And now, our theatrical release is starting up in Toronto! We’re opening January 13th at the Carlton Cinema for an indefinite run. Vagrant Films Releasing is organizing a show of Disfarmer photographs in the lobby, which should be a killer compliment to the movie.

Homunculus is home to neuroscientist Larry Ely and other, mostly non-professional puppetry bloggers. Larry will be reporting back on his entry into modern puppetry from the same place of naive intrigue that originally sparked Puppet. Check back often to follow his explorations of New York’s puppetry scene – its shows, studios, scholars, and artists.

This all got me to thinking about another book I’ve been reading lately: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. GEB is a weird book, to say the least; in short, it discusses the works of Kurt Gödel (mathematician), M.C. Escher (illustrator), and Johann Sebastian Bach (composer) and their relationship to one other, but it pretty quickly diverts this discussion to illustrate how concepts like recursion, self-reference, and analogy lead to (among numerous other things), intelligence. Hofstadter spends quite a while geeking out about the idea of “isomorphism,” defined (care of good ol’ Wikipedia) as “a kind of mapping between objects that shows a relationship between two properties or operations.” Which is where Sontag’s essay comes back in. As I understand it, an isomorphism is a way of interpreting the same concept or structure in two distinct ways. The drama and effectiveness of bunraku, as Sontag describes it, seems to depend critically on isomorphisms – isomorphism between the text of the play and the play itself, between mute but physically expressive puppet and the eloquent but impotent narrator, between the actions of the puppet which draw the audience’s eye and the black-clad puppeteers who fade from it. What’s fascinating about an isomorphism is that the same information is contained in both of its incarnations; the transformation between the two is essentially a perspective change that allows the same core concept to be considered in two distinct ways. It’s probably trivial to spot isomorphisms all over the world of theater, but in puppetry, which takes the separation of action from actor to a kind of logical extreme, they seems especially integral to the structure of the performance.

Speaking of grown-up, the show I caught was called Phobia and Fetish and was put on by the appropriately titled group Cranks and Banners down at the Here arts center in SoHo. This turned out to be a pretty ideal introduction to Cantastoria, since the show literally kicked off with an introduction to Cantastoria, described in song as the lead artist of the group mapped out the history and spread of the art form on her dress, painted in exquisite detail with a map of the Middle/Far East (cradle of Cantastoria, it turns out) and complete with fold-down sections depicting historical Cantastorians and their circumstances. The way they told it, theatrical styles as diverse as shadow puppets, marionettes, bunraku, and hand puppets can trace their history back to these paintings and accompanying stories.

The subsequent parts of the show each had a unique style, making for a pretty great showcase of the flexibility of Cantastoria. One of the more striking involved a box with cranks on either end and a continuous, maybe 30 meter long piece of paper stretched between them depicting the narative arc of an Inuit who got into a feud with a neighbor over a certain yellow patch of snow. Much the way that the physical presence of a puppet on a stage creates a very different reaction in the audience than, say, a digital rendering of the same figure would, the physical process of cranking the banner across the box in time with the story was much more engaging than just seeing a video, despite accomplishing something similar. It was also clear just how delicate the paper  banner for the story was, with the cranking actors taking great pains to keep it from getting caught in the crank mechanisms.

Another favorite section involved a pair of clotheslines strung across the stage, with the narrator singing her sorry tale of injustice at the hands of love and Uncle Sam while periodically attaching paintings to the lines with clothespins, so only once the song was over could the entire sequence be observed. As expected, a couple of the tales also stuck with the more historical method of displaying paintings one-at-a-time to illustrate the stories. These were cool, but a bit less visually striking than the two I mentioned above; I think the more modern takes on the style probably just appeal a little more in modern times. Still, I recommend checking out Cantastoria if you get the chance; I’d love to catch some more of it down the road and see what other variations the dramatists and -turgs can think up.

Also:  yes, I spent pretty much the whole night trying not to make the pun, “Cantastoria? I barely know her!”

During the panel, the discussion of puppetry in videogames (presented by this just way-too-cool professor from LA whose name has completely escaped me) was accompanied by some clips from a short piece made using Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The clips felt very much like an experimental film (the GTA protagonist running through wispy trees and interfacing somberly with a giant, rotating bundle of flowers), but now that the concept has been pointed out I know I’ve seen this before. Remember the Red vs. Blue videos that were just, everywhere on the internet about five years ago? Those were videogame puppetry too!

Now that I think of it, videogames could be a very friendly medium for an aspiring puppeteer. They’re cheap and ubiquitous, they lend themselves to being captured on video for distribution (although they can also be used for live performances), and they have a built-in control mechanism I’d wager is orders of magnitude easier to get the hang of than a marionette’s wooden cross. Plus, videogames naturally minimize that classic antagonist of puppets – the uncanny valley. Since videogame environments are already simulacra of reality (albeit a generally cooler and more physically lenient reality), the not-quite-human faces of videogame characters don’t show up in striking contrast to the realism of their environment in a way that triggers discomfort in the human psyche.

This has me wondering a bit at where to draw the line, puppetry-wise. Many a time I’ve been playing Fallout 3 or something similarly engrossing and found my companions in the room at least as drawn into the action as I am(sometimes to the point of protests when I’ve decided I’m done playing). It’s not really a puppet show for me, since I’m the one controlling the game, but it’s not inconceivable that it is for them. I think, though, this wouldn’t hold true if I were just playing through the game in a linear story mode. The thing about a host of videogames that have gotten popular of late is that they’re open ended (examples coming to mind include Red Dead Redemption, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the recent GTA titles), so a lot of the time players aren’t doing something pre-scripted or specifically dictated by the game’s designers. Instead, players are encouraged to explore a virtual world, use their imaginations. This type of ‘sandbox gaming’ seems particularly conducive to creating stories and interesting interactions that are completely unrelated to the game itself. So I might not be a puppeteer when I’m running around post-apocalyptic Washington DC looking for lawn gnomes to add to my (rather prodigious) collection, but mix in an overdubbed narration about my character’s breakdown into obsessive-compulsive gnome collecting as a means of dysfunctionally coping with the massive psychic trauma and survivor’s guilt of making it through the apocalypse alive, and suddenly it’s looking a lot like puppet theater, XBox 360 style.

Don Cristóbal started with a visually-striking shadow-puppetry scene, where a scrim was lowered before the stage and the actors filed around behind it – the gaudy jester-type costumes and stilted movements made it very difficult to distinguish human from humanoid figures, and I found myself wondering just how many puppets were involved. I overestimated, as there was only the one (Don Cristóbal) in the main story, but it was interesting that the line between puppet and man became so blurry with only the colorless, 2D information of shadows available.

Speaking of the Billy-Club Man, this was one gnarly-looking little puppet – bent at the shoulders with his face twisted into a lopsided sneer, which worked quite effectively with the crotchety, Spanish-accented voice provided by his lead puppeteer. The puppeteer, incidentally, was fantastic, easily outshining the other actors with his excellent comedic timing and a knack for keeping the audience’s attention on his puppet charge. Puppets naturally draw attention, but I think a mark of good puppeteering is maximizing that effect. The coolest thing about this particular puppet’s appearance was his asymmetry, which not only gave him an endearing but decidedly ugly mug, but allowed for an impressive range of ‘facial expression,’ since the one side of his face was more cruel-looking while the other was more pitiable. As discussed in Puppet, people will project all kinds of emotion onto the by-definition lifeless face of a puppet, so giving the puppet a distribution of possible expressions naturally facilitates the process.

While it started simply enough, Don Cristóbal, Billy-Club Man got decidedly weirder and more dream-like as it progressed. The freakiest part was this slowly-moving procession of tall, masked, black-veiled beings circling the stage, which it took me a moment to realize were actors holding intricately carved masks of very, very old and pale people in one hand held high above their heads and bobbing them around, using their wrists and arms as the neck – everything else about their appearance was cloaked behind a mostly-opaque black veil. This was downright spooky.

Also, at the end Don Cristóbal winds up at the forest home of some kind of puppet-maker, who has whittled him a new heart because his old one decayed into sawdust? Or something? This may have been due to Don’s ladylove’s rejection of his plan to fly to the moon together, which, I mean, it’s hard to blame her but he takes it pretty hard. Incidentally, there’s this recurring theme of Don Cristóbal waxing poetical at the moon, which plays host to an ever-changing array of shadow-puppets and was one of my favorite aspects of the play – the projected shadows ranged from humorous and none-too-vague sexual imagery to very subtle, emotionally stirring backdrop for the play. In fact, the only thing for which I’d knock Don Cristóbal was the couple of scenes where Don ‘flew’ over to a ledge to pine toward said moon. David Soll once told me (I think he was quoting someone) that ‘puppets shouldn’t fly,’ which says a lot in a few words, I think. The job of these figures is to be a receptacle for our projected emotions and suspended disbeliefs, and while it’s cool to have them do things that human actors can’t do, altogether defying gravity doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it. The Anne Frank puppet from Compulsion had a flight scene too, and it too rubbed me a little the wrong way.

Overall, though, Don Cristóbal, Billy-Club Man was excellent, particularly for its integration of so many distinct forms of puppetry in ways that emphasized the strengths of each, and it was funny and touching to boot.

Check it out.

Tickets for the festival are available here.

Puppet is now available for educational use!  If you’d like to teach Puppet, your institution can buy a copy from Cinema Guild here.

We’re thrilled to be screening along with a slate of fantastic films at IFFBoston.  If you’ll be in town we hope to see you there.  Puppet is screening at 5:30pm on Saturday, April 30th at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.  Check out the full lineup here.