"Ship of Fools" docks at HERE Arts Center

Scenes from Ship of Fools
at HERE Arts Center
(photos: Josiah Shelton)

Last evening, HERE launched its 2016-2017 season with Ship of Fools, a multidisciplinary production created by visual artist and puppeteer Jessica Scott with Anonymous Ensemble.  After some delay, we were waved into the tiny Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, filling seats atop what would prove to be our very own "ship of fools"--a platform slowly rotating us past various scenarios of puppetry, dance, music-making and video installation tucked along the perimeter of the space.

My first, innocent step onto this seating area made me fear I was having vertigo--or a heart attack! I stepped, immediately and inexplicably pitching sideways, somehow managing to keep my feet and reach an empty chair. Something probably jostled the platform--maybe even just my stepping onto it--but I didn't figure that out until, during the performance, the platform suddenly began to revolve. That realization would have been reassuring had this turning not felt unpleasant. So this is my trigger warning. But go. You'll eventually get used to the sensation and experience some striking artistry along the way.

Scott plunges us into a shifting terrain that evokes both mental instability and the irrational fear and exploitation of what she calls "women as a dark continent."

From France’s famous all-female asylum Saltpetriere, to the Mary Laundry’s of old England, the overwhelming incidence of modern female depression, to the recent attacks on women’s reproductive rights, diagnosing femininity has forged our modern psychology and politics sewing a seed of an insidious fear: a conviction that the fault line between woman and world lies not in the constructions of popular culture but instead somewhere rooted our inherent femaleness.

--from publicity for Ship of Fools 

Scott and her collaborators turn the theater into a combination wax museum, puppet theater, fun house and house of horrors brought to life by her performers--Kate Brehm, Liz Davito, Jacob Graham, Takemi Kitamura, Sarah Lafferty, Georgie Tisdale and Jessica Weinstein. We're trapped in a compelling nightmare--equal parts elusive imagery, numinous beauty, amusing absurdity, disorientation and looming terror. I must resist the temptation, here, to open this box of surprises, but I particularly enjoyed one famous, unmistakable article of clothing that undergoes a wardrobe malfunction of epic proportions. Its construction and puppet-like manipulation are just a taste of the wild imagination and detailed, painstaking craft on display in Ship of Fools.

The production does have some sluggish, awkward moments--including a few text passages spoken by the otherwise wonderful vocalist Liz Davito. But, no worries. This ship just keeps on turning, always delivering you to something new to discover.

Co-direction, puppetry, costume and set design: Jessica Scott
Co-direction, text and projection design: Eamonn Farrell
Original compositions: Alex Klimovitsky
Lighting design: Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
Sound design: Gavin Price
Live music and vocals: Liz Davito

Ship of Fools runs through October 22. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

HERE Arts Center

145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan

Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.

map/directions

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The political spectacle of Bread and Puppet Theater

Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater
returns to New York for a December season.
(photos courtesy of Bread and Puppet Theater)

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger.

During the Vietnam War, Bread and puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people. In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Read more and connect with Bread and Puppet Theater here. Volunteers are welcome for the theater's upcoming events in New York:

Upcoming shows and art auction 

at Theater for the New City

The Overtakelessness Circus
Saturdays-Sundays
December 12-13, 19-20 at 3pm

The Seditious Conspiracy Theater Presents: A monument to the Puerto Rican Political Prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera
Wednesday-Sunday
December 16-20 at 8pm

Bread and Puppet Theater Art Auction (live auctioneer and band)
Friday, December 18at 9:30pm

Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

I'm your puppet: Ronnie Burkett's marionettes at BAC

The actor Lovey Lunkhead (above)
and his creator, Ronnie Burkett (below)
in The Daisy Theatre
(photos: Hiroyuki Ito)

From the look and, especially, the sound of things at Baryshnikov Arts Center last evening, Canadian puppeteer extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett has a legion of south-of-the-border fans. And now he has one more, because I love him.

That's not too extreme a position to take, given how Burkett seeks to wring every bit of love and laughter out of audiences for his Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, putting a positive spin on the word manipulation.

The New York premiere of The Daisy Theatre stars a handful of Burkett's forty finely-designed creations--a motley crew who are impossible to resist--in acts ranging from burlesque to opera. Improvised around each marionette's personality and John Alcorn's loopy songs, the show has elastic tendencies. Performed without intermission, it can stretch from ninety minutes to two hours, depending upon how much fun Burkett is having with his marionettes, with volunteers from his audience and with the serendipity of any given moment.

Burkett indulges himself, and us, because he is a child. He is a happy child, standing up there on the bridge, deftly working the control bars and wires that give his marionettes uncanny, supple life. With his own marionette-like jaw, resplendent smile and maniacal, motormouth voice, he resembles someone from his nomadic tribe of performers. Or the Second Coming of Robin Williams. In fact, if you find yourself gazing up at Burkett about as much as you watch the marionettes acting out below, you would not be wrong--or alone. He's a huge, huge part of the show.

Burkett and his rotating cast of characters
(photo: Hiroyuki Ito)

Steeped in fearless queer attitude, profane language and racy innuendo, The Daisy Theatre ain't puppetry for tots, and anyone under 16 will not be admitted. But anyone over 16 will enjoy the likes of sweet, yearning "fairy child" Schnitzel (a stand-in for Burkett's inner child, I suspect) and Las Vegas belter Rosemary Focaccia, a-shimmy in fringe dress and knee-high boots, hair-trigger rage and foul mouth out of all proportion ("I know people, Baryshnikov! Don't cross me!!"). An eerie segment featuring marionette Meyer Lemon--an ancient master ventriloquist--and his dummy stood out for near-literary, surreal quality and Burkett's exacting skill.

Acclaimed ventriloquist Meyer Lemon takes the spotlight.
(photo: Hiroyuki Ito)

I have no idea who--among all forty of the possible players--will perform when you see The Daisy Theatre and what they'll be up to. You'll be, in Burkett's words, one of the "poor bastards sitting in the dark not knowing what happens next."

How exhilarating!

Remaining performances:

Tonight, October 1, 7:30pm
Friday-Saturday, October 2-3, 8pm
Wednesday-Saturday, October 7-10, 8pm

Ronnie Burkett in Conversation:

A conversation with Ronnie Burkett and Kristy Edmunds of Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA will be held in BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater on Monday, October 5 at 6:30pm. Reservations are not required.

Jerome Robbins Theater
Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

After the fire: Puppet artist displaced by East Village explosion

A Puppet Master Loses Life's Work in East Village Fire
by Stephen Nessen, WNYC News, May 19, 2015

La MaMa's Puppet Series opens with "The Orphan Circus"

Quebec's Les Sage Fous troupe opened La MaMa's latest Puppet Series with a curious number called The Orphan Circus, directed by South Miller.

Monsieur P. T. Issimo, mysterious circus impresario
(photo by Cinthia Chouinard)

We begin this hour in the company of two rough-looking customers--actor/puppeteers Jacob Brindamour and Olivia Faye Lathuillière--who creep around a dark alley filled with corrugated gates, trash barrels, old oil cans and other debris. After our initial impulse to hug our belongings closer, we watch the pair go about recycling trash--"orphaned objects"--into treasure, asserting the siren-like beauty in a discarded, ratty-looking doll, training a fish skeleton to be a champion acrobat, and more.

Brindamour (l) and Lathuillière with friend(photo by Theo Cote)

Christian Laflamme's score, in its pleasantly jazzy way, belies the grim surroundings and the grotesque appearance of the puppets and says "New Age Magic Act." I got the point--see loveliness and wonder everywhere and anything is possible!--but never warmed up to these puppet characters or to the slight work itself. Perhaps something more meaningful and effective could have been done with the perfunctory contact between puppets and audience (first row only).

Brindamour and Lathuillière very skillfully control their puppets via little black sticks and strings, the dim lighting and our cooperative minds rendering those maneuvers nearly invisible. Yet the grand transformation these puppeteers seek to achieve is more announced than convincingly displayed.

The Orphan Circus repeats tonight and Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30pm. The La MaMa Puppet Series runs through November 24, including a curated "puppet slam" on Friday, November 15 at 7pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

La MaMa (First Floor Theatre)
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Basil Twist's "Dogugaeshi" puppet theater returns to Japan Society

In Basil Twist's ingenious Dogugaeshi--now sold out in its new run at Japan Society through Sunday--painted images recede and shrink, or steadily press forward, growing in intensity, or playfully pop up from out of nowhere. This kaleidoscope of sliding doors, dancing panels, Shinto gateways, silhouettes of people and objects, and glowing candlelight creates a continuously altered environment, a theatrical experience that disorients and enchants.

Dogugaeshi's white fox

It's sort of a shaggy fox story--featuring, at times, a shaggy white fox puppet--with no recognizable narrative and little conventional action, just the almost neverending opening of painted portal after painted portal onto more portals, each awaiting its turn to be pulled aside. This series of revelations, this simple dance of decor--dogugaeshi means "set change"--leads you, step by step, to a final, quiet awareness of the mysterious, archetypal essence of theater.

Sliding panels and some elusive fox puppets from Dogugaeshi

Presented in a deliberately constrained space--hence the quick dispersal of tickets--Dogugaeshi flows like dream inside your head. It can be a sweet dream. (Have you met that loping, Trickster fox--familiar of the god Inari--with his gorgeous eyes?) Or, like very different types of dreams, it can be frustrating or even anxiety-provoking. My general memories suggest that, for the current production, Twist has made changes from 2007 version of Dogugaeshi, seen here at Japan Society.

Shamisen musician and singer Yumiko Tanaka in Dogugaeshi

For one thing, this new edition acknowledges and evokes northeastern Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In one section, the delicate decor's walls and panels flap and tremble; tattered panels fall from the little ceiling as Yumiko Tanaka's shamisen emits shrieks and grinding sounds. Our thoughts surely go to Japan's historic trauma, but like everything else in Dogugaeshi, what we see before us and hear from Tanaka's masterful singing and playing seem like externalizations of our own sensations and feelings, all of this experience and information looping forward and back between us and the little puppet stage.

Although you probably do not have a ticket for Dogugaeshi, you can catch up on the many other events planned for Japan Society's 2013-14 season--including a shamisen workshop with Yumiko Tanaka on Saturday, November 2 (1pm). Click here for Japan Society's general information and schedule.

For more information on Basil Twist's extraordinary work, click here.

Asia Society to host Indonesian performance troupes

Nan Jombang Dance Company

As part of its Creative Voices of Muslim Asia initiative, Asia Society will present two innovative performance companies from Indonesia:

Nan Jombang Dance Company (Saturday, October 6, 8pm) will show work that combines the Minangkabau (West Sumatra) traditions of martial arts, dance, folk theater and body percussion. (video clip and tickets)

Papermoon Puppet Theatre's Mwathirika (photo by Indra Wicaksono)

Papermoon Puppet Theatre (Monday, October 1, 8pm) presents Mwathirika--a non-verbal, puppet-theater experience set in 1965, when thousands of Indonesians were jailed and murdered. (video clip and tickets)

Asia Society
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), Manhattan
(directions)