House. In two days five works were presented; all of them prove that young directors do not make any “allowances” for the young age of their audience. Not only the subjects are serious, but the discussion itself is so serious in its form, that one is no longer sure that the production is aimed at the youngest audience – adults will also be interested in all of that. Thus, Denis Kazachuk, for instance, has chosen for his production the book The Winter When I Grew Up by Peter van Gestel, telling about the war, which took the mother of the main character, a 10-year old boy. The actors and director of the sketch are trying all kinds of means: from jigging puppets to designating people with objects. Here the mother is cellophane, belted in the middle with a rope and made to look like a woman’s silhouette in a dress, and the father is a jacket on a hanger.

However, the most powerful impression at the BTK-LAB was made by Ivan Pachin’s sketch based on the book My Grandfather Was a Cherry Tree. The director tells the story about the death of the dear ones with humor and children’s ardor, using the truly ludic theatre. Here the heavy grandmother is performed by a skinny actress, who, in front of the audience, puts a down pillow under her blouse, so that at some point she becomes the owner of a big belly. This same actress in 15 minutes will start to crouch, pretending that she is the grandmother’s favorite goose.   The production’s main character, a little boy named Tonino, is at the same time an actor-narrator, and a small children’s chair with pants and shirt lying on it. A feisty dog – a cardboard figure on a cardboard leash, and the cherries are picked from the cherry tree, drawn on the floor. A large part of the production is live which is so favored by contemporary puppeteers, however, the true ludic nature of the puppet theatre is also present here, when the method of expressing the thought is being born out of the means at hand – and in the 21st century everything can become a puppet.

A separate new tendency, which appeared in Russian puppet theatre in the recent few years, is baby theatres, i.e., companies creating productions for babies from the age of 6 months. This phenomenon, which is not taken seriously by certain theatre critics, is quickly gaining momentum, becoming more noticeable, and, what is most important, – more meaningful.

It is important to take into consideration that baby theatre is not an interactive entertainment, similar to the way animators interact with children in a café, where an actor asks the children to dance, spin, applaud together with him. Baby theatre is an action, where baby viewer is included in the creative space. Creators of the production are aware of the fact that their target audience can not sit on one place and wants to touch everything, which is present in the space of the stage. In most cases this is the theatre of objects, when an object, puppet becomes a partner in game, not an independent character.

This phenomenon is widely spread which can be proved by the first festival of baby productions Kukusya that took place in Moscow in spring. The program included baby productions from across Russia. Among them was All Year Round from Krasnoyarsk Puppet Theatre directed by Alexander Khromov. This is the double of the work of the same name from St. Petersburg theatre company MetaZero. In a paper dome, to the jingling live music, with the help of sheets of ordinary white paper, the creators of the production tell the audience about the surprising metamorphoses of various seasons. Paper is snow, snowflakes, the mountain, from which a man – also paper-made – can slide. In a minute the snow melts, the flowers appear from under it, and the paper starts playing the role of umbrellas, providing shelter from the April thaw. There are also paper insects in the summer and fallen leaves in the autumn. Babies can touch “a part” of every season, and everyone is entitled to a piece of paper metamorphosis – every baby member of the audience receives his or her own flower and butterfly. The production is without words, but everything in the production is simple and understandable. And, at the same time, it is surprising and wonderful for the little audience members, many of whom do not yet remember all of the seasons.

One more production shown at the festival – Dreams from Krasnoyarsk Puppet Theatre directed by Beata Bablinska. This production is about adventures during the sleep, when a blanket in the hands of actors becomes the sky and meadow with flowers; and a pillow is at times a stretching cloud and at times a butterfly. Here dreams are kept on stage in real old suitcases, and then little audience members are asked to draw their dreams on paper – before that they are shown examples, drawn by other children on wallpaper or a birth certificate.  The actors tell the story with the assistance of shadow theatre and a projector.

Another production, presented at the festival, the fairy tale-coloring book The Adventures of a Brush (the Mother’s Little Garden theatre, the author of the idea, designer – Yulya Velikanova), is performed by only one actress. She plays the role of a brush, becoming a puppet herself and helping an entire world to appear on the white background of the sets – with the yellow sun, blue drops of rain, green grass, and red flowers.

Partially, the means of puppet theatre were used in another production, showed at the festival – The Swan Lake. Baby Version by the Meyerhold Center and Baby-Lab (director Tatyana Priyatkina-Weinstein). The production is based on musical excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s eponymous ballet performed on exotic instruments. The visual part consists of dance acts, performed by Moscow Ballet soloists, and puppet acts, performed by the actors of Obraztsov Puppet Theatre. The production features cardboard fish, swan puppets, and the dance of little swans, presented with the help of shadow theatre. Of course, all of that is far from the “classical” puppet theatre, which causes shock and surprise in unprepared adult audience members – which they discuss on social networks.

Looking back at the history of puppet theatre, it is possible to notice an interesting fact: today, like a hundred years ago, many new theatre companies appear. Of course, quantity is not quality. However, one may hope that the subjects and means, which are discovered and used by contemporary directors in their approach to children, will bring Russian puppet theatre for children to a substantially new level.