Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 01:22:34 +0100
From: Stephen Kaplin <skactw-AT-pop.tiac.net>
Subject: PUPT: Puppet Text


	A very interesting thread.
	How does puppet drama contrast to live actor plays? My feelings
match Alice and others who say that puppets should use words sparingly.
Concentrated forms of language work best, because is at its core, puppetry
is a movement and visual based dramatic form, closer to music than to
literature.
	I find it extremely annoying to sit through a puppet play that
delivers torrents of naturalistic dialogue (especially if accompanied by
lots of lip-syncing.) It's like watching a great dancer who won't just shut
up and dance. In fact, spoken language is often totally superfluous in
great puppetry. Think of Burr Tilstrom's hand-mimes, or one of Albrecht
Roser's solo marionette turns. But then on the other hand, Tillstrom made
his big bucks off those two yackety hand puppets, Kukla and Ollie; and
nobody ever gets up to leave when Roser's Grandma, sitting there knitting
in her rocking chair, spins out a half-hour long, folksy monologue. Well,
that just goes to show that there is no black and white answer to this
question.
	Still, I truly believe that brevity is the soul of puppetry. I
think in particular of Bread and Puppet plays, in which the puppets seldom
if ever speak.  Because he honed his puppetry style on the street (and also
because he grew up in Nazi Germany, and consequently developed an inherent
distrust of spoken language which so can easily be made into a weapon of
mass destruction) Peter Schumann has pared the language in B&P plays down
to its absolute minimum. Whatever blocks of text are necessary for emphasis
or edification are usually delivered by an outside character, an
"interlocuter," similar to those who were first employed interpretting Mr.
Punch's squeaks and squawks for the audience. These intermediaries can
address the audience directly, without the pretense of speaking as the
puppet character.
	My own experience with Great Small Works follows closely to the B&P
model. Even though we use lots of text in our productions of "Toy Theatre
of Terror As Usual," (much of it lifted verbatim from mass media sources,)
it seldom comes from the mouths of the puppets themselves, but rather from
the authorative narrator/interlocuters who stand outside and frame the
puppet stage action. The text itself becomes one more element in the
montage. Only for moments of great dramatic intensity, or for comic effect,
do we let the puppets "speak" for themselves.
	When I work with my wife in Chinese Theatre Workshop, we create
more conventional playscripts. We have translated and redacted puppet
versions of dramas based on classical Chinese Opera sources. On the opera
stage the actors use an extremely stylized and musical delivery that is
very difficult to translate (Mandarin is a tonal language, English is not.)
And the florid poetic imagery sounds can sound extremely stilted if not
very carefully pruned back. So here too, the blocks of language or dialogue
have to be as spare as possible, and melded to the flow of music and
movement in order to be effective.
	Puppetry transcends spoken language, like music. That may be one of
the reasons why historically, puppet theater flourished in parts of the
world (such as the Indian sub-continent and Central Europe) where many
different languages exist side by side in close proximity; and conversely,
why it languished in places (like England) where a single tongue came to
dominate the dramatic arts.
	Okay, enough of this rambling,lecture on puppet brevity. Shall we
get back to musical saws?
	Stephen




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