Meryvn Millar - Puppetry: How to Do It

PUPPETRY

HOW TO DO IT

Mervyn Millar

Foreword by Cheryl Henson

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

For Anna and Stanley, who know how to play

Contents

Foreword

Cheryl Henson

The magic of bringing a puppet to life fascinates me. The precision of gesture that conveys a puppets inner life can be breathtaking, immediately taking me out of everyday reality and into a world where anything is possible.

As the President of the Jim Henson Foundation, a grant-making organisation that supports puppetry, I have had the opportunity to meet a wide range of artists. In addition to supporting American puppeteers, our foundation produced an International Festival of Puppet Theater for a decade, presenting more than 120 shows from over thirty countries in five festivals. We were the first in the United States to present Handspring Puppet Company, as well as many other extraordinary troupes.

A number of years later, I had the pleasure of meeting Mervyn Millar when he worked with Handspring on the National Theatres production of War Horse. The puppeteers in this show brought full-size horse puppets to life and interacted as real horses with human actors. The horses were extraordinarily lifelike. Although the puppeteers were in full view, the audience readily accepted the puppets as horses. With the success of War Horse, Mervyn travelled internationally to train new performers to do these roles. He worked with actors, dancers and movement performers to give them the skills they would need to be good puppeteers.

Puppetry is an ancient theatre form rooted in various cultures throughout the globe. Yet, it is also a contemporary art form embraced by innovative theatre artists creating new styles and techniques. That combination of old and new brings a particular dynamism to puppetry.

A simple puppet can be surprisingly appealing in todays technologically complex culture. The prevalence of digital media and the easy manipulation of perceived reality is commonplace these days. When what is real in our everyday world becomes questionable, realism can feel untrustworthy. In contrast, puppetry can be very straightforward. The magic feels real because you can see exactly how it is done and still choose to believe in it.

In this way, puppetry invites the audience to participate in the theatrical experience. The puppet is not alive. No matter how well it is manipulated, everyone knows that it is not alive. It is an object that appears to breathe, to see, to think, to react to be an emotionally whole being with an unknowable inner life, just like us. But we understand that a puppet is doing none of these things. It is an illusion that the audience agrees to go along with. It is theatre in its purest form. The puppeteer cannot force the audience to believe. The puppeteer must cajole, convince and carry the audience into the shared illusion of believing in the life of the puppet. As Mervyn puts it:

Something is happening when the audience believes in the puppet, and invests in it emotionally, that they recognise as being close to religious or ritual action. But we should remember that it also has the opposite energy of playfulness and irreverence. The puppet is like a little god, or a little miracle, but also just a toy. It reminds us of being a child when we imagine our toys into vivid life. I hope that the emphasis in this book on the active part the audience play in imagining the character helps to reveal how it is they who are making this connection

Of course, this connection to the audience does not happen if the puppet is not believably performed. The manipulation of the puppet is everything. How one trains to manipulate a puppet can vary immensely, but the fundamental principles remain the same.

I had the pleasure of observing Mervyn Millar teach puppet manipulation using the techniques in this book when he came to the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene ONeill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, an annual gathering of international puppeteers that brings professionals and trainees together for an intense ten-day period of creative development. At this conference, I watched as Mervyn encouraged and inspired the participants to experiment with their choices, to pick up odd objects and combine them to create characters and give them movement: an old watering can and a wrench, a piece of hose and a bucket, a brass bell and some paper. All of them came to life before our eyes in new and unexpected ways. The atmosphere was calm and supportive, and the participants worked together to create unique characters.

Based on the workshops he developed for training performers for War Horse, as well as workshops like the one at the National Puppetry Conference, Mervyn has written this book to share his craft. With care and dexterity, he takes us through a basic training technique that uses simple materials like sticks and brown paper to focus attention on the movement that gives these objects the appearance of life. The exercises in this book are clear and easily reproducible for many different types of participants.

Although this book is aimed at training performers for live theatre, creating the illusion of life is a skill that can be used in the digital world as well. Digital media video games, virtual reality, television, film, even social media all contain manufactured reality in varying degrees. Creatures and characters within those realities can be brought to life by defined gesture and movement, just as puppets are. Whether through digital puppetry or motion capture, the human body and the human hand is still better at conveying movement that reads as life than any computer algorithm. Not only is the training outlined in this book beneficial for a range of performers, it could provide important skills for all sorts of jobs not yet invented in the creation of believable life in alternate realities.

By writing this book and sharing the teaching techniques that he has mastered over many years, Mervyn has offered a wonderful gift to the field of puppetry. I hope that it will be used widely to introduce adventurous spirits to this dynamic art form.

Cheryl Henson has been President of the Jim Henson Foundation since 1992.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book and the first parts of the first draft were completed with the support of a Fellowship from the Arts Foundation. I am indebted to the foundation, who support artists in all disciplines, and am particularly grateful to have been the first puppeteer to be awarded a Fellowship, among some illustrious company.

Im also indebted to the thoughts and ideas of many amazing puppeteers and directors with whom I have worked. Many of their thoughts will have gone straight into my head without me noticing. Some shared thoughts I will have come up with independently because Ive been influenced by the way they have been talking, working and performing. Apologies to them if I have inadvertently not credited them.

Ive spent a lot of time working with the inspirational Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring Puppet Company, in whose care puppetry speaks a language of subtlety and sophistication. The same is true of Sue Buckmaster of Theatre-Rites: even though her puppets usually play to young audiences, theres nothing simplified about how they behave. Her openness to abstraction and psychologically based puppetry was a key influence on me. The energy, wit and inventiveness of Improbable Theatre, and the intricate, surreal worlds of Faulty Optic each lit the way to a different idea of what puppets could do on stage. My work and career has developed alongside that of Blind Summit (Nick Barnes and Mark Down) theres considerable overlap between my work, theirs and Handsprings in particular. The personalities of each designer and director pulls the energy of the technique in different directions. Rene Baker and Steve Tiplady have challenged what I thought puppetry was, and offered profound and original avenues to explore. Every group of puppeteers I meet offer new provocations and ideas like the New York community I met through Matt Acheson, Tom Lee and Dan Hurlin, and later through Pam Arciero and the ONeill Puppetry Conference.