Pony Pie
theatre/glasgowArchive for July, 2009
Paper Puppets
The other day I was coming home from the allotments at the top of Queen’s Park, a green and cheerful expanse on Glasgow’s south side. As I was making my way down the park, covering the steep inclines on the politely tarred walkways, I saw two teenage boys sailing over the last high ridge before the bottom of the park and the roads around. They sailed down the hill on their bicycles squealing like poked pigs as they sped and squidged down the rain-soaked hill like two shots. Yelling incomprehensibly not just because it was Glaswegian but because whatever it was they said was articulated in the throws of ecstasy. And, as my companion pointed out, an analog experience. It looked like it was thrilling.
I have been thinking a lot about the role of nostalgia in this piece and I’m almost certain it’s all uber-analog. There is no trickery here. There is the most….familiar of creatures, if not authentic (a subject I will blog on much more in the future.) In many ways this is a “memory” piece, though most of the history that is narrated is constituted by a fragmentation of memory and imagined memories, those images that are in our minds as history but perhaps not ours, perhaps not real, perhaps inspired by the memory of another or something we thought we knew somehow. There is no solid history to be reclaimed anyway, not really, not in this story anyway. He’s in throws of despair, like those boys racing down the hill, articulating the emotion in whatever way possible, regardless of ownership. This is the MOMENT and history will boy to that. This is the history and it should articulated accordingly, with scraps, with glimpses, with the relics of the (any) past. The various pasts I have described- real, imagined, imaged, borrowed, stolen and possibly forgotten. The artifacts of a childhood. A marriage. A career. The toys from our various live that belong to another era…
What do the relics of a fake history look like? And how can they also signal a past that belongs, chronologically, in the past for all of us (or, in other words, how to signal to my audience old-timey without being so specific that anything seen can be (mis)taken for “real.”)
Paper.
My starting point is this charming book Paper Puppetpalooza by Norma Toraya:
Norma Toraya outlines in a clear way with great illustrations how to make various moving paper puppets. There are masks here, stick puppets, marionettes, and all very approachable. I don’t know yet how any of this fits into my work but it’s already sending up redflags.
Sarah Muirhead
I have reluctantly started work on “The Hard Man” project. Other projects- more pressing projects- are hanging over my head. But I am too excited about the work to drop it completely. At this point I’m brainstorming techniques that might be right for the peice and collecting visual inspiration.
I have come across these wonderful paintings (photograph?) by artist Sarah Muirhead. I was sketching a potential papier mache puppet for the central character/narrator and getting no where. I realized that the hard man is within but the man telling this story, the man who is doing the battling (I don’t know his name yet) he mustn’t reflect physically what lurks beneath. There is no room for stereotypes in this piece. So here I was trying to draw in two dimensions what will be a three dimensional figure but couldn’t capture the muted emotional decrepitude that will define this creature- a murky stillness that these images capture beautifully.
My first bits of visual inspiration for this narrator.
Review of The YelloWing
From Neil Cooper’s review of New Works New Worlds Festival at the Arches, published July 6 2009 in The Herald. At the festival Julia Taudevin and I premiered our collaboration “The YelloWing.” We’ll move into further development in the fall before a tour around Scotland with the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival:
October 3, 2009 at The Netherbrow, Edinburgh
October 4, 2009 at Eden Court, Inverness
October 13, 14, 15 & 16th CCA, Glasgow
“There have been many stage versions, for instance, of Charlott e Perkins Gilman’s pioneeri ng novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, which so deftly captured the 19th-century experience of a woman incarcerated after being declared mentally ill. Julia Taudevin and Amanda Monfrooe’s one-woman play, The YelloWing, is a 21st-century response to its source material that suggest things haven’t changed much over the last century or so. Taudevin plays a woman who at first glance has it all; a high-powered career and an ice-cool demeanour, all wrapped up in a little black dress to die for. Once back in what turns out to be some kind of institution, however, the brittle façade crumbles in a torrent of histrionics as she attempts to tear down the walls that confine her. As silhouettes of caged birds conjured from the woman’s imagination flicker on the wall, the voice of her husband at the other end of the telephone backs her further into a corner.
As Taudevin’s character lets rip physically, mentally and every which way, it’s impossible to recognise the “little goose” at the start of the play, such is her increasingly extreme unleashing of what may be a misunderstood form of post-natal depression. While still a work in progress, there’s plenty of dramatic meat to grab hold of in a piece set to be developed further for an autumn tour supported by the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.”
