The Adventures of Curious Ganz
I could tell you about the fascinating life of Joachim Ganz, who was the first Jew to settle in the first English colony in America in the late 1500s. He was an engineer who invented a new way of smelting copper. Born in Prague and speaking German, he is said to have been recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh as the resident scientist for the settlement. The colony, which was on Roanoke Island in what is now North Caroline, failed, and Ganz went to England – where he was arrested because he openly practiced his religion (some three centuries after the entire Jewish population of England had been expelled) although there is no record of a trial; it’s possible that Sir Walter interceded.
Not a word of this is mentioned in “The Adventures of Curious Ganz.” Actually no words are spoken at all in it, or in “Pescador” — the two mesmerizing works of theater on stage at HERE, both under an hour long and presented separately in the first week of the third annual Puppetopia puppet festival.
Yet somehow Ganz’s story is there in spirit, and his spirit is there in the story, a spirit of adventure and invention told through startling imagery and movement – the language of puppetry.
“The Adventures of Curious Ganz,” the work of the English company Curious School of Puppetry, begins in black – the blackness of the clothing the puppeteers wear so as to disappear into the background, but the blackness of space, and also, I started to suspect, the blackness of the beginnings of the universe. There are glowing objects that slowly combined, then objects that looked like globes, then eventually, then what looked to me like a pterodactyl, a small flying dinosaur. This was my clue that we were witnessing the evolution of earth. Eventually we’re presented with a miniature figure who looks to be wrestling out of his sleeping bag, although it could have been a cocoon from which has been born. He stands up – and sneezes.’
Once Ganz appears, soon as a larger puppet, we’re introduced to civilization, which is to say, the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the powerful people with whom Ganz must contend. With his quill pen, scientific instruments and his stacks of leather-bound books (adorably reduced in size for ease of puppet-reading), he explores, experiments and invents. He gazes at the planets. He sails around the world. His antagonists, with faces as sharp-angled as predators, insist that the world is flat and policed by amphibious green dragons. It’s an elaborate story that involves the queen, who is drawn to his adventurousness – she’s a dreamer too, literally — but is hamstrung by her advisors, who at one point put him behind bars.
The most memorable image is of the queen, in an Elizabethan collar that makes her identity unmistakable, standing atop what resembles a layered wedding cake, but is three floors of the little people of her reign (small puppets perhaps one-tenth her size), as she holds the blue round globe that Ganz has given her (again its identity unmistakable), and lets out a giggle. “The Adventures of Curious Ganz,” which is running through March 2, is accompanied by bouncy music that, like an ice cream truck that stays too long at a single stop, loses more and more of its initial delight. But it can’t cancel the enchantment
“Pescado,” created by the Chilean company Silencio Blanco, tells the simple story of a fisherman going out for the day to try to earn a living – and failing to do so. It’s sad and it’s exquisite. At first, as the slight puppet laboriously pulls his boat into the water, I thought I might need the patience of a fisherman for this show, but once he gets it into the water, the five humans, covered top to bottom in black, don’t just manipulate the fisherman and move his boat, they dance the waves – they are the waves — and the movement of the sea. For most of the 45 minutes of the show the only sound is that of the waves, with an occasional squawk from the birds we see overhead, first one at time, eventually in a huge threatening flock. But then music kicks – like you’d hear in an action thriller — and there’s a storm, the boat thrown (literally) from wave to wave.
The creative team reportedly spend doing field research and conducting interviews — and translated all those words into something that makes words unnecessary.
‘Pescador” is at HERE only through March 3. Two new works debut next week.
A documentary about the making of the puppet show. (Click on the CC for English subtitles if you don’t know Spanish)
