DELIGHTFULLY ABSURD Matty Sidle’s Unicycle Baby Guy. |
FirstWorks, a biannual array of performances since 2004, is going year-round. The kickoff event will be a free two-part puppetry film festival, with selections chosen and moderated by Heather Henson, daughter of Muppets creator Jim Henson.
Designed for adults, the first collection of short films will be Handmade Puppet Dreams, to be screened on Thursday, April 24 at 7 and 9:30 pm at RISD’s Memorial Hall, 266 Benefit St. The second series, Handmade Puppet Dreams for Kids, will be shown on Friday, May 16 at 6 pm at the Providence Children’s Museum. As a bonus, museum admission will be free from 5 to 8 pm.
As with storytelling, puppetry is frequently and mistakenly taken to be exclusively for kids. Not necessarily. In the series for grown-ups, while many of the images may entertain children, much of the subject matter and visual style is hardly geared toward the Sesame Street set. In fact, Lyon Hill’s four-minute Incubus is a darkly erotic fantasy in which a sleeping woman is visited by a shadowy spirit — with paper puppets in the style of a pop-up book.
In the House of the Sin Eater, by Matt Acheson and Paul Kloss, is a 15-minute dream fantasy based on the ancient Welsh tradition of sin eating, in which someone can take on the sins of the recently deceased. Genevieve Anderson’s Too Loud a Solitude is based on a Czech novella by Bohumil Hrabal, in which a crumbling civilization is the backdrop for passion and extreme moral consequence.
The adult program is not all seriousness, though. Not with a 12-film program that includes Sammy & Sofa, by Tim Lagasse, about a Mohawked psychic and his very expressive pet sofa. Also on the schedule is Matty Sidle’s Unicycle Baby Guy, which may be a bit too absurd for the little ones to fully appreciate, with its hero being a modern-day centaur — a unicycle from the waist down.
“IT’S AN AMAZING ART FORM” Henson. |
“There are so many different approaches to puppetry,” Henson said, speaking by phone from her Orlando, Florida, base. “It’s an amazing art form. You can have shadow puppets, you can have parade puppets. There are oversized outdoor spectacle puppets and there are marionettes, there are Punch and Judy show puppets — and Lion King on Broadway.”
Asked to single out films she included that particularly impressed her, she first mentioned one of those she produced.
“Too Loud a Solitude is an example of a very cinematic approach to puppet films,” she said. “They worked with dollies and cranes, and it was shot on 35mm film.”
And then there is Everloving, by special effects specialist Steve Johnson, who not only filmed the puppets underwater to give an unearthly effect, but also shot them in reverse at double speed.
As an ambassador for puppetry as an art form, Henson has found that she can get more mileage out of showing puppetry films then puppet shows themselves, which are harder to tour.
Henson graduated from RISD in 1995, involved at the time in environmental performances rather than puppetry.
“I did not do much when my dad was alive,” she said. Jim Henson, who started a puppet boom in this country, died in 1990. She had been around it forever but didn’t join in until after RISD, when she went to the the annual puppetry conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. “I’ve gone almost every year. It’s a weeklong puppet seminar, and I go to recharge my batteries and then get back into the whole puppet flow. That’s where I started developing my own voice with puppetry.”
Henson observed that Providence is “ripe” with developing puppeteers. She cites John Emigh’s work with masks Brown’s theater program and Paula Vogel’s teaching playwrights about puppetry when she was here; Vanessa Gilbert’s Blood From a Turnip monthly puppet nights at Perishable Thea¬tre; and, of course, Erminio Pinque’s Big Nazo creature-building workshop and performances.
“There is so much puppetry going on in Providence — you guys are very lucky,” she declared.In the next few months, the expanded FirstWorks will likely present another event that will be an¬nounced in May, along with the schedule for the annual FirstWorksProv Festival programs in the fall. Next year, YoYo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble will appear on March 6 at the Providence Performing Arts Center as part of FirstWorks programming.
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