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Day Nine: Analytics, Confusion, and One Bad Show

This morning I didn’t have anything till 11am, so I slept in. It was a bad idea, because it was so hard to get up! I headed off to breakfast, and today tried some very yummy yogurt. Then I headed to the Perth Town Hall, where I had my first event of the day. 

This was a two hour masterclass with Neville Tranter, and it was excellent! The masterclass was all about the ‘power of the puppet’, and was basically a very analytical look at how a puppet performs onstage and how best to use it to communicate to the audience. Neville performed a little with a large vent (ventriloquist) puppet, showing us a few tips and tricks, and then had six volunteers to help him show how to best perform certain scenes. What was great was that the volunteers were mostly well known puppeteers, including Philip Millar and two from Krinkl Theatre, and Neville ended up showing them what was wrong with their manipulation. 

I won’t go through everything but here’s some gems of info: puppetry is a suggestive medium, and once you understand the body language of the puppet you can learn how best to emote using it. As soon as you have your hand in the puppet, you start a dialogue with the audience, and every movement is part of that dialogue, so you must be aware not only of the puppet and its surroundings, but also yourself and the way you place yourself in relation to the puppet. Manipulation is all about action and reaction – ie. looking at something and reacting to it – as well as the push and pull of the puppet with an object or thing onstage. If the puppet looks at something, then looks at it again, and then looks at the audience, that action is then a shared action with the audience (ie. letting them in on the joke), which helps the audience to have an emotional connection with the puppet. If you try to think technically about what you want the puppet to do, you stop doing the action yourself, and instead focus all of your energy and emotion into the puppet. The eyes of the audience always follow the movement, so be careful not to cover the movement of the puppet with the movement of the puppeteer. 

The exercises that Neville did – I thought they would be good to share with those wanting to improve their performance skills – are as follows: nonverbal scene, where the puppet has its head down, bobs its way up, looks over at something, peers off into the distance (gesturing with its hand over its brow), becomes frightened of that thing, then watches it go past from one side of the stage to the other. Second exercise was a simple yes/no scene: the puppeteer interacts with the puppet by telling it no, while the puppet must say yes. And the third used text – any text – to show how lip synching worked. 

The whole masterclass was excellent, despite the fact that I’m not a performer, it was extremely useful in terms of understanding manipulation better, for writers, directors, performers and for builders. I wished that everyone could do the class, because I know so many people in Australia and elsewhere that could have benefited from it and Neville’s analytical mind. His short performances when he was explaining things put shame to some of the volunteers’ efforts, who have decades of professional experience using puppets. 

Well, by this time it was 1pm, and despite sleeping in, I was exhausted, so I headed back to the hotel for a short nap before my next event. I’m glad I did, because an hour later I woke up and felt so much better. 

The next thing was a keynote speech given by Petr Matasek, who designs and makes puppets in the Czech Republic. The speech was supposed to be on the creative influence, but in all honesty I have no idea what it actually turned out to be. Matasek’s accent was very strong, but he had an odd way of speaking in stilted sentences, which were quite incomprehensible to follow. I’m sure there was logic to his thoughts, but it all seemed to be so ethereal (not in the sense that it was high philosophy, but in the sense that there was no clear link between one thought and another) that I couldn’t understand it. Anyway, he showed us a lot of photos, and I guess the main discussion was how we as humans create different shapes and forms on a range of ideas, and how we take perceptions, expectations, memory and juxtapositions from one work of art to the next. He started with pictures of architecture, a range of human sculptures and images, and piles of sand; and then moved on to some fantastic shots of his own work, including marionettes in the making. But for the most part I was utterly lost, and I’m not sure many people were able to follow it either. 

By this time it was 4pm, and as it happened, in the same building was an Open Space meeting (as part of the festival, delegates are able to secure rooms in the State Library to discuss any topic they like, on a day and at a time that suits them) for a discussion on puppetry in the US. It was run by two people from the Puppeteers Organization of America, and I thought that would be interesting to attend, so off I went. It really wasn’t much of a discussion – they introduced themselves, and told us about their biennial festival, and then showed us a DVD about the festival. We got really engrossed with the video, and got kicked out of the space at 5pm because someone else had booked the room for 5. 

The festival sounds like an amped up version of this one: registration gets you entry into workshops and shows, and unlike here you don’t have to pay individually for every show or class you want to take. Plus you seem to get on campus (it’s at a college) accommodation, late night parties, a puppet store and bookshop where you can sell your wares, and a mentorship program for those new to participating in the festival. It sounds like right up my alley, and I submitted my name for a copy of the DVD. 

My long day was almost over: I headed back to the hotel to relax for an hour or two, and then headed to my final event of the day. A show! Sleeping Beauty, which I really really didn’t like. Read my review here.

Tomorrow I have an all day workshop with Gary Friedman, and if I feel up to it, I’m heading to the Transit Lounge for some behind-the-scenes goodies in terms of short performances only available to artists and delegates. I do want to mention two things about the Lounge: they provided on the tables some LED disco lights, plus on each table there is a white box with fun stuff inside. The fun stuff is random: some have little toy cars in them, others have play cards, others have paper planes… A few of us were remarking that the organisers really knew their audience, since everyone has a great time playing with the lights and the toys; and that at a business conference the participants would find the whole thing strange and inappropriate. Ah, puppeteers! Only we would have fun with such items! UPDATE: Read next post here.