This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

22nd September 2007

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At the opening ceremony of last week’s Out the Box festival of puppetry and visual performance, Artistic Director Aja Marneweck expressed a desire to remove the stigma that “puppetry is only for children”. This was emphasised in the organisers’ decision to split the festival between two Cape Town locations: there was a “Family Festival” at the Baxter Theatre Centre and an “Adult Festival” at the Little Theatre Complex. A few eyebrows were raised at the prospect of shows for “adults only”, but festival Director Janni Younge was quick to point out that there would be “no puppet strip tease acts – although ...” she tailed off with a glint in her eye, hinting at the sexual content in a number of the pieces.

Now in its third year, Out the Box has established a substantial profile, something evident in the full houses for many of the shows. In fact, on more than one occasion, performances were over-booked; in years to come, as it attracts a larger following, the festival will need to increase its organisational capacity. Nevertheless, there was general agreement that Younge and Marneweck have worked wonders in growing the audience for puppetry and the slightly amorphous genre of visual theatre (which they define as “a multidisciplinary approach” incorporating “dance, live art, object theatre and new media”).

There were various international productions in the offing, and the opening night featured the widely respected Theatre des Alberts from Reunion island. Their Accidents, a series of short sketches, demonstrated to anyone who might have been dubious about the level of emotional sophistication that can be achieved through puppetry that, if anything, it is a medium offering a wider scope for creative interpretation than “straight” theatre. The five stories presented leaped between gritty realism and the fantastical – even the physically improbable – using both life-sized and miniature puppets and props. We met a girl doing battle with a recalcitrant load of laundry; a homeless man whose empty wine bottles act as surrogates for his lost children; an old woman who will wait, endlessly, for the husband that she has accidentally killed by sitting on him; a young boy, also waiting, in his case for a letter from an absent father, while his mother is more concerned with preserving her good looks and serving her sexual appetite; and, finally, an apartment building full of in-fighting and incest amongst its eccentric tenants. As the above list would suggest, the show certainly lived up to its promise to show what happens “when tragic emotions meet the funny side of life” ... all this against a musical background that included the stylings of James Brown and Lou Reed.

Somewhat darker, and more mysterious, was Panta Rhei II from the Dutch duo ’T Magisch Theaterje (who will be touring the country during September and October). People merged with trees, a Buddhist monk made an appearance, and there were multi-eyed monsters that appeared to be eating humans. If the effect of these fleeting images was to act as a memento mori – a reminder that death frames life and is omnipresent – this was confirmed by the insistent presence of a skull with a wig: even after the eroticism of two “finger” puppets making love and the beautiful shadow image of a womb, promising new life, it was the tone created by the macabre death’s head that dominated.

Beth McMahon’s one-woman piece, Venom, was set in colonial Australia and (in rhyming couplets) told the outlandish tale of two competing purveyors of snake-bite antidotes. McMahon, who has a background in the circus, remained in one spot throughout the performance; yet she was constantly moving as she made inventive use of her sole prop, an elaborate Victorian dress – out of which she produced an entire theatre, from talking heads and talking shins to snakes and snake-bite cures.

Younge and Marneweck led the South African puppeteering contingent with their own performances in Violet Rose Bite and La Loba respectively. The former was a kind of “portrait of the artist as a young woman”, depicting autobiographical scenes at various stages of development from toddler to teenager. Younge is tall and slim, but her careful attention to mannerisms and speech habits managed to convince the audience, in the opening minutes of the show, that she really was a three-year-old. The use of a puppet – which, as the protagonist got older, changed dresses and heads and hair colours – allowed Younge to explore the psychological conflict between different versions of the self. At first, puppet and puppeteer were one; but, as the character grew older, the puppeteer became removed from the puppet, acting as a super-ego, a socialising voice that controlled her and told her what to do. Then, after the initial rebellion of adolescence, the roles were reversed: it was now the puppeteer who was more child-like, wanting to be a girl again, while the puppet represented the hard-edged, cynical, “mature” young woman.

La Loba (performed by Marneweck and Jacqueline van Meygaarden) was a slightly more opaque and less celebratory rendition of “the burden of womanhood” – a theme echoed in a film projection, alongside the action onstage, of La Huesera, the archetypal old woman labouring under a bundle of wood (or bones) in a barren, windswept place. The play pivoted on notions of “lightness” and “heaviness”, a contrast underscored by the main character’s insistence on her own corporeal weight while the puppet that portrayed her was little more than a head with a paper cloak and wispy, paper-thin arms. If this lack of “substance” was ironic for most of the play, there were also brief liberating moments when she danced and even flew across the stage.

Each of the puppetry performances at the festival was characterised by the curious blend of pathos and humour to which the medium lends itself. Even when we are lured into the magical world of puppetry, audience members know that the puppets are not people – are not, literally, alive – and this has a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, we have in the backs of our minds the image of the limp, lifeless object that a puppet is without its manipulator: there is something inherently sad and lonely about it. On the other hand, precisely because they are not people, puppets can die and return to life, or get beaten up and leap back into action, or have exaggerated features, all of which is perfect for slapstick and black comedy. A skilled puppeteer can mimic the human beings in the audience, make them laugh at themselves, and at the same time distort that mirror-image in profoundly disturbing ways.

But it wasn’t all puppets at Out the Box. Of the items that fell into the “visual theatre” category, The Life and Work of Petrovic Petar (starring Jason Potgieter) was the highlight for this reviewer. Again, video projection was an important element, with entertaining cameo appearances by African leaders like Idi Amin, Haile Selassie and Robert Mugabe, as well as icons such as model Iman. These made the fictional Petar seem like an historical figure, adding resonance to his plight as a white man who desperately wanted to be black. Although Petar’s relationship to Africa was primarily a libidinous one – obsessed with black women, he hoped to become “the first editor of an African magazine of tasteful pornography” – Potgieter’s portrayal of a character insisting on his status as a “refugee” and not a “coloniser” was a subtle and layered evocation of the dilemma of the European-in-Africa.

Altogether unsubtle was 6 Minutes by the Erf[81] Cultural Collective, a work that attempted to remind audiences of how serious and widespread different forms of abuse are in contemporary South Africa by provoking a visceral response and a guilty sense of complicity for “standing by and watching”. Thus, after simulating rape and torture scenes, the cast invited the audience to come and join them in a meal – a perverse sacrament of bread, Checkers chicken and brandy-and-coke – with the acrid smell of tomato sauce, raw meat and other substances thickening the air, and a naked man hanging from his feet upstage. They certainly succeeded in disgusting many members of the audience, but one couldn’t help feeling that they had taken their artificial acts of abuse to such an extreme that they were no longer shocking; and this, it could be argued, detracted from the real-life abuse they were protesting against.

Finally, there was dance, including Acty Tang and the First Physical Theatre Company’s Protect and Dancing With Shadows from the Remix Dance Company. In both of these, body paint and stifled body language had the effect of rendering the human dancers puppet-like. Effective use of spotlighting and slow, constrained movements created beautiful tableaux, but it was difficult to establish a narrative in either work. The music and supplementary effects (the black-and-white photographs of Santu Mofokeng in Dancing with Shadows, the Buddhist chants in Protect) provided a vaguely melancholy emotional continuity, but the relationships between the “characters” that the dancers seemed to be playing remained obscure. Dancing with Shadows made innovative use of dancers in wheelchairs and there was a further challenge to assumptions about disability and performance in terms of hearing impairment. In Protect, the dancing duo’s paintstaking gestures and minute physical inflections demonstrated remarkable muscular control, but the piece was more enjoyable in the brief moments that they allowed their bodies to move freely.