Touble Puppet Theater

No strings attached

Austin’s puppeteers give us a peak into their misunderstood art

By William Bass

Published February 23, 2011

Whether it be a lack of audience or a dearth of practitioners, puppetry just keeps on flying over everyone’s heads. Nevertheless, a few companies in Austin are keeping this art form alive while moving it into the future.

One of the main appeals of the craft for many is the outsider status of the art, existing in a nebulous zone between high and low art; it remains a do-it-yourself craft in which the creator is essentially an auteur, responsible for everything involved.

“Puppetry struck me as a great boundary breaker — it was theater but it was a people’s theater, not legitimate enough (at least in this country) to be highbrow but with potential to be so much more than kids’ entertainment (again, an assumption made in this country),” notes Trouble Puppet Theater founder Connor Hopkins. “Also I really liked that you had to do all these different things, write and design and paint, engineer puppets and mechanisms, perform — basically a bit of everything.”

While the human body might be the dominant medium in which we express drama, puppetry offers the audience something else — something closer to the source of the original emotion, by-passing our usually flawed modes of expression.

“By their nature, puppets are embodiments of ideas as much as they are characters, because their life itself is an idea, something the puppet body is imbued with, by means of the puppeteer,” states Hopkins.

“I think puppets have enormous freedom, more so than a human actor, because a human actor is always fighting against being him/herself. As an actor you’re always going to be you (short, thin, brown haired, young) pretending to be something you’re not.” This offers the audience a much more powerful and immersible gateway into whatever story is being told.

“Puppets can quite literally be the character because they don’t start out being somebody else already. Their age, history, identity is put into them with their breath and consciousness.”

The fact that puppets can be so evocative is what makes them so interesting, strange, and other. At the same time, their ability to come to life as easily as one flicks on a light is jarring.

“Movement brings puppets to life -- when they stop moving, they die. Puppets aren’t living things, because living things are never truly still,” states Private Lives puppeteer Katie Pipkin.

Nevertheless, even though they might not be “living things,” the subtle realization that an inanimate object is moving so fluidly seems to convince our imaginations that something else just might be going on. Our breath shortens as we get the sense that a Frankenstein is being animated -- mirroring that sensation back to ourselves with the question, “Who is animating us?”

Trouble Puppet

Austin’s premier puppet theater, The Trouble Puppet Theater Company was founded by Connor Hopkins in 2004. The company started out performing their inimitable works in bars and benefits around town. Over the years the company has grown vastly, performing versions of Frankenstein, How I Became a Catholic Suicide Bomber, and The Gunpowder Plot.

When most hear the word puppet, their minds most likely conjure up images of marionettes or childish sock puppets. However, Trouble Puppet theater uses an altogether unfamiliar approach called “table-top.”

“It’s more or less derived from the traditional Japanese form called bunraku. It involves large puppets with articulated arms and legs, each of which is operated by multiple puppeteers, usually three at a time,” states Hopkins.

The group’s most recent production of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle takes the craft to another level. While the novel is powerful, the paper-mâché inanimate objects, along with some live acting and video projections, somehow manages to exceed the graphic nature of the book while driving the message home even harder.

“There are a few things I hope people find worth considering after our staging of this work: the relationship between immigrant workers and our economic system, and the fact that industrialized food production still has problems with sanitation, danger for workers, and inhumane treatment of animals.”

Trouble Puppets The Jungle runs in March at The Salvage Vanguard Theater. More information can be found at www.TroublePuppet.com.

Private Lives Puppet Theater

Describing themselves as a “phantasmagorical puppet theater created by two remarkably strange young ladies of society,” Private Lives is comprised of the uncompromising Olivia Pepper and Katie Pipkin. The ladies opt for more fantastical narratives, specializing in shadow puppets while utilizing marionettes and rod puppets as well. “Shadow puppetry especially interesting to me because of its historical precedent. Manipulated shadow play, and the idea of a shadow world has had an incredibly important past in theater, philosophy, and the arts,” notes Pipkin. “It also allows a fairly complex story to be told by only one or two people, whereas marionettes or rods require an exceptionally large cast.”

Unlike Trouble Theater, Private Lives takes the art in a more whimsical direction -- think of a collaboration between Joanna Newsom and Mr. Rodgers King Friday XIII — reminding us of the magic in the mundane.

“I hope that our audiences can remember to look at all things with fresh eyes. Nothing is dead,” states Pipkin. “Everything has a hidden, secret life — a particular way of moving, behaving, a character hidden inside what seems inarticulate. It is merely a matter of reminding these objects how to speak.”

Check out Private Lives show at The Salvage Vanguard Theater Sunday March 20 at 8:00pm.

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