Animating Animals
By Martin Puchner
Tall Horse
By Khephra Burns
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater
(closed)
Tall Horse, which recently played at
the BAM Next Wave Festival, opens with a view of the storage space of
the Musée National in Egypt. On a set of tall shelves, we find boxes,
tools, and sundry objects and fragments. The show is framed as a history
lesson: a Parisian of African descent arrives at the museum to find
the roots of his ancestors' migration to France in the early 19th century.
Part of this lesson is a preachy lecture on the
French Enlightenment and its search for exotic cultures, a somewhat
diligent combination of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. But this critique
of orientalism does not run very deep, for the show itself celebrates
cultural exchange on every possible level. It tells the story of a giraffe
which is transported 7,000 miles from Alexandria to Paris, a gift from
the Pasha of Egypt to Charles X, King of France. This gift is not a
pure act of friendship, but a ploy in a high-stakes diplomatic game
through which the Pasha wants to turn the King against the Greeks. The
cultural exchange is anything but benign. The makers of Tall Horse,
however, are rather undisturbed by power politics in part because their
production is premised on exchange as well: it is a unique collaboration
between the renowned South African Handspring Puppet Company and the
Sogolon Puppet Troupe from Mali in northern Africa. Indeed, these two
African companies take their artificial gigantic giraffe on a tour of
their own, exhibiting it to gaping audiences around the world. They,
too, are trading in curiosities, and they seem to enjoy themselves in
the process.
The centerpiece of the opening scene is a mummy,
a piece of dead matter. Animating dead matter is the true purpose of
this show--an animation fueled by an exchange in puppetry. Tall
Horse is a play with puppets but also a play about puppets, an
experiment in cross-cultural puppetry. The Handspring Puppet Company
has a long history in innovative puppetry, including Ubu and the
Truth Commission (1998), an adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu
Roi, as well as Claudio Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses
(reviewed in Hotreview.org in 2004). The Sogolon Puppet Troupe
works with more traditional puppets, in particular simple but compelling
rod puppets as well as antelope puppets with fringed skirts. The result
of this collaboration is a marvelous panoply: huge puppets such as the
Pasha of Egypt or the King's wife; small puppets representing children;
rod puppets creating the impression of crowds; a diplomat whose long
thin legs develop a life of their own; and a whole zoo of animals, including
antelopes, a ferret, and, of course, the giraffe. The theme of the show,
cultural exchange, is thus translated into a breathtakingly varied inventory
of puppets.
The two companies practice their puppet trade
almost to a fault; there are perhaps too many different types of puppets
populating the stage. It is almost impossible to make sense of the multiplicity
of styles and modes, colors and shapes. In particular the Malian antelope
puppets seem to pop up at odd moments, including at the court in Paris,
without preparation or explanation. It's almost as if the performers
and puppeteers had too much fun exchanging styles and techniques.
In the end, however, Marthinus Basson, the show's
director, Adrian Kohler, the main puppet maker of Handspring, and Yaya
Coulibaly, the main puppet maker of Sogolon, manage to turn their rich
cultural resources into a compelling meditation on puppets. There are
three species to be found in Tall Horse: human actors, human
puppets, and animal puppets. The dynamic interrelations among these
are the true drama of this show. Handspring and Sogolon are masters
of animation, but what makes Tall Horse special is that the
animation works both ways: puppets often animate human actors. One such
scene occurs when the French wife of a Marseilles notable, a puppet
who has taken a liking to the human giraffe caretaker, teaches him how
to waltz. Another example is the way the giraffe leads fashionable Parisian
society to imitate it, an effect beautifully achieved through the long-necked
Malian rod puppets.
The animation of puppets (and of humans) is a
matter of grace, but also of power. The huge puppet of the Pasha of
Egypt, for example, is animated by a whole host of puppeteers. The King
of France, though much smaller in size, is surrounded by a number of
attendants, only some of which are puppeteers. These two royal puppets
command these puppeteers, who double as their underlings. The connection
between animation and power is made clear at the climax of the play,
when the giraffe is finally brought before the King. Even though the
King is small (much smaller, for example, than his wife, who is jealous
of the giraffe and wants to turn it into food) and truly in awe of the
animal, he becomes a sovereign animal trainer, commanding the giraffe
and three antelopes in a final dance. For all its parody of French society,
including its monarch, Tall Horse thus leaves the power of
the King untouched. This monarchist streak is suggested early on when
the giraffe and its entourage encounter revolutionaries in Lyons. The
revolution's main purpose, it seems, is to guillotine the poor giraffe,
and the animal barely escapes. Only after such hazards have been overcome
can the giraffe, which is repeatedly called a "regal" animal, reach
its true destiny and become directly subservient to the king.
Even though pretty much everyone, except for
the bad revolutionaries, is busy protecting the giraffe, the show is
not overly concerned about the animal's welfare. The giraffe is treated
as important only insofar as it is a gift in a political gambit. Early
on we see the mother of the giraffe get hunted, wounded, and killed.
The young giraffe grows up in captivity. The difference between the
wild giraffes and the captured one is expressed in different styles
of puppetry. The parent giraffes are represented by single performers
on stilts, two-legged creatures that move swiftly and gracefully across
the stage. The captured giraffe, whose main feature is its sheer size,
has a huge frame that barely fits the large stage of the Harvey Theater.
Indeed, the performance briefly relapses into a Foucauldian mode when
the French professor goes about measuring every extremity of the enormous
creature. The giraffe is not only large, but also clunky, something
of a machine that creaks with each awkward step. The only part of this
puppet that can move with some elegance is its long neck, a movement
performed to excess at various moments in the show. At the very end,
after learning that all of Paris is imitating the giraffe, we are left
with an image of the Eiffel Tower, an apt comparison as the giraffe
is indeed a kind of animated architecture. If the main point of the
show is to endow this construction with a soul, an anima, I am not sure
it succeeds. If the point is to stress compulsion through size and engineering
prowess, however, that works, as we gaze incredulously at this Trojan
horse of sorts, which may harbor one or several humans inside its large
belly.
There is one relation that functions seemingly
outside the question of politics and diplomacy, namely that between
the giraffe and its caretaker, Atir. They alone truly understand one
another, and in the end Atir chooses to remain with the animal in Paris
rather than return to his village. The show ends with the giraffe gently
kicking the sleeping Atir, as if attempting a final act of animal-human
animation. Atir moves a little, but falls back asleep, leaving us to
ponder that huge mechanical creature, brought all the way from Africa
not only to Paris but to New York. Who could fail to be impressed by
the accomplished puppetry, the fertile exchange of cultures, and the
power of animation. But we are also left to wonder what kind of lesson
we can take away, a lesson not so much about the French Enlightenment,
curiosities and diplomacy, but about the act of animation itself, from
which this show derives its pulse. This animation has a limited understanding
of animals. Its plot is too confined by a conception of animals as something
to marvel at, trade, give as gifts, transport over large distances,
and put into the royal menagerie. Of the three species--humans, human
puppets, and animal puppets--the latter occupy the center of attention,
but not the center of animation. One is left wondering what it would
look like if the regal animal took over and in turn animated human puppets
and human actors.