To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:46:43 GMT
Subject: [Puptcrit] Dancers & Actors vs Puppeteers


Sid Krofft often said that it was easier to train dancers than puppeteers for his various puppet shows. It seems there is a glitch in his reasoning since Sid himself started as a puppeteer and had no fame as a dancer.

One elucidation theory:
each puppeteer may have a specific way of working, and may not be flexible in working in another puppeteer's technique.

OK, so wouldn't that be the case with a dancer working in a different dance style? They may not be flexible to work in "different moves".  What about different styles of actng (Commedia, The Method)?

Bottom Line: 
Where is that box of salt grains? We need to take these silly theories with the biggest grain of salt we can find.

Perhaps the REAL reason is there are a lot of not fully employed dancers. Sid was always able to find a lot of them. And they had bills to pay. They could be eager to work, but so are puppeteers.

Bottom Line #2---I saw a lot of Sid & Marty Krofft shows, and frankly, the best puppeteers WERE the REAL puppeteers: King Hall & Pady Blackwood, or Stan Kramer were just 3 examples.

Among puppeteers there are some who only work with hand puppets or only with shadows, or only with another type. That is where they are most "at home" but other puppeteers like it all. For example, Hobey Ford loves seeing multiple puppet construction techniques for different kinds of puppets, and that goes for many on puptcrit too.

Puppetry is about movement and it is about acting of course, but it is also about puppetry (Gertrude Stein influence).

Puppetry is about bringing an object (the puppet) to life through animation.

Many times I have seen egotist actors unable to transfer the animation of themselves to animation of the puppet because they want to be the center of attention (that old "Star Complex") and the puppet was competition for attention.

Some puppeteers, like some actors, like to be the center of attention. Daniel Llords found a way to do it. He was seen above his marionette stage with a spotlight on him and another one on the puppets. For the first 50 years, the light on him seemed to be brighter than the one on the string puppets. More often, the puppeteer stays in the background, emphasizing the puppet.

Non-puppeteer Bob Smith (Buffalo Bob on the Howdy Doody TV Show) had a big Ego, and even though he was Howdy's puppet voice, he envied or resented when the puppets got more fan mail than he did. PUPPETEER Rufus Rose who worked the Howdy show took note of that, and so did Bill LeCornec who was a live performer on the Howdy Show as Chief Thunderthud but also had a puppetry background. 

Some actors can act THROUGH the puppet---and are known as PUPPETEERS. Many puppets have danced on puppet stages.

What it comes down to is do you believe the puppet is "alive" or not. It takes a puppeteer to be sensitive to that. Some dancers & some actors can be trained to be puppeteers, but not all are trainable because their EGOS get in the way.

Years ago, my mother dabbled in hand writing analysis, and occasionally would do analyses for private parties. At one event, the same personality traits were found in all the writing samples. Well, the room as full of ACTORS. So sometimes generalities are true, but not always.

I think puppeteers can benefit from classes in sculpting, acting, voice, dance, etc. It seems that a lot of puppeteers HAVE had diverse experience in various arts in school, community theatre or whatever.
And movie animators (CGI, hand-drawn cartooning, stop motion puppetry) can benefit from working live, manually operated marionettes or shadow puppets or hand or rod puppets. Movie cartoon genius Chuck Jones felt that working with the Yale Puppeteers' marionettes in the 1930s helped greatly in bringing a sense of spontenaity to hand-drawn Warner Brothers movie cartoons.

Phillip Huber has given talks about puppet movement to Disney artists and with Marvin Rae, I lent puppets for an exhibit seen by Disney Artists (in-house, not for the public). Bob Jones, Wah Chang & Charles Cristodoro, all with puppet backgrounds, contributed greatly to Disney's PINOCCHIO production.

Cross-fertilization is what's important, along with greater respect for puppetry, which like opera, can combine it all in the end result.

So in the long run, what is to be done? Puppeteers have to toot our own horns a lot louder---something actors and dancers have been doing loudly for a long time.


_______________________________________________
List address: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Admin interface: http://lists.puptcrit.org/mailman/listinfo/puptcrit
Archives: http://www.driftline.org