In “I Am The Bear,” Jerrell L. Henderson, wearing a t-shirt that says “I Am Black History,” tells the story of how he was walking to work when he was stopped by a police car because he “fit the description” of someone in the vicinity. It’s a story that is only unusual because of the way he tells it — as a puppet show, streaming online.
The only person Henderson had seen in the vicinity when the police stopped him, he tells us, was an older disheveled man with newspapers instead of shoes, who “looked nothing like me”….except that he, too, was Black.
No matter how intelligent and capable he is, Henderson concludes, many people will only ever see him as “the bear.” Throughout the entire seven-minute video, which is streaming for free online through July 15th, he is holding a large puppet of a brown bear. Sometimes the bear nods along with him, sometimes it mouths Henderson’s words for emphasis (“You fit the description”); at the end, they hug, and the man walks away from the puppet.
It’s a metaphor that grows on you, and is arguably aided by the camera, which allows close-ups of the bear, pushing the human being to the periphery – a stark illustration of how others see the man. And even when they are side by side, the flattening effect of a video subliminally drives home the point further: In the eyes of the profiling police, the man and the beast are on the same plane, two dimensional at best.
“I Am Bear” is part of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, which had been planning to hold their fourth biennial festival in January of this year – a multi-week event that in the past had attracted as many as 14,000 audience members to dozens of venues in Chicago. Instead, over this past year, the festival has pivoted to cyberpuppetry – as have many puppet theaters nationwide, as a glance at the list of “puppet happenings” posted regularly by The Jim Henson Foundation makes clear.
Vancouver
“Vancouver” is a longer, more involved, and clever example of cyberpuppetry, also in collaboration with the Chicago festival, written and directed by Ralph Pena of the New York-based Ma-Yi Theater Company, and presented online through May 31st. The 35-minute video is about a family who struggles to adjust after the move from Japan to Vancouver, Washington. The puppeteers themselves needed to adjust, traveling to a barn in Wisconsin last September to perform masked and socially distanced for the camera.
The filmed play, which manages to be both poignant and amusing, demonstrates some of the inherent advantages of puppetry. The puppet heads of father, mother, daughter are expressively sculpted, haunting works of art. The dog Lucky has a wonderful, hilarious body, and can talk (voiced by Daniel K Isaac) – in some ways, he’s the most grounded member of the family. But “Vancouver” also takes advantage of the medium of film, especially (as in “I Am The Bear”) in its use of close-ups. This is striking during the scene when husband and wife, a mixed-race couple who are both stressed out, attempt to make love. Much would have been lost without those extreme close-ups of their straining faces, a tensing hand, the movement of a corner of the blanket. The film also directs our attention more than once to the nervously tapping feet of their teenage daughter Ashley (voiced by Shannon Tyo), who has Asperger’s, only communicates to other people through video games over the Internet, and is the cause of much of her parents’ stress.
Yet, the close-ups also emphasize that the puppet mouths never move…with the exception of the dog!
Puppetry vs. (plus?) Cyberpuppetry
Puppeteers have had varying levels of success in making the transition to digital theater, as I discovered last August while watching Manual Cinema’s livestreamed video version of its initially in-person puppet theater, “No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.” Much of the appeal of puppetry like Manual Cinema – like most puppet theater, actually — is seeing how it’s made in front of your eyes – which is harder to do on film.
Not all puppets have been cyberpuppets over the past 14 months.
Voyeur, an hour-long play that takes place in the streets and landmarks of Greenwich Villa which I saw way back in October, has extended again and again; currently it’s scheduled through July 31. It focuses on the 19th century painter and voyeur of the title, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, and, while it’s performed by a relatively large cast, the main character, Toulouse Lautrec himself, is a puppet.
There is also a spectacular scene that takes place on a traffic island on Sixth Avenue of a woman dressed in a larger-than-life hoop dress, which seemed to house another person – a trick of shadow puppetry.
Since the relaxation of restrictions over the last few weeks, Dixon Place has put together a new season of puppet theater, one of their specialties. The shows are in-person a their small Off-Off theater on the Lower East Side. But it seems significant that the shows are also being livestreamed and on demand.
The questions about puppet theater are the same as with most theater these days:
What will happen when physical theaters have fully reopened, and audiences feel comfortable enough to return en masse? How much digital theater will remain? Are there useful lessons learned that will wind up incorporated into puppetry from now on?
