A small wooden string puppet named "Stickman" delicately danced and flew through the air Monday night in McCormack Family Theater, carefully controlled by the hands of renowned puppet master Basil Twist. The Literary Arts Program hosted Twist and theater producer Barbara Busackino of Tandem Otter Productions earlier this week, holding a talk and demonstration Monday evening and a workshop Tuesday afternoon.
At the Monday talk, Professor of English Paula Vogel introduced Twist and Busackino to the crowd in McCormack. Twist created puppets for Vogel's play, "The Long Christmas Ride Home," which premiered at Trinity Repertory Company in 2003. Busackino is "the person who makes magic happen," Vogel told the audience, calling her "the patron saint of off-off-Broadway."
Twist answered questions posed by Vogel as well as by audience members and demonstrated his skill with the agile "Stickman," using the puppet to perform a winsome dance routine. During the informal question-and-answer session, Twist and Busackino discussed their work and collaboration and showed video footage from past productions.
These included "Symphonie Fantastique," an elaborate abstract puppet show set to classical music that takes place in a large water tank. Puppeteers stationed around and suspended over the tank used a multitude of materials in the show, including cloth, feathers and dye, to create a unique performance. There is a "random chaos factor to what the water will do that you could never replicate as a puppeteer," Twist said.
Twist's show "Dogugaeshi" utilized a Japanese technique involving the shifting of sliding screens to indicate scene changes. The show featured hundreds of moving screens, augmented by video projection, a musician playing a shamisen - a Japanese string instrument - and a nine-tailed fox puppet.
For a production of "Hansel and Gretel," Twist created a 12-foot witch, embodied by a male opera singer inside an elaborate mechanical puppet operated by multiple puppeteers.
Twist also adapted the Russian ballet "Petrushka," which usually features dancers playing puppets. Twist's production used Bunraku-style puppetry - a Japanese puppetry form in which three puppeteers directly move one puppet. "Petrushka" centers on three puppets - a clown, a ballerina and a moor - and took nine puppeteers to produce.
Another complex show, "Master Peter's Puppet Show," a puppet opera by Manuel de Falla, is based on an incident from "Don Quixote." The production, which took place in a confined space in front of a live orchestra, included a life-size Don Quixote puppet watching an old-fashioned tent puppet show. When he falls in love with the puppet maiden and tries to rescue her, he brings the tent crashing to the ground.
Twist rounded out these clips with a live demonstration of his ability with the simple "Stickman" for the benefit of an enthusiastic audience. Among various upcoming productions, Twist has worked on puppetry for the Joe Goode Performance Group's performance "Wonder Boy" in June 2008.
According to the Literary Arts Program's Web site, Twist is a third generation puppeteer and "the only American graduate of the Ecole Superieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France, one of the world's premier puppetry training programs."
