ICA/Boston presents Old Trout Puppet Theater
Famous Puppet Death Scenes
By: Erica H. Adams - Oct 20, 2007
Tweak our ancient narrator.
Death by lack of humor was not an option, thanks to our Canadian puppeteers.
Beautifully crafted puppets activated nostalgia for simpler times.
Brut vignettes of gruesome deaths provoked snickers and guffaws from the audience..
We are the beast inside the bag encountered by monks who mistake it for an elephant, Nathaniel Tweak cautions
Quibble squished to death like a fly.
Boston: Edgy, timely performances are the norm at the Institute of Contemporary Art since its December 2006 relocation to the Fan Pier near South Station. The Old Trout Puppet Workshop condensed their life's work into 'Famous Puppet Death Scenes' at the ICA/Boston from October 18-20, 2007. Canadian pranksters delivered 22 ways to die to a U.S. culture infamous for its twin addiction to death and denial of death. Enchanting scenes of demise began with a swift kick: a giant wooden hand descended upon an unsuspecting, stout businessman killed like a fly. Lest we missed their point, a narrator announces "the essence of puppet death scenes is to assuage your fears". Thanks to our Canadian puppeteers we avoided death by a lack humor, for a few evenings.
A portable, hand-painted stage with three curtained openings allowed glimpses of puppeteers that dates back to 16th century tradition of Punch and Judy puppet shows performed on Italian streets. A straight line could be drawn from 16th century street theater to television's dysfunctional families, including The Simpsons, a beloved U.S. cartoon family and the rural, do-it-yourself humor of The Red Green Show, a Canadian sitcom.
Brut vignettes of gruesome deaths provoked snickers and guffaws from an audience who alternately held their breath in anticipation or recognition. Despair in The Swede, led to suicide by a gunshot to the head, the response of each puppet who entered a room and was unable to contain their grief after seeing legs dangling from the ceiling –an apparent hanging. A pile of dead puppets accumulated. The last puppet enters, surveys the disaster and unhinges the plot's fatal misconception: what the curtain's frame allowed us to see -legs hanging from the ceiling –distracted us from the fuller picture. In fact, a puppet's torso lay on the floor, unhooked and detached from its legs above. Countless deaths were the result, therefore, of incomplete or shaded information.
The puppet-world equivalent of arias or haiku The Old Trout Puppet Workshop presented bottom-line morality tales to jolt the forever young and jaded. Alone on stage, a doltish adult plays with a child's toy farm in My Stupid Dad by Sally. Dad's agrarian reverie vanishes when a cadre of brash puppeteers storm through the curtains of the stage; their monstrous reality banishes everything in its wake. Puppeteers are strapped to large, horrific puppets, macabre fusions of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with Friday the 13th slasher film hero, Freddie. Tranquility gives way to mayhem. Puppet and puppeteer form a single terror who acts out a twisted, fear-based reality.
Variously delivered in English, German, Spanish, French and Italian, the visuals told-all for a global, post-literate culture. Beautifully crafted puppets activated nostalgia for simpler times, regardless if it is from the Brothers Grimm to 'fractured' fairy tales of the 60's or, the recent 'lifestyle' changes from agrarian to post-industrial.
The sober, 18th century rural appearance of bearded, native Calgary puppeteers underscored their wry performance titled "Nathaniel Tweak presents the greatest death scenes in puppet theater history. Please endeavor to care as much as possible". The sober, 18th century rural appearance of bearded, native Calgary puppeteers underscored their wry performance titled "Nathaniel Tweak presents the greatest death scenes in puppet theater history. Please endeavor to care as much as possible".
We are the beast inside the bag encountered by monks who mistake it for an elephant, Nathaniel Tweak cautions us in his "Message from Your Host". The famous death scenes Tweak says 'assemble different graspings into a different bag with a different beast inside' . . . who is ourselves, " we do the grasping; what we find in our hands, and what we call it is up to us".
We are the beast inside the bag encountered by monks who mistake it for an elephant, Nathaniel Tweak cautions us in his "Message from Your Host". The famous death scenes Tweak says 'assemble different graspings into a different bag with a different beast inside' . . . who is ourselves, " we do the grasping; what we find in our hands, and what we call it is up to us".
We are the beast inside the bag encountered by monks who mistake it for an elephant, Nathaniel Tweak cautions us in his "Message from Your Host". The famous death scenes Tweak says 'assemble different graspings into a different bag with a different beast inside' . . . who is ourselves, " we do the grasping; what we find in our hands, and what we call it is up to us".
