Article in The Puppet Notebook, 2018

Voicing the puppet: animation and opera

Cunning little Vixen, 1996. Vixen and Gamekeeper.

After a short introduction into the history of opera and puppetry (touching on two representative examples from the repertoire), I focus on the way I have been using puppetry throughout my career as stage director of opera and music theatre.  Examples from early opera repertoire are followed by two examples of more recent repertoire, where I have used the agency of puppets to foreground specific elements of the staging. I conclude with a heartfelt recommendation to pursue further the combination of music, puppetry and the stage, both in new creations as well as in the repertoire that forms the canon of opera practice worldwide.

            Perhaps the best-known and most effective example of the singing puppet in the operatic repertoire can be found in Offenbach’s marvellous Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881). In the first act, the title role falls in love with a singing contraption shaped as a beautiful woman. Offenbach’s rare genius, exploiting the musical aspect to fulfil its comic-dramatic function makes the automaton falter just before it reaches the end of the first verse.  The mechanism has to be rewound before she can finish the high soprano coloratura aria.  The voice type Offenbach chose for this aria is without question the most adequate: everybody who has witnessed a good high coloratura soprano performing live on stage will have undergone the slightly unearthly sensation this produces; it’s almost as if it is not the actual person who is producing the sounds, it’s hard to believe that a person is physically able to be in control of such artifice. This opera being difficult to stage and expensive to produce, I have only been able to see a handful of staged versions of it, but so far I have never seen a stage director who chose to use an automaton to perform (with the singer hidden somewhere in the set or the wings): it’s always the singer herself acting out the aria as if she were a mechanical device.

            Perhaps the most interesting piece in the operatic repertoire making use of puppets, is de Falla’s magical El Retablo de Maese Pedro (1923). In this case, the composer turns to the opposite device as compared to Offenbach: instead of one singer performing as a puppet, the whole opera (based on an episode from the second part of Don Quijote) is performed by puppets with the singers together with the instrumental ensemble in “the pit”.[1] This is all the more surprising, as the dramatical situation is in fact depicting Don Quixote as part of a larger audience watching… a puppet play being performed by Maese Pedro and the story-teller, the Trujamán. An operatic mise en abyme. Although de Falla stipulates that the characters of Don Quixote, the Trujamán, and Maese Pedro (amongst others that do not sing), have to be performed by life size puppets watching the performance of the smaller puppet-play, the standard way of staging this opera is through the singers physically performing their roles themselves while watching the smaller puppet-play. The subject of the puppet-play is a heroic medieval epic and has to be staged in an appropriate technique (Sicilian type rod puppets for example). Quixote watching the puppet-play is drawn into the epic so completely that in the end he believes that there is a real battle going on and he decides to participate and take on the enemy army of puppets singlehanded.  When I staged the opera myself in the early 80’s, I also decided to have the singers playing their roles. But throughout the opera, the puppet types used in the puppet-play developed into larger than life-size and the final battle that Don Quixote delivers is with Spanish traditional gigantes y cabezudos, the huge puppets that are still parading the streets of Spanish cities and villages on certain festive occasions.

            Opera and puppetry go back a long way; examples from the 17th century, the age in which opera was invented, are documented, continuing well into the 18th and 19th centuries. Especially linked to comedy, satire, and parody, its combination has mostly been restricted to popular entertainment, but in the first quarter of the 20th century it began to interest composers and librettists as an artistically challenging medium on its own. The puppet was discovered as a poetic as well as dramatic agent, just as it has been exploited for centuries in other cultures (India, South East Asia, China, West and Central Africa). Its close relation to music, again as exploited for centuries in the cultures aforementioned, was discovered, leading to experiments and new ways of integrating puppets and music, and besides De Falla, composers like Hindemith, Satie and others throughout the 20th century (Britten, Honneger, Krenek, Smetana) were inspired to write for puppets. In 2009, l’Institut International de la Marionnette published a theme issue of Puck, La Marionnette et les Autres Arts on opera and puppets, highlighting especially the latest trends in composing opera with puppetry.[2]

            Towards the end of the last century, the arrival of the new media has enlarged the scope of choices immensely, and a number of artists and companies have integrated a range of media besides and sometimes beyond puppetry for their productions. The names of Wilson and especially Kentridge come to mind, but they are not exceptions: companies like Hotel Modern, Duda Paiva Company (NL) and others (Facing West Shadow Opera, USA, Thalia’s Compagnons, DE) are exploring a type of visual theatre where media, puppetry, music and live action go hand in hand.

            There is another field however that I have explored throughout my career as a stage director of opera and music theatre: integrating puppetry into repertoire that in the first place has not at all been intended for puppets.[3] I find that the combination of singing voice and puppet mutually reinforce each other’s strengths and succeeds in creating a universe where the singing voice seems to fit organically. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the singing voice focuses uniquely on one specific element of human expression, isolating the (singing) voice and turning it into the principle means of expression, almost separating it from the rest of the performer. In a similar way the puppet focuses on the somatic element of human expression, isolating movements as expressive agents. Focusing on voice and movement in this way means that both can meet in the realm created by music and thus transform into a new unity, where the relative (un)importance of the words opens the possibility for non-logocentric and very effective expressive actions.

            Especially when dealing with earlier repertoire (17-18th centuries) I will often take puppetry into consideration as an effective agent to become part of the dramatic action. For the triptych of Cavalli opera’s I staged in the 90’s, I regularly employed puppets. One example will suffice: In La Calisto, perhaps Cavalli’s masterwork to Faustini’s poetic and amusing libretto, the title role, a nymph belonging to Diana’s following, gets seduced by Jupiter disguised as Diana. When Juno finds out about her husband’s infidelity, she punishes Calisto by turning her into a bear, and hands her over to the Furies to devour the creature. I had conceived the whole opera to take place in a world populated by a colourful combination of diverse strata of youth (sub)culture. In the final act, the transformation of Calisto into a bear was operated through a quick sequence where the soprano playing Calisto was instantly replaced by a particularly cute teddy bear. The Furies, dressed in an attire inspired by punk and gothic examples, proceeded in tearing the teddy bear apart to the horrified shrieks of the audience, proof that the agency of a puppet can result in being more effective than that of an actor. Puppets had been introduced early on in the staging: already in Calisto’s entry aria the soprano shot arrows into the clouded baroque sky, hitting small winged dolls dressed as Cupids that crashed out of the sky onto the stage floor.

            The Shakespearean type of dramaturgy of mid- 17th century opera, setting off comic situations next to dramatic ones, combining different genres within one narrative, mixing the sublime with the banal, offering a non-realistic universe where gods change sex and marry mortals (a universe where gender is extremely fluid anyway), is particularly suited to a multidisciplinary approach that includes puppetry and other media. Music is the one element that holds together all these disparate entities.  Through music, personified Beauty and Sensuality can communicate with the goddess of love herself (L’Egisto, 1643), an adolescent rural boy express his bewilderment when visiting a big city for the first time (L’Ormindo,1644), or two immortals discuss the qualities of a good-looking nymph (La Calisto, 1651). The strict division between opera seria and opera buffa that settled itself on the baroque and rococo stages during the latter part of the  century, leaves the director with less freedom to create such a motley universe, but from Händel to Mozart I have found many occasions where I could draw upon the strengths of puppetry.

The 20th century repertoire has provided me with fruitful further occasions to integrate puppets seamlessly into opera productions. An obvious choice to integrate puppetry (albeit surprisingly, I have so far not encountered a comparable example) is Janáçek’s Cunning Little Vixen (1924), which I staged in 1996. The opera has been scored for roles sung by humans as well as roles sung by animal characters. The composer himself proposes which singer should double which animal, so I found it completely logical to present the animal in the guise of a puppet, manipulated by the singer who corresponds with it. The type of puppet used was obvious from the beginning: as their main action is singing, we needed to use puppets with a beak that could be manipulated to synchronise with the musical phrase. As Janáçek composed his operas in a singing style that is closely modelled on speech, the coordination of the puppet by the singer proved not so hard to master: being unfamiliar with the language helped the singers to be very aware of the movements that the singing puppets had to produce, as each singer had had to prepare their role meticulously before the stage rehearsals by going through the libretto syllable by syllable with their language coach. There was only one singer in the cast who was a native speaker of Czech (the baritone who sang the Forester), and even he had to work on the specific dialect Janáçek uses for this opera.

                                      The Badger operated by the singer playing the Priest

The Vixen and the Gamekeeper could have interactions on a much more poetic level than otherwise would have been possible. The Vixen singer manipulating the Vixen puppet herself, does open the possibility of a set of interactions on separate levels of theatrical (ir)reality, completely in line with Janáçek’s own intentions: any clear distinction between a young woman (coveted by all the men in the opera) and the Vixen must remain an arbitrary one.

            The opera contains many more instances where puppetry points the way: the lovely second act chorus of the Voice of the Forest and the ballet of the animals at the end of the act was staged with the chorus members all dressed and moustached as the composer himself, and carrying stuffed real animals in their hands, on their shoulders, on their heads and the like, all these elements together adding to the creation of a universe very close to the original cartoons on which Janáçek based the libretto of this delicious opera.

                                     Chorus members: animal gossip, towards the end of the second act

For my last production with Dutch National Opera Academy (2016) I again integrated puppetry, this time to create a very different but equally imaginary universe. Hanna Kulenty’s Mother of Black Winged Dreams (1995) is a stark portrayal of a young woman in a crisis, a conflict of multiple personalities competing for domination. Paul Goodman’s dark and dense libretto asks for a protagonist who is portrayed through a quartet consisting of two singers and two actresses.

Entrance of two of the protagonist’s four alter ego’s           Disguised alter ego threatening the protagonist

Puppetry and masks provided me with the right kind of expressive tools to bring out the psychiatric qualities inherent in this opera. The whole piece takes place in the mind of the protagonist. The soundscape accompanying the voices alternating between speaking and singing conjures up a desolate landscape where the lonesome protagonist loses herself and crashes between conflicting forces that can materialise in unexpected guises.

Entrance of an alter ego of the male character                               Trying out creatures

But the puppets could equally provide a lyrical counterpoint of great beauty to the violent conflicts going on.

These examples can serve as illustrations of the wide range of potential uses for puppetry on the operatic stage. When discussing puppets, I’m of course not talking exclusively about miniature creatures like animated dolls: puppetry can cover the whole field from the extremely realistic to the completely abstract, and it is just this quality that makes it so suitable for opera. The perspectives puppets can add to stage actions supported by music are manifold. Puppets are able to go beyond the real and thus open a wealth of possibilities to transcend the limits of the physical and material world. In opera especially, where music and movement are inextricably entangled, puppets can function in the purest way possible: puppet behaviour can operate detached from psychological justification. A puppet motivates its actions simply by its urges, nothing else. Even if the puppet is not shaped as an anthropomorph or a zoomorph it is activated through its urges. Audiences accept this without looking for an explanation: a puppet is a creature whose ontology is never questioned. Perhaps that is the reason why music seems to be its natural habitat and why puppets blend in effortlessly with actors whose urges make them sing instead of speak .

[1] it being a chamber opera, not conceived for the proscenium arch stage, it was never intended for a pit. The première took place in the famous  salon of the Princesse de Polignac, who had commissioned the piece.

[2] Brunella Eruli (ed): Puck, la Marinnette et les Autres Arts. L’Opéra des Marionnettes. Charleville-Mézières 2009: Inst. Int. de la Marionnette

[3] I will not discuss the type of puppet shows like the traditional one in the Marionnettentheater Münicher Künstler, where repertoire opera productions in miniature are staged,  with marionettes performing to pre-recorded music. These concentrate on an imitative reproduction of what I’d like to define as pre-conceptual opera productions.