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Dateline: 26th October, 2009
Suspense London Puppetry Festival Suspense, a London-based puppetry festival opening at the end of the week, promises as much to stimulate the mind as to entertain the heart and the imagination. For those who think that puppetry for adults must be quirky smut - a marionette orgy of Avenue Q colliding with Puppetry of the Penis - something enriching and surprising is in store. The festival is the brainchild of Peter Glanville, who during his tenure as Artistic Director of The Little Angel Theatre has been keen to develop the range of works for an adult audience and has reflected this in the programming. In 2007 the Little Angel-RSC collaboration Venus and Adonis was a sell out with audiences of an older demographic, and the subsequent success of Puppet Grinder Cabaret, "a mixture of live puppetry and film animation alongside a funky young stand-up", proved a winning formula for a wider audience as did the first season of work for adults earlier in 2009. Not just stringing alongSuspense is the first festival of puppet theatre to take place in the capital in over twenty-five years and is planned to be a biennial event, that will stand tall when compared with more established fixtures such as The International Puppet Festival Ireland founded in the early 90s as part of Dublin's European Capital of Culture, and Edinburgh's Puppet Animation Festival, now it in its third decade. But with puppet theatre festivals now taking place from Scotland to Brighton, how does Suspense compliment and not compete with the rest? "We're not duplicating the work that they programme, that's partly it; a criterion was to present work that was new or relatively new. And we have a range of symposia and events which are unique to this festival ... We're bringing over TAMTAM from The Netherlands as part of an event looking at objects in performance, and members of the Philip Genty Company are leading a four-day workshop ...". The list of workshop events is impressive in its length and range but Peter Glanville is unboastful: "In some ways London is catching up!" But with artists from all over the country as well as abroad, no one can accuse it of being London-centric, and Glanville enthuses at the nationwide spread of talent, "Art form-wise this isn't something that's just happening in one small population: across the country there are companies and artists creating great work for adults". But the cross-section on offer is not just geographic as practitioners of a wide variety of techniques have been brought together for the festival. Paper theatre is represented by leading practitioner Alain Lecucq, whose Compagnie Papierthéâtre's Romeo and Juliet is one of the shows at the Little Angel Theatre. The Pleasance nearby houses Unpacked's multimedia experimental work in progress, Soap Soup's Sir Gregory's Hutch which combines puppetry and live performance, and Bric a Brac's Richard's Love in which the intricacy of shadow puppetry comes together with mask characters. Three further contrasting pieces are also to be seen at the Rosemary Branch: preceding Deep Time Cabaret, Horse + Bamboo's new show, is I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am, a piece which creates a period landscape using passages of composer Arnold Schonberg's voice and music with contemporary reportage. This is followed on each of the three evenings by a piece evolved from the INCUBATE programme called Sick of Love. A work in progress, this exploration of erotic love "deliberately confuses the senses" mingling the human and the inanimate. Experimentation of a different kind is to be found at new arts and performance space 'The Nave'. In this Grade II listed church building renowned company Indefinite Articles offer participants the chance to get hands-on, 'play with clay' and help build the story. It's not often adults have a chance to enjoy getting messy in public without having to be accompanied by their children, so this is an opportunity not to be dismissed! In fact with most full price tickets at £12.50 or less, it isn't hard to justify ceding to temptation and making a risky choice - or even a risqué choice. Exploding the mythUnlike many other cultures, the British seem all too willing to give up "childlike complicity with a show" as Gregory Doran terms it, hastily setting aside puppetry in the move towards adulthood and more exclusively adult entertainment. As mainstream theatre practitioners are catching up with what puppetry can do, one could even say finally catching up, the festival could be said to be capturing the zeitgeist in its raising the profile of puppet theatre amongst a broader audience. Peter Glanville said, "I am hoping we are getting to a point where puppetry is seen as just being part of the pallet, a part of the theatrical landscape. There's nothing extraordinary and actually there's nothing new about puppetry being used to create adult work ... so I hope that people [see] the festival in terms of contemporary theatre practice and what the possibilities are of engaging with puppetry. "Over the years puppetry has had a hard time, disenfranchised by theatre makers ... largely because lots of people still regard puppetry as being 'just for kids' and I'm hoping that finally the hammer will come down ... that myth will die. "I think people are recognising that the work can be really quite complex and also it can also be really grotesque. It can be something that is beautifully poetic or it can be something that is foul and filthy, and in some ways because you're working with objects or representations or through metaphor it allows you to go further ... with things that would be very difficult with actors. "That's what I think is so fascinating: it's got this incredible range of possibilities". Sandra Giorgetti Suspense London Puppetry Festival runs from 30th October to 8th November in seven venues across London. Information and booking at www.suspensefestival.com The Festival has been nominated for the Peter Brook/Equity Ensemble Award. More information at www.britishtheatreguide.info/news/emptyspace09-nom.htm
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