On 23rd-25th September in the Alanfowshi Culture Palace (قصر الثقافة الفروسي), Alexandria, 15 self-selected participants joined me for 3 days of workshops as part of the Alexandria International Theatre Festival.
Video: Reflections on Clown and Puppet workshop, AITF 2023. Image: Translator/performer Selina Sou, and performer Saïd Al-Ahmed.
Working with the group over three days gave me chance to see how their performances changed as they got used to working together and with me. It was also a chance to reflect on the combination of clowning and puppetry. Beyond comparing movement styles and the comic gap between human movement and puppet movement, I think we were able to experiment with different combinations of human, puppet and setting.
As Christopher Finch has shown in the beautiful book The Art of Walt Disney - from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom (2004) the 1940 animated version of Pinocchio already used actors to work out the movement of the animation. Layering backgrounds and small images and playing with scale are fundamentals in this genre. But exploring this with a group with varied backgrounds and skills is an opportunity to learn by your own mistakes and to establish a your own style. So far invention, starting with the character of participants and a DIY approach to animation have been key to the creativity and pleasure of running these workshops.
Picking up from the recent workshop in Itoshima, I aimed to expose the technical process, showing it layers and glitsches. This is the opposite of the realistic and smooth aesthetics seen in video games for instance.
Observer reports (Festival Facebook Page)
Day 1 - Body
I used the Spymonkey name game (in which you avoid being caught out by calling the name of another player) not only to wake everyone up mentally and physically, and to illustrates the body/mind conflict for performers working with impulse. The urge to call out your own name by mistake or to move when it's not your turn leads to lots of errors, bafflement, and so to laughter and free expressivity.
I have been using skipping for years too, after learning it with Guy Holland at Quicksilver Theatre and then Philippe Gaulier - but with the aim here of taking the rope away to illustrate movement with an imaginary rope, as if you are connected to other ropes/strings above.
The response to impulses and the attention given to the rope are a good foundation for then walking as an ensemble, leaping into any spaces between bodies, changing speed, and returning to a steady rhythm, with a strong focus both internally - being awake and self-aware - and on an external object.
When you work in pairs or trios you can't simply follow your own impulses and this is like skipping as a group: it's more demanding and it can be tiring. I tried to adapt an idea in which a leader pulls a follower around the space with imaginary strings, beginning with tugging and releasing gestures as a signal for a partner to move. This can become too fiddly and moves away from the scale of movement that is inspired by the rope. So it's useful to move this into a more distant puppeteering, in which the follower simply responds to kinaesthetic energy changes, or copies the shapes in the body of the leader.
Then this can lead into choreographic exercises, in which groups try to follow 'stories' with these games and exercises hidden within. At this point, my Alexandria group had started to move like rusty robots, pointing at imagary rainbows and leading their group through mimed doorways. So I had to insist on stronger lsitening on the part of the leader, and to allow the story to unfold rather than to anticipate or dictate what what going to happen.
For this workshop virtual space is understood as being like the Belly of the Whale. It's a space in which a puppet (Pinocchio) and human (Gepetto) meet - or where two animations meet, so the puppet is not limited by its strings or by the puppeteer. And it's a situation that these figures encounter each other as a surprise with comical possibilities. And finally there's a challenge to back to the material world - but how? This is where the mechanism of digital space is exposed.
Day 2 Layering
I talked with some people about the Chromavid app, to get ready for Day 2, while others practised group work. I am trying to reduce the visibility of task-setting, so that it feels like this technology is brought in spontanously as an option, rather than as the magic solution. I do the same with coaching individuals, chatting to them incidentally to plant ideas rather than give instructions.
We were able to produce some more complex material, like video shorts using puppet animation. I had limited technical resources and used Chromavid app to demonstrate chromakey on participants mobiles. Unless you have your own blue material for a backdrop, the app has limited efficacy but I included in the video a clip of the puppet in front of the building next to my hotel. I got it to work with a blue cloth background, but most participants would need more supervision to get this work on their own, enough to execute some ideas at home.
Day 3 Screen Sharing
I ask the group to storyboard and then I edit on the hoof, as quickly as possible, using the footage that can be gathered from the place in which the workshop happens. This can then be added to the outputs from different workshops to create a themed series of videos.
I was expecting more on the theme of the sea from Alexandria, but a walk through an abandoned fairground was also powerful. I went with the Polish theatre maker and pedagog Daniel Arbaczewski. The photos we took suggest we are in the scene in which Pinocchio gets drawn into the dark world of the carnival and circus. The fairground also appeared in an original interpretation of Hanzala's Journey, presented at the festival (The blog post about that production is here).
The knick-knacks in the taxi and the background music filmed by Saïd confirm this mysterious undercurrent in the idyllic seaside world. Saïd sent me this video short on Day 2, taken from the inside of a taxi. He was going to edit himself and the puppet in the shot with the aim of making us laugh. So he came up with the idea of an interaction with the driver (a puppet). When the driver looks to the right out of the passenger window, he sees a pedestrian running to keep up. The pedestrian runs so fast that they need to flap their arms and eventually they take off and fly ahead of the car.
If the connection with the audience and stimulus for laughter is the gaze, how does that correspond on screen, and ultimately in virtual realms? But who does the actor look at? The driver or the audience? Both of course, or to be more precise, a comic actor can feel the audience looking at him as he makes his choices. The driver can’t look at the audience but a double take might imagine the audience’s reaction.
In the virtual space this can be smoothed with tech. or in an open-style workshop you can expose each step. We established principles around failure through the beams game and skipping on the first day.
Our crude chromakey screen...
Day 2 - Space
We made puppets out of plastic bags and plastic straws. I was already worried about the amount of plastic bags in Alexandria. This was a cheap and quick way of creating a form, but it needs more consideration in future.
We worked on how to move as a group using Viewpoints sensitivities plus the idea of proximity or focus. That is, thinking of the viewpoint of the screen space and the place from which clownish characters enter we worked on guiding attention and listening out for the laughter and interest of the audience.
The narrative ideas started with the question "How do you get out of the belly (ie what do you do in the belly together" but a narrative was abandoned and replaced with Gaullier's term 'major/minor' in storytelling, to think about the relative focus given in a scene to the setting, to puppet and to the human actor, depending on the importance of the function of each in telling a story.
Conclusion
Back in the Grand Hotel, in the Smouah district of Alexandria, I watched The Gold Diggers, a 360 degree virtual reality immersive performance by the Puppentheater Zwickau. I was impressed with the feeling of being hostage to the Gold diggers, but still an observer, perching on a rock watching their greedy and brutal fight over gold. The human performers wear hairy body suits that are clearly foam and feature outsized feet, hands and heads, and so I enjoyed being in the creative make-do world of puppetry. At the same time I liked the ability of technology to transport me into a completely different world. I also remained in the hot yellow hotel room, bumping into the furniture as I swung my head and torso around to follow the action of the performance with my virtual headset.
Some final reflections on the workshop:
I am developing a new approach to leading workshops as I let go of my strict list of activities aligned to learning points and try to be more explicit with them about the potential direction of the workshop based on their responses. I want to invest in each individual, working from their starting points and motivations. This is because I have experienced this approach myself as a participant and found that it extinguishes the participant's internal monologue around whether or not they are good enough.
So, for instance this means spending more time on the phase of becoming familiar with their projects and accepting challenging questions as a good starting point for group discussion. And the outcome is less frustrating for the person with lots of questions and more productive for people who are able to contribute their own opinion. This sounds obvious but it’s not as easy as it sounds especially in the process of trying to steer the training in a particular direction, as the person who has been booked to ‘teach’.