I just returned from the Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival. I participated in Catapult 2, learning about scroll puppets and kuruma ningyo (cart puppetry) from Blair Thomas and Tom Lee. I was also able to see some brilliant puppet theatre.
On the first night we saw Jeghetto's Just Another Lynching, a powerful piece with expressive puppets and a beautiful soundtrack. The second night was a mash up of four very different pieces in various stages of development at Links Hall. The last evening of theatre was by La Pendue, a French company with a piece called Tria Fata. Over the three nights, there was opera, shadow play, scrolls, politics, social commentary, and one visual feast followed by another.
During the days, a group of ten folks from all backgrounds and parts of the world worked together to devise scenes and ideas from "Dragon: the old potter’s tale” by Ryunosuke Akutakawa. I was reminded throughout the whole workshop that puppetry is first and foremost a visual storytelling mode.
The scroll mechanisms (or crankies) are a precursor to film and the moving image, with images drawn on a long length of paper that is wound from one dowel to another. We began by sketching ideas from a scene; those ideas turned into beats, and then the beats were connected together. My partner, Matisse, and I explored a character named Emon who had caterpillars for eyebrows. We decided his caterpillars were derived from the pillars of the gate and crawled onto his face. My initial instinct had been that the scroll boxes are static, like scenery, but later learned in practice that they are quite mobile, can live on different planes, and that figurative puppets can interact with them.
Cart puppetry is a specific form where the puppeteer sits on a small rolling box and tucks the peg feet of the puppet in between their toes. We didn't construct any of these puppets, but we did look at the interior mechanism and practiced with some of Tom's puppets. On the last day, it took everyone, but we were able to compose and run a short scene with three scrolls, a cart puppet, a piece of fabric that served as a choreographed body of water, all with percussion.