I have the sad duty of announcing the passing of a great British tradition - puppeteer, historian and author, George Speaight, at the age of ninety-one on 22 December. I had the pleasure of meeting George Speaight only one time in my life and I shall never forget it. It was in Covent Garden at the 325th anniversary celebrations of Punch and Judy in 1987. I was there performing my Puns en Doedie (Puppets Against Apartheid) along with more than 150 other Punch Professors in London and Speaight (dressed up as 17th century writer and historian, Samuel Pepys - see the front row in the above photograph). Speaight, who is best known for his master work, A History of the English Puppet Theatre, written in 1955, once described himself as a “frustrated actor”, but while he may never have enjoyed whatever glamour the large stage has to offer, he did enjoy the independence of the small one, where everything could be under his own control. His big, but adaptable, voice and his ebullient personality made him a master showman, and he was generous in his help to all who shared his affection for theatrical history. You can find the full Speaight story here! (My thanks to Ray De Silva, UK)
It's the silly season here in not-so-sunny Cape Town, but it's summer nethertheless, so they tell me. While back home in Sydney, it's a simmering 40 degrees C! It's the time when you can't get anything done, cause everything is closed and 'on holiday'! So I guess I'll have to wait till early next year before getting moving again with any of my plans here in South Africa. Have a wonderful holiday season and keep on reading!
The final leg of the tour has arrived and here I am in Cape Town, South Africa. This is the place of my birth and where I grew up and lived for many years of my life and this is the place I first got beaten up in the streets during the Apartheid era, when I launched my Puns en Doedie (Puppets Against Apartheid) in the early nineteen-eighties. But that was and this is now... Tomorrow I am visiting the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which forms the remnants of the Cape Coloured Community's destroyed housing estate during Apartheid days. In 1966, it was declared a white area and all its inhabitants were relocated to the Cape Flats, out in the distant townships surrounding Cape Town. I am planning to donate my old Puns en Doedie puppets, which are all still in Johannesburg, to the museum, together with a film of the performances in the eighties! So this is where I will be for the next few weeks, to enjoy summer and catch up with the theatre and television scene in this distant part of the galaxy. Will keep you updated!
It is already nearly a week ago that I met up with my friend, Austraian shadow-puppet master, Richard Bradshaw (see article from The Muppet Show) and his wife Margaret and together we got the train to St Celoni, a little town on the outskirts of Barcelona, up in the mountains, to visit our friend and teacher, Catalan artist and puppeteer, Joan Baixas.
I already mentioned Joan in the article I wrote before that historic meeting last week. We dinned in his home and after Richard and Margaret left back to Barcelona, together with my friend Tina from Berlin, Joan showed me some of the artwork and letters from his master, Joan Miro, in the early seventies, when they worked together on the conception of 'Mori el Merma'.
It was a special day for all of us and hopefully this meeting of the minds in Barcelona will lead to some future inspiration and work together!
Two unique opportunities for Australian puppeteers have just come up - the Award winning SOLO Puppet Company PUPPETEASE requires a solo performer (would also suit couple) for 3 month Australian Schools Tour in 2006 throughout WA, NT, & SA. They are looking for a experienced professional puppeteer with previous schools touring experience who would be interested in performing two shows Puppetease and Funky Fins. They should be available between April and August 2006. Interested applicants please email your CV to Ross Browning or call him: 0414-645 665The second is for puppeteers interested to work on a short film, to be shot in and around Sydney in January 2006. They are looking for two puppeteers with some experience or training in performing for camera. There will be no fee involved but it is a professional cast and crew and will be great experience for anyone interested in puppeteering in film and TV. More information, email Fiona Gentle or call her on: 0438-661 117 (photo: Terrapin)
My first meeting with Jan Dvorak was in 1981, when I was privileged enough to be one of twenty international students that participated in the very first puppetry workshop, dedicated to the “marionnette á fils”, at the Institute International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France. Dvorak at that time was the artistic director of the renowned Drak Theatre, based in Hradec-Králové in Czechoslovakia.
I was a South African puppeteer, who, until then had been quite isolated in a country cut off from the rest of the world by a right-wing Apartheid government. I had always been fascinated by the stories emanating from Europe about their creative and sophisticated puppet theatre, especially those in the eastern European countries. So of course, when I was informed that I was accepted for the course in France and that I would have three puppet masters from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Rumania, I was overwhelmed.
Dvorak or Honza, as he called himself was a large, smiling individual who immediately made a great impression upon me. I remember our first exercise of performing with old wine bottles attached with a single string. The life in animating just about anything soon woke me up to the endless possibilities of the puppet.
Soon we were building string puppets, out of a piece of foam and a rubber ball for the head. Using a traditional Czech marionette vertical control, gave us a great performance technique that was quite simple to use, even for puppeteers such as I, who had mostly never used marionettes before!
It wasn’t until 1999, that I decided, after almost twenty years since that first Charleville experience, to go back to the Czech Republic and visit my old puppet master, Honza Dvorak. From Poland, I caught the train to the Czech Republic to visit a friend in Hradec-Králové. From there we drove to Smidary, a tiny village in the country, in search for Honza. To my absolute delight, we found Honza and his wife Jana in their country cottage and were welcomed with home made cakes, coffee and then ‘piwo’ (Czech beer – a necessary part of Czech hospitality). We reminisced about the ‘old days’ played with the puppets and explored his huge garden with a river running through it. Honza told us we must visit the puppetry museum in Chudrim, although another few hours in the car, it was worth it. This old four-storey building in the tiny Czech town of Chudrim, houses one of the largest collection of antique puppets in the world.
I never realised the impact that visit would have upon my life that day. Before I left Honza, he presented me with a little gift. It was an old puppet head he said that came from Czechoslovakia during the war years. The head had a fascinating quality. It was papier-mache, covered with old leather and painted. But it wasn’t until a few months later that I became a little obsessed by it and the need to discover where it actually came from.
In Jerusalem, earlier that year, I accidentally found a puppet play, written by a thirteen-year old poet in 1943, while a prisoner in the Czech concentration camp of Terezin. The writer of the play, Hanus Hachenburg tragically perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, two days before his fifteenth birthday. I managed to get a copy of the boy’s play, translated into English and only a few months later did the possibility enter my mind that the old head that Honza had given me, might well have been the head of one of Hanus’ puppets!
This event started me on an almost six-year journey to re-trace the life of Hanus Hachenburg and his brilliant puppet play, written in Terezin in a great hurry before his eminent deportation to the East.
To summarise an immensely long journey into a few paragraphs, I actually got to perform Hanus’ play “We are looking for a monster” in Cape Town, South Africa in late 2001. This had been the first performance of the allegory, written by a young boy that saw right through the Nazi cover-up operation which fooled the whole world, including the International Red Cross. The world was lead to believe that Terezin was a Paradise Ghetto for the Jewish population that were imprisoned there. It wasn’t revealed until many years later, that this was in fact only a holding camp, before the prisoners were shipped to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau. And this is partly what Hanus alludes to in his play!
But back to Honsa, when I visited him again in Smidary, some two years later. I had recently performed the piece and even included Honza as one of its characters, who gives over the elixir or puppet head to the returning puppeteer. Honsa was delighted at hearing how the story unfolded and in seeing himself as a character on the stage handing over the head. But it wasn’t until another few years later, in 2004 that we actually returned to visit Honsa once again. We were filming the visit this time, for a television documentary on the life of Hanus, when many more pieces in this enormous jigsaw puzzle became clear. I finally managed to locate actual survivors in Prague, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, New Jersey, West Palm Beach Florida and Poland who knew young Hanus sixty-five years earlier and remembered his genius and incredible writing talent. Honza’s role in truly being my Jedi Master in many ways fell into place. It was largely through his generosity and encouragement, already back in 1981, to take the necessary risks in theatre to make the adventure happen, that it did! Honza celebrated his eightieth birthday this August 14th. On behalf of myself and my fellow puppeteers of the world, may I wish Honza only health and a good life for many years to come! (edited)
Yesterday I had the priviledge of visiting the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem and my old friend, Hadas Ophrat, founder and its first director(1986-1992) and co-founder of the Train Theatre in Jerusalem. The school is dedicated to developing the talent of young Israeli puppeteers and visual theatre practitioners. I witnessed them sculpting, creating stop-frame animation, puppet design and development and the like, which was a true inspiration!In the photo, I am with Dalia Yaffe-Maayan, manager of the Train Theatre, at the Holon lecture last week. There's a full report on my activities over the past two weeks in Israel, for those who can read the lingo.... Click here!
On Tuesday I am flying from Tel Aviv to Barcelona. I will visit my friend, great artist - Catalan puppet master and director, Joan Baixas. Baixas is one of the founders of the "Teatre de la Claca". He is considered one of the most important artists in visual theatre. For almost twenty years, from New York's Lincoln Center to the Sydney Opera House, Baixas toured the world with his ground-breaking mime and puppet ensemble, Theatre La Claca, for which he devised, directed and appeared in extraordinary performances produced in collaboration with acclaimed painters, most famously his friend, Joan Miro. In 1978 Joan Baixas (photo left) came together with the great surrealist painer, Joan Miro (photo right), and produced an production with giant puppets "Mori el Merma" (Death of a Tyrant). The puppets and the masks drawn by Miro for the Catalan company "Claca" have the inventive beauty of the sketches of teenagers rageurs. Ubu was not born differently, of some blows of pencil of a schoolkid, Jarry, carting a stupid and malicious pawn. One thinks indeed of Ubu, which Miro left, in front of these faces of nightmarish Lent, these tubers quivering like gelatine, these protuberances grotesque, these feet equipped with eyes exorbities and giant noses. These monsters represented the tyrannical Franco regime.Joan Baixas has directed and designed theatre projects with Els Comediants and Circus Oz, events for cinema, TV and the fashion world and was director of Barcelona's International Visual Theatre and Puppetry Festivals. In 1982, I was fortunate enough to be a part of Baixas' first workshop in Charleville. This was dedicated to creating theatre from junk materials. We swept the abandoned factories of Charleville for any interesting garbage to recycle into theatre of objects. In 1999, many years after the first, I attended another workshop with Baixas in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. This time we created great theatre pieces out of anything. It was wonderful! And now six years later, we will meet again...
I have always believed in using puppetry to change people, their environments and the world! From as far back as Puppets Against Apartheid in the early eighties in South Africa to Puppets Against Aids, the power of the puppet as a tool to communicate serious and important issues, yet keep the message light and humurous has always moved me and my audiences. So when I saw the email advertising a conference in 2007 for 'Puppetry for Social Change', I thought "Yes, that's the way to do it!" Puppet Power is advertised as a bi-annual conference in Calgary, Canada (why so far away?) by a group called WP Puppet Theatre.
They tell us: "The Puppet Power conference features keynote speakers and hands- on workshops lead by artists and professionals from across North America. Participants are also involved in panel and round table discussions and the weekend ends with a puppet performance. A master class puppetry intensive is sometimes available as well as puppet exhibits, silent auction and video screenings. The goal of the conference is to give participants greater knowledge and increased comfort to use the medium of puppetry more frequently in their various professional applications."I am awaiting more information from them, but they can be contacted by email!
The past week has been crazy for me here in Israel. As usual in such a fleeting visit, too much to do and too little time! Unfortunately I missed the Palestinian Puppetry Festival in East Jerusalem, having had the flu when I arrived, but a short report of that will be posted here soon! I have been lecturing at the University of Haifa in the north, filming interviews for 'Looking for a Monster' on Wednesday in Omer in the south and leading a wonderful workshop yesterday in Holon, near Tel Aviv, which began Thursday night with a lecture on Puppetry and Politics at the Steinberg Cultural and Arts Centre. This is the Israeli Puppet Centre and where I also conducted the workshop on Friday. We began with a Paper Meditation and exploring the theatrical possibilities of the paper in the dark. The discovery of the brown paper and its movement potential - Paper is a mystery – it’s a matter which we can shape freely, without restriction and can contain everything. The individual work in the darkness gives individual intimacy which later developes into group work to create short theatrical pieces animating the brown paper. In the Object Improvisation, we start with the sense of touch in feeling the object and the space surrounding it and we demonstrate the meaning of “thinking with hands”. The participants of the workshop learn to extract the rhythm, energy and breath from the object and explore its structure, sound and motion. The introduction into the theatre of paper and objects is addressed to everyone feeling that they have a great yet unrealized creative potential, but have a barrier to start on this creative journey and to those broaden their theatrical horizons. My thanks go to Ilan Savir, my Israeli tour organiser who planned this great exchange with Israeli puppeteers, teachers and therapists!
I have the sad duty of announcing the passing of a great British tradition - puppeteer, historian and author, George Speaight, at the age of ninety-one on 22 December. I had the pleasure of meeting George Speaight only one time in my life and I shall never forget it. It was in Covent Garden at the 325th anniversary celebrations of Punch and Judy in 1987. I was there performing my Puns en Doedie (Puppets Against Apartheid) along with more than 150 other Punch Professors in London and Speaight (dressed up as 17th century writer and historian, Samuel Pepys - see the front row in the above photograph). 
