Politics, Playfulness With the Art of Puppetry

In separate performances on the UCLA campus over the weekend, first-rate companies from South Africa and Peru demonstrated radically different approaches to the art of puppetry as well as a few surprising points of agreement.

For instance, both the Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town (in Schoenberg Hall on Saturday afternoon) and Teatro Hugo & Ines of Lima (at the Freud Playhouse on Saturday night) place the puppeteers out in the open, unconcealed, and often exploit personal relationships between them and their puppets.

When Handspring puppeteers Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler and Louis Seboko hold the hands of the puppet characters in some of the most intense moments of “Ubu and the Truth Commission,” it seems as much an act of consolation as the method by which the large, carved doll-figures are made to gesture. Written by Jane Taylor, “Ubu” bitterly recaps recent South African history, with many of the puppets depicting witnesses to atrocity and embodying a helpless nobility in the face of great suffering.

Similarly, many of the Hugo & Ines puppet characters are so sweet or naive that they need to be protected and reassured by the puppeteers--though Ines Pasic isn’t above teasing one of her creations and Hugo Suarez even repeatedly steals from one of his. “Never trust anyone over 30 inches” might be a wise motto in this world, except that these puppets are always extensions of the puppeteers’ own bodies: humanoid figures conjured up from fingers, feet, a kneecap, a belly-button, plus some quick-change costuming and maybe a paste-on rubber nose. So when Surez subdues the agitated knee-puppet by conking him on the head, it’s the big guy who ends up limping. For Handspring and Teatro H & I alike, puppets are us; we abuse them at our peril.

For Handspring, however, the puppets represent a kind of supplement to a neo-Expressionist theatrical experience that the company defines primarily with human actors and film animation. Adapting characters from Alfred Jarry’s seminal “Ubu Roi” (first performed as a marionette play 110 years ago), “Ubu and the Truth Commission” dramatizes the politics of betrayal so graphically that it eminently deserves its adults-only designation.

Although the work should be a jolt for many Africa-watchers--offering a portrait of post-apartheid Mandela-land as anything but the best of all possible worlds--its key issues resonate far from that continent. Like Americans during the Clinton scandals, for instance, Mrs. Ubu (Busi Zokufa) fixates on accusations of sexual excess, not imagining that her lord and master might be committing bigger crimes; when she learns the truth, she immediately turns those crimes into media gold.

Dawid Minnaar may lack the horrific obesity of Ubu, but in cowardice, blood-lust, grandiloquent rant and eagerness to make others pay for his crimes, he is the Jarry anti-hero incarnate. As his crafty wife, Zokufa excels at the moments when she plays celebrity victim to the hilt--and her wonderful alligator handbag (a large, talking alligator with a handbag in the middle) deserves to be put on sale in the ritziest specialty stores.

Director and animator William Kentridge skillfully integrates the movement of actors and puppets with his often startling animated chalk-drawings and live-action imagery projected at the back of the stage. “Ubu” may be unrelievedly depressing, but it is executed with consummate artistry.

In contrast, Teatro Hugo & Ines supplies an unfailingly whimsical theater-of-marvels and seeks the traditional family audience--even reportedly replacing some of its more adult material at matinee performances. Its daring is chiefly in the realm of physical metaphor: How many different ways can a hand be made to suggest a face? Can a doll-costume put over a foot, a knee, a stomach make the audience accept that body-part as a complete, independent individual?

Suarez and Pasic prove infinitely resourceful in addressing these questions. He adroitly uses a streak of cruel humor to balance her sentimentality and also makes the biggest departure from the puppetry format: a mime segment about a floating hat and a man’s attempts to control it. Titled “Short Stories,” their program consists of brief solos, with occasional duets emerging as highly complex collaborations in which she usually supplies the characters’ hands and he the heads--both superbly in tune with a sense of magical transformation that makes their partnership one of the wonders of the age.

These events in the new UCLA Puppet Theater Series were presented in association with the Jim Henson Festival of Puppet Theater and the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and Arts at CalArts.