Animated
Operas
By Martin Puchner
Master Peter's Puppet Show
By Manuel de Falla
The Return of Ulysses
By Claudio Monteverdi
(closed)
In the opera, characters come to life through
the singers' voices. That these singers also have bodies and that
these bodies should be capable of acting is often an afterthought,
except when the singers' bodies become so large that they somehow
get in the way. The world-class soprano Deborah Voigt recently
found this out the hard way when she was dropped from a production
at London's Royal Opera because she was deemed too voluminous
to appear in a cocktail dress on stage. But usually, everyone
pretty much accepts that singers aren't held to the same corporeal
and actorly standards as dramatic actors. When once in a while
a singer breaks this rule and displays acting prowess--for example
Lauren Flanigan--a second problem emerges: the opera is revealed
as a stylized and formulaic art form that doesn't call for, or
permit, naturalist acting. What is a good actor to do during those
long repetitions and developments conceived of by the composer
with no consideration for stage action? Stand still until the
next unit of action is finally reached, or else run all over the
stage desperately miming the emotions that are already expressed
by the music?
Recently, New York theatergoers could witness
two instances of a fascinating solution to these problems: the
staging of opera with puppets in Manuel de Falla's Master
Peter's Puppet Show, presented by the Brooklyn Philharmonic
and the Compania Tridente of Granada at BAM, and in Monteverdi's
The Return of Ulysses, presented by the Theatre Royal
de la Monnaie at Lincoln Center. Both these productions separated
the singers from the actors and replaced the onstage performers
with puppets, allowing the singers to concentrate on voice while
the puppets suggested the more abstract and stylized characters
called for by the musical form. The differences between the productions
were striking, however, and they shed interesting light on opera,
puppet theater, and the art of acting.
De Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show
was part of a concert dedicated to three twentieth-century Spanish
composers interested in Don Quixote: de Falla, his contemporary
Oscar Esplas, and the younger Roberto Gerhard. De Falla is the
most well known and also the most explicitly theatrical of the
three. His wild juxtaposition of vastly different styles, ranging
from Renaissance songs to 18th-century keyboard masters, is reminiscent
of Stravinsky's historical collages, and in theater circles de
Falla is best known for The Three-Cornered Hat, a ballet
written for Diaghilev and presented with sets and costumes designed
by Picasso in 1919.
Of the pieces performed at BAM, only de
Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, written between 1919
and 1922, called for and received a stage representation. It is
based on the episode in Don Quixote in which the protagonist
watches a puppet show and gets so drawn into the action that he
seeks to rescue the damsel in distress, only to destroy poor Master
Peter's puppet theater in the process. De Falla conceived of his
piece as a puppet opera: the puppet show itself, but also Don
Quixote, Master Peter, and a Narrator are represented by puppets.
Thus, it contains a puppet show within a puppet show, with some
puppets representing puppets and others representing humans--a
perfect occasion, one might think, to probe the difference between
the world of effigies and the world of humans that Don Quixote
so destructively ignores.
Taking its cue from Cervantes's Baroque
fascination with overlapping levels of reality and fiction, The
Compania Tridente of Granada revels in devising the multiple layers
of puppet theaters. Life-size figures watch Master Peter's show,
which keeps changing from its initial geometrical set into a variety
of other theaters and styles, like so many Russian dolls hidden
inside one another. There is a certain amount of ingenuity in
these transformations. As one puppet stage disappears, for example,
the puppets remain without a frame until their shadows are projected
onto a screen that appears behind them: the puppet show has momentarily
become a shadow theater. On the whole, however, the constant changes--which
seem to have absorbed most of the company's creative energy--are
distracting and contribute little to the episode. All of the interest
is in the transitions from puppet theater to puppet theater, with
each set of puppets barely knowing what to do once its little
theater stands. The puppets remain largely static or else move
aimlessly about in clumsy ways. It is hard enough to convince
opera singers to make an effort at acting. These puppets are worse.
They are neither comic nor tragic, neither crudely jocular nor
eerily uncanny (as puppets often are). They are simply wooden
and don't know what to do on stage. Indeed, they seem to suffer
from stage fright.
Still more disappointing, the singers,
music, and puppets are entirely disconnected from one another.
The singers are removed from the stage and stand in the orchestra
pit. The large puppets of Don Quixote and the Narrator don't know
how to react to the constant set changes occurring in the puppet
theater (and one can't blame them for this, since the changes
are entirely unmotivated), and the Don Quixote puppet doesn't
know what to do when the Narrator laboriously recounts the story
to be shown on the puppet stage. Even the culminating action,
the final destruction of the theater by the misguided Don Quixote,
consists only of a few awkward stabs at the frame. Narration,
orchestral music, arias, outer puppets, and inner puppets all
appear as fragments of a whole destroyed by some willful, misguided
fellow.
These
same ingredients--shadow theater, life-size puppets guided by
multiple puppeteers, and separate singers--are also part of de
la Monnaie's Return of Ulysses, but to an infinitely
more compelling effect. Over many years of productive collaboration,
director William Kentridge and the South African Handspring Puppet
Company explored the profound potential of puppets. Their grotesque
and harrowing adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Ubu
and the Truth Commission, set in South Africa before and
after apartheid, was shown to universal acclaim in New York at
the Biannual Puppet Theater Festival in 1998. For The Return
of Ulysses, the group created much more classical and lyrical
puppets. As in Master Peter's Puppet Show, the main protagonists
are each presented by an almost life-size puppet, a puppeteer,
and a singer. But where de Falla's work had kept these performers
separate, here they are carefully integrated. The production did
not just disassemble characters; it also reassembled them. First,
the singers were up on stage, part of the ensemble, and they even
helped to guide the puppets. In addition, the singers' delicate
modulations, especially those of Kristina Hammarström as Penelope
and of Fuiro Zanasi as Ulysses, were picked up by the subtle puppeteers
and by the orchestra, which was placed in a semi-circle on the
stage. All the instrumentalists, manipulators, and singers thus
shared a single space and their finely attuned interactions realized
a multi-layered whole. In de Falla's piece, the result was accidental
fragmentation.
Kentridge and Adrian Kohler, principal
puppet maker and designer of Handspring, achieved precisely what
de Falla had intended almost a hundred years earlier: a modern,
animated opera. This historical similarity is worth contemplating.
The last turn-of-the-century witnessed a striking resurgence of
serious puppet and marionette theater, including Jarry's Ubu
Roi. Indeed, many of the most significant playwrights, from
Maeterlinck and Yeats to Lorca--all them more or less de Falla's
contemporaries--wrote well-known plays explicitly for puppets,
even though these plays are now usually performed by human actors.
Moreover, many visionaries of the stage, such as Gordon Craig,
called on actors to imitate the impersonal grace of marionettes.
The discontentment with traditional acting and traditional actors
was caused, among other factors, by the newer media, including
film, photography and radio, as they transformed the theatrical
arts. And herein lies the analogy to our own time. We too live
in an era when new media are transforming older art forms, not
just theater but also those, such as film, that had contributed
to the new puppet theater a hundred years ago. The recent success
of Lord of the Rings, acted alternately by humans and
the creations of animation engineers, is perhaps the most visible
result of this development.
From this perspective, The Return of
Ulysses does more than simply avoid the mistakes from which
the recent production of Master Peter's Puppet Show suffers.
It takes the creation of a puppet opera as an occasion for a breathtaking
experiment in contemporary animation. This is perhaps only to
be expected from Kentridge, who is best known for his charcoal-drawn
animated films. Such films found their way into Return of
Ulysses. At times, the drawings develop their own symbolism.
Ulysses, for example, is represented by a single curved line that
turns into a straight line, Ulysses's bow and arrow, with which
he kills the suitors. At other times, the film animation shows
allegorical figures, for example the owl of Minerva--Ulysses's
guardian god--and also stylized landscapes and cityscapes that
look like Manhattan avenues drawn with a Renaissance fascination
for central perspectives. Repeatedly we see a richly adorned Renaissance
proscenium stage that can turn quickly into the silhouette of
Ulysses's boat in the style of a shadow theater.
One of the most compelling moments occurs
when the film animation creates a bare landscape before which
the puppets can walk and move. What is truly stunning about these
scenes and the company's work with puppets in general is that
the puppets really move and gesticulate like humans. This does
not mean that they seek to fool us into thinking that they are
real, as if hoping for a Don Quixote to mistake them for people.
But it does mean that they have shed all the clumsiness often
associated with more amateurish forms of puppet theater. Once
more, Kentridge succeeds where the Compania Tridente of Granada
had failed, namely in creating a multiplicity of transformations
in which different animated figures and forms interact and counteract
one another.
The opera opens with Ulysses sleeping on
a table half covered by a blanket, surrounded by gods. Ulysses
is a puppet---but a puppet that breaths. This is the mysterious
core of all serious puppet theater: the attempt to animate dead
matter. The sleeping Ulysses puppet remains the animating center
for the conceit on which the entire show is based. His return
is simply too good to be true; in fact, it can only be the product
of wishful thinking. All the events depicted in the opera--Ulysses's
return, his recognition by the swineherd, the alteration of his
appearance by Minerva, Penelope's fidelity and the final revenge
on the suitors--are the products of his dreaming as he lies on
some foreign shore, an old man who will never return home. The
dreaming--and breathing--Ulysses is the heart of the action that
takes place around him.
This breathing and dreaming Ulysses thus
animates the production, but is at the same time an animating
principle that is ruthlessly analyzed, tested, taken apart, and
destroyed. For Ulysses is lying on a kind of operating table and
the cruel gods that surround him, played by puppeteers and singers,
actually operate on him for their sport. This production is interested
in animation as a subject of anatomical analysis.
The desire for anatomical knowledge is
picked up in Kentridge's animated films, which frequently depict
anatomical drawings, even close-ups of surgical cuts and operations,
but also drawings of the pulsing heart. They are reminiscent of
the anatomical drawings that had become current in the decades
before Monteverdi's work, for example those of Leonardo da Vinci;
but their rough, charcoal quality also has something of Goya's
dark dismemberments. It is here that the production reveals the
violence that forms the undercurrent of animation. As much as
we want to bring puppets to life, we also want to destroy them,
cutting them up in order to see that the living body is nothing
more than a dead mechanism. Animation is but the counterpart of
destruction. This is, perhaps, why so much puppet theater is infused
with violence, especially in its lowest forms such as Punch and
Judy. Kentridge understands the fundamental relation between animation
and destruction, and his genius lies in the ability to find ever
new forms to illuminate it: live singers and dead puppets forming
single characters; breathing puppets; anatomical animation. All
this is part of the dream-life of puppets and also, perhaps, of
the human puppeteer.
The table on which Ulysses lies is an operating
theater, a theater in which each of his limbs and reactions is
exposed to the onlookers, who are anatomists and audience members
at the same time. The gods' analytical violence is ultimately
our own. We too watch Ulysses, we too are interested in his reaction
and his emotions, and we too are eager to see how fast his heart
beats when he sees the suitors or when Penelope finally recognizes
and acknowledges him. People in the theaters get angry when something
is obscured from their view. Here we are reminded that all theaters,
ultimately, are operating theaters where protagonists are taken
apart for our viewing pleasure. In this case, the anatomy lesson
we get is not so much a moralistic denunciation of voyeurism as
it is one more way of raising the question of life and death.
It is a tribute to how deeply this production understands the
magic and violence of puppet theater that we walk away realizing
that this magic and violence have been part of theater all along.
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