Taco Tuesday at a tiny pub on Front Street, 2019. I’m sitting with three beautiful strangers who are also participating in the Director’s Lab in Toronto. The show starts in 25 minutes and our pints are still half-full. We shave off hot-button topics between mouthfuls of the cheapest things on menu. Indulging in the fear and tension of testing each other, we’re excited for the company. The clock is ticking and we’re ravenous in the dance of getting-to-know. We tip the waitress as much as we can—not nearly enough—and tumble into the street, a light and raucous chorus with the city spinning its approval around. Our bags rattle as we run into the theatre lobby at the exquisitely last second.
The usher asks us to remove our backpacks and we suddenly notice thin beads of taco-fueled joy dampening our skin. We’re sent down a short bending hallway, unceremoniously vast and industrial, leading to a heavy door that matches. On the other side is one of the biggest rooms I have walked into in a long time. There is a romantic pathway of candles that hug the wall from the door and lead through the darkness to a miss-matched array of furniture under a high tent of fairy lights. We’re suddenly moving slow and can hear our own hearts. The silent crowd picks a place to sit, a stool or ottoman, a park bench or pouffe, and faces each other in a grand staggered circle. About a month from this moment Ronnie Burkett will be inducted into the Order of Canada for his work in puppetry. I’d never heard of him. He arrives formidably dressed in a great hooded habit, facelessly reciting something about love, elevated and melancholic. It feels like it could be from Milton or the Torah. But, admittedly, I’m still tasting my taco from the moment earlier and feel a bit too dazed to catch up. Once the thickness settles—of my belly and the performance, quickly, simultaneously—we’re allowed into Ronnie’s eyes and the intimacy of his more living-room voice. He invites us to form a line across the performance space. “This is the most important walk you will go on today,” he says, “and the most important walk of my life.” The procession is suddenly scary-exciting. At the end of our short procession is a great open chest: one handmade puppet each. He has instructed us how to animate these particular hand puppets. There are different ways of doing it but, with your index finger in the head and your thumb and pinky extended into the hands, when you hold your puppet up its very bones sign to the world, “I love you.” Each with their own unique head, face, and personality, our puppets can nod and bow, they can dance, they can shake hands with other puppets, and they can hug. We’re invited to indulge in their dexterities. My puppet hugs another and I feel the bones of my I-love-you hand wrap around a stranger’s. It is more intimate than I had felt in a long time. My puppet is old and sad. His thin jaw gently slacked and his eyebrows droop down at either side. Others’ are older and younger; the room fills with twice as many genders and identities as it had when we first sat down. A sea of their pale clothes and little heads fill my eye-line across the space like hundreds of eager sentinels fixated on Ronnie and his puppets, performing the story. As the show goes on I realize I’m not watching it at all, my puppet is. What’s more, that by engaging in the show through the eyes and ears of my ever-attentive puppet, I’m able to enjoy it more ruthlessly, less judgmentally, with a sudden and strange kinship to the puppets that are performing and to all the tiny spectators around. Am I performing—in this moment—is my puppet performing? It begins as a ridiculous and nearly gross show. Cartoonish carnies selfishly manipulating for their own jollies. I look at my puppet and his slack-jaw that was so endearing a moment ago signifies the willing soma of a selfish sexual indulgence. This sudden grossness is made all the more meaningful by having unified myself with the puppet so thoroughly the moment before. Or is this closer to the truth: am I looking into a mirror of sorts and it’s me who loves the lewdness of these crude characters? Between the puppet and I, who is a projection onto whom? And, through this performance, what am I discovering about myself? The show won’t allow me to indulge in these thoughts for long. New characters are introduced, held up by strings that are delicate and beautiful. Their smallness creates intimacy. Their faces and postures communicate decades. The poetry of their dialogue makes me feel precious again. This whiplashing rollercoaster of a play fictionally portrays the danger of a world where reading and writing are illegal. In order to love each other across great distances the illiterate create and send forbidden messages through a gentle gatekeeper, made mystic by her inaccessibility, elevated alone on a cake-like throne. The storytelling is messy and vast, precious and unpretentious. And we, the audience, are constantly asked to take part. We are invited to control the performance’s soundtrack, taking turns to haphazardly place vinyl on an amplified turntable (keeping us down-to-earth with its pops and cracks). We carry our puppets across the room to surround the sensitive tenderness of one tiny scene only to find that our chairs are taken by other members of the audience. We circle the story, as it progresses, in a quiet game of musical chairs. We are touched, willingly and kindly, in a perfect respite far away from earlier scenes’ vulgarity. We are challenged to speak out and interrupt a climactic injustice near the end of the play. And then we feel complicit when we do not. We are invited to speak and we are indulgent in silences. I am my puppet. Absolutely. And I imagine Ronnie would agree, he is his. Through the story’s range out of bawdy clownishness, to poetic elevation, and slow startling intimacy, to a punctuation of guilt and violence, we hold ourselves up to each other, constantly: I love you. And, through the story, containing all the glorious mess that love entails. 10am the next day, the thirty-or-so artists participating in this year’s Director’s Lab circle our chairs in a rehearsal studio at the Tarragon Theatre. We start our day with a broader continuation of the previous night’s dinnertime chats. Already exhausted by the burning questions brought to each other but thrilled to keep soldiering them through. How do we build accountability into our rehearsals? How integral is immersion to an audience’s experience and what counts as immersive? Holy shit, you mounted that spectacle with only one week of rehearsal? Well done! Then Ronnie Burkett arrives for his Q & A and we applaud the perfectly sleepless aging gay as he crosses to his chair. His simple human charm is a big part of the success of his performance. And he brings it with him, sans-puppets, today. We learn how he works: monk-like, waking up in the wee hours for years at a time to build his puppets by hand. While building, he develops a sense of the performances they’ll inhabit—the feel, the topics, who the puppets may be, how they’ll weave together—long before anything is rehearsed or written. Then, once the characters are built he’ll rehearse the new production in, what seems to me, a frightfully short period. True to many world traditions of puppetry, he is generous with information. It is custom to pass it down through practitioners and maintain a philosophy of openness. He keeps a library of literally thousands of books on the subject, lending freely to younger artists. While tools are tools and materials mere materials, the incredible preciousness of his process is clear by the alighting youthfulness that animates him. Free from the bustle of Toronto sunshine, the early hours provide a sense of unification with the traditions he invokes. His deceased mentors have the silence and the darkness to be welcomed there … there is room for these ghosts to appeal to the larger history: the millions who have traded poverty for their vocation; noble histories of past performers risking death to secretly entertain under Nazi occupation; the accessibility of object-driven and mask-theatre holding the mantle of performance art during historic austerities; the universality of puppetry in nurseries and classrooms across the world; the younger artists Ronnie supports and inspires right now … can all gently wash around a room when it is four o’clock in the morning. This is where the work begins in puppet-building. To him, a puppet is a shape of an idea in motion, witnessed. Like any wonderful idea, a puppet is both complex and simple. A puppet takes time. I find myself entertaining the morbid thought of who will inherit this sacred studio when he dies. He talks about audience integration. There is elbowroom within his performances for the needs of the moment. He aims to meet the audience where they are at. “In jazz, a musician must honour the text but play wildly with the melody.” One of his pre-show rituals is to spy on us. This gives him a sense of where he can go with the evening’s performance. Who he can rely on to help take the night where it needs to go and who might need help along the way. He has the quietly charismatic trappings and sensitivities to ask the audience to only do authentic things. Authentic—but highly specific. And they always do. “There are plays,” he gripes conspiratorially, “called immersive but what really happens is the action gets interrupted so you can follow a young actor somewhere and then you have to watch the play while sitting on the floor of a barber shop or something. That’s not immersive. That’s just watching actors from a dusty floor.” In his show, we aren’t immersed by the space so much as we are by the shape of the storytelling itself. Ronnie is only sixty-two years young but fifty years into his vocation. At this stage, he tells us, he is only now achieving the things he is searching for in an audience-performer relationship. He insists that puppetry is high art that works best when it is low art. But still kisses the floor before working in a new venue. This is impossibly communicated in his performance. That skill to unlock a certain connection with the audience, truly integrating them with a high-level of hidden and nuanced subtlety, he says, is only sincerely arriving, fifty years in to the job. In the next breath, “I’m going to have surgery on my hand.” Years of this work have taken their toll on his body. The moment of achieving these quieter successes takes it away. “I maybe have 22 more good years if I take care. I’ll keep working until the last second. It’s going to hurt.” Then, as if we all agree, he says “it should hurt.”
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6/4/2023 10:19:35 pm
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