Subject: RE: PUPT: Theodora Skipitares new show - NYT review
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 22:57:15 -0500
From: "John Bell" <John_Bell-AT-emerson.edu>


We just saw Theodora Skipitares's new show tonight, and it's really interesting in terms of puppet techniques.  I find the Times review to be off the mark in several respects.  First of all, the show is not "slow" at all: it's very lively and switches radically from scene to scene.  There are all sorts of interesting puppet and object forms used, from Chinese-influenced shadow figures to "par vacano" style Indian picture performance, and karuma ningyo-influenced puppetry with operators seated on little wheeled stools.  It's a relatively short show (not much more than an hour).  The net effect is somewhat subdued; the performance of Susan Vitucci's "Love's Fowl" which we saw few nights ago was much more dynamically dramatic in comparison.
 
john bell
great small works

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	Subject: PUPT: Theadora Skipitares new show - NYT review
	
	


	Link below - also cut and paste the document below for those who cannot
	access NYT site (you have to sign in and get the cookies, though it's free). 
	Anyone who has seen the show care to comment?
	-Serra
	http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/theater/21ODYS.html
	
	Odysseus Goes Home. Slowly.
	By NEIL GENZLINGER
	
	Published: February 21, 2004
	
	
	f nothing else, Theodora Skipitares's "Odyssey: The Homecoming" explains why
	it took poor Odysseus so darned long to get home from the Trojan War. He and
	everyone else in ancient Greece apparently moved in ultraslow motion. Snails
	and turtles would have had to stop and wait for these guys to catch up.
	Advertisement
	
	
	Not that Ms. Skipitares's show, the second of a trilogy, is overly long; the
	tale is done in less than 90 minutes. It's just that when a story is told with
	puppets and largely without words, speed takes a back seat. This "Odyssey"
	unfolds at roughly the pace of a "Mark Trail" comic strip.
	But the story is secondary. Ms. Skipitares's show, at La MaMa E.T.C., 74A
	East Fourth Street in the East Village, through Feb. 29, is primarily a visual
	experience. A colorful collection of shadow and other types of puppets are used
	to tell about some of Odysseus' adventures on the way home, with video
	projections and elaborate music by Arnold Dreyblatt and Tim Schellenbaum adding to
	the mix.
	Among the most memorable elements are some strange creatures with video
	screens for heads. A segment early in the piece that bluntly links the classic tale
	to modern war, presumably the current one in Iraq, seems didactic,
	cliché-ridden and at odds with the elegance of the rest of the show. But elsewhere the
	merging of the ancient and the modern works just fine. A fight scene in which
	Ms. Skipitares's puppets are superimposed onto clips from old films is very
	clever.
	Last year Ms. Skipitares tackled the war itself in "Helen, Queen of Sparta,"
	and the third piece of the trilogy, about the prelude to the war, is scheduled
	for next year.
	
	
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