Basil Twist: Symphonie Fantastique / Dodger Stages, NYC / ongoing
Mark Dendy: choreography for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / October 8, 11, 15, 18, and 21, 2004; April 5, 13, 16, 20, and 23, 2005
The idea of Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique is magical: You’re sitting in this small neo-Bauhaus black-box theater—one of five spaces at the new, ingenious Dodger Stages complex on West 50th Street. And you’re staring in anticipation at an oversize fish tank or, if you will, a Lilliputian aquarium. Its contents are concealed for the moment by the sort of lavish looped red curtain (or is it a picture or projection of one?) typical of yesteryear’s opera houses.
Up the curtain goes to reveal water (defined by clusters of giddy air bubbles) and its inhabitants. You’ve been promised puppets, and marionetteers—six of them, including Twist, and two swings—are indeed listed in the house program with impressive credentials such as training at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionette. You can even see a few of the strings and wires being used by the dexterous hidden manipulators. But this is no Punch and Judy, no Salzburg Marionette Theatre, no Muppets, no Bunraku. Twist is on the trail of abstract puppetry, and his “characters” are wisps of cloth, feathers, and tinsel strips.
The first puppet on is a smallish swath of white fabric that leads a turbulent life in its glassed-enclosed sea and seems to think it can fly as well. Watch it carefully. It will emerge as the show’s protagonist, a brave, optimistic little fellow with whom, I believe, the viewer is meant to identify. The personal-size sea will, accordingly, come to stand for the universe. For the sake of convenience, I’ll call our hero Salamander (Sal, on better acquaintance), since he often assumes the shape of one.
It turns out that Sal has a cluster of look-alike friends as well a capability to change color that gives him the air of a psychedelic chameleon. Alas, the trouble with Sal’s effects is that they could be rendered on video with no loss of impact or created electronically from scratch. I’m wondering if the several children in the audience recognize the difference between the live show they’re watching and the fare regularly served up to them on TV. I can see how the grown-ups might regard the performance as nothing more than a screen-saver with pretensions to Higher Things. Similarly, the intermittent bubble effects, though they have their charm, are duplicated and topped by many an exuberantly programmed public fountain, such as the one delighting and mesmerizing spectators ogling it from Greek-amphitheater bleachers at the newly constructed plaza fronting the Brooklyn Museum.
After running Sal through his repertoire, Twist introduces other players: feathery plumes (which shed a little, so that they enjoy an accidental afterlife) and other filaments, like thin, translucent ribbons. They’re ravishing, but by the time they’ve come and gone—certainly before they come again—the viewer may be admitting that it’s hard to engage with marionettes that don’t represent people or animals, if only in fantasy forms. Inanimate objects, animated though they may be by their keepers, are pretty much incapable of narrative and its offspring, drama—unless, of course, they’re anthropomorphized (as I’m guilty of doing, naming Sal). One-third of the way through the hour-long show, Twist’s material begins to look merely like eye candy, the idea of it far more compelling than the execution and the result.
No doubt Twist himself recognized the problem and, applying an obvious remedy, added the attention-getting element of apocalypse—or at least enough hints of it to keep his viewers alert. First he sets the scene, taking us to a midnight blue forest glowing with tiny specks of flickering light, as if it had been invaded by fireflies. Or is he, perhaps, showing us a single tree, bedecked with tinsel and inexplicably submerged in a dark lake? Beauty, mystery, and menace; the atmosphere serves as a prelude. From here on in, Twist counts heavily on the audience’s impulse to create story—and thus meaning—where none exists, at least at the literal level. The phenomenon is common. Most people can’t bear looking at things they can’t identify. Think of how often abstract painting, sculpture, and dance is greeted by a plaintive or hostile “What is it?”
Stubbornly enigmatic, Twist moves us to a shades-of-gray Nowheresville punctuated by hazy beams of light that suggest outer space and punches the action right up to Star Wars level. Small, brave Sal returns to thrash his way through the fuzzy, shifting crosshairs, attended in time by his loyal pals. The creature’s earlier idyll of indolent, graceful swimming that segues into ecstatic flight becomes a mere memory of calm before the storm. Swirling himself into a roll, Sal resembles an angry little cyclone. And now an ominous patch of inky threads invades the silvery space like a cancer, devouring or blotting out huge segments of the once-upon-a-time peaceable kingdom. Hope is not quite abandoned yet; the section concludes with the appearance of a portentous glowing speck surrounded by smoke, like a match ignited in darkness.
Next, a scene of vibrating cylinders. Remember Claes Oldenburg’s outsize soft sculptures of small, hard, everyday objects? Like that—if he’d done cigarettes. A pair of these flexible columns (in ironic pastel tints) invades the foreground from opposite sides like self-important opposing leaders, confronts but doesn’t take that fatal last step into combat. Each is then portentously seconded by a second. The threat comes to nothing. Generals and lieutenants retreat to their own sides only to repeat the inconclusive face-off. In the background, a close-packed line of them—let’s call them The People—trembles. It looks like politics as usual, but this stuff is punctuated by intermittent fires, green on one side, red on the other. And our innocent salamander beams straight into the conflagration and is destroyed.
And so it goes, the same basic elements used in increasingly agitated and elaborate ways, accompanied by Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, conveyed by a sound system evidently so primitive it has only two modes: OFF and VERY LOUD. I must say the music supports the visual antics, lending them a drama of danger, conflict, and bliss they might not otherwise convey so clearly.
Maybe it’s just me, subjected to too many excursions to the planetarium, first with small children my age, then with my own children, and then with my grands, but Twist’s show reminds me of those darkened-auditorium displays in which the nature of the universe is depicted in visuals that are essentially so abstract, I slip almost immediately into a stupor. Others have certainly reacted otherwise to Symphonie Fantastique. When the show was first done in 1998, it was all the rage with the downtown crowd and garnered both an Obie award and a Drama Desk nomination. And I haven’t given up on Twist. He’s preparing a new show, Dogugaeshi, based on esoteric Japanese puppetry traditions now threatened with extinction. Japan Society will present it November 18-23. Given my susceptibility to Japanese art and to puppetry, with its beguiling combination of the sophisticated and the ingenuous, it sounds like my kind of show.
The fall season in New York was full of puppet-driven productions, the most elaborate of them being the Metropolitan Opera’s new rendition of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Its mastermind was Julie Taymor—an opera director long before The Lion King made her name a household word—who was responsible for the overall concept, the costumes, and, with Michael Curry, the puppetry. Gregory Tsypin did the overbearing phantasmagoric sets. The puppet effects are a bit much, too. One patron hardly exaggerated when he claimed that the overload of visual stimuli prevented him from hearing the singing. Mark Dendy got the choreography credit. I’d be happy to follow the dictates of my job description and comment on his work—if only I could figure out what he did.
Nearly all of the movement interest belongs to the puppets, manipulated by an agile crew shrouded in black: an enormous dragon breathing fire (if not smoke) who nearly fells the princely hero, and requires at least ten deft attendants; a gaudy, avian flock fluttering on long willowy sticks to surround and tantalize the bird-catcher Papageno; a pack of polar bears (the best item in the show) that prove to be kites, inflating to full size and power as they’re guided aloft, cloth miraculously becoming flesh and muscle, then collapsing like melting marshmallow; and (unworthy of the occasion) a feast of flying food. Where did Dendy’s work come in? Was he responsible for the predictable patterns these objects create in the air? The delight, where it exists, lies in the objects themselves, not their traffic patterns. Presumably, Dendy choreographed the scene in which some absurdly long-legged birds, including several of the flamingo persuasion, offer a Vegas riff on Swan Lake, but this stuff is so routine, I wonder if some irony was intended, then only feebly resolved.
Throughout the production, the puppets, the costumes, and the sets conspire too blatantly to overwhelm the spectator. The puppet effects add to their sins by teetering on the edge of the Abyss of Cuteness, revealing a shameless cousinship with the world of Disney. As a dance critic, I found the most fascinating aspect of the evening to be the sight of human bodies going through pedestrian or theatrically stylized movements with only minimal visceral impulse and fluency, performing rote gestures while—as if emanating from another body entirely—the voice spoke worlds, rendering every idea radiant with feeling.
Photo credit: Carol Rosegg: Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique
© 2004 Tobi Tobias