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| Puppeteers set to pull quite a few strings Bill Ward, Star Tribune When scores of the world's top puppeteers gather in St. Paul this week for Puppet Rampage 2007, it will not be Howdy Doody time. Instead, much of the focus at 50 workshops, 70-plus private shows and a handful of public performances will be on increasingly varied formats, new technological opportunities and risque material that is definitely not appropriate for puppetry's younger fans. Much of the fare will be family-friendly, some of it even retro. But it's unlikely that Shari Lewis or even Jim Henson would recognize the hero of "The Mother of All Enemies," coming Friday to In the Heart of the Beast's theater. Puppet protagonist Zaradoz is a "queer secular humanist Quaker Buddhist agnostic Arab-immigrant artist," said creator Paul Zaloom. "One of the event's major goals is to catch the imagination and attention of younger puppeteers and [a young-adult] audience," said Wayne Krefting, a Minneapolis resident and president of the Puppeteers of America. Krefting is quick to point out that Saturday's free street fest at Concordia University and the other public performances are copacetic -- "and entertaining, I hope" -- for kids of all ages. Going multimedia Puppets go back to ancient CChina, Egypt and Africa, and long have been an integral part of Native American ceremonial dances. They went somewhat underground in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, but re-emerged in Christian churches during the Middle Ages. "The word marionette," Krefting noted, derived from "a little Mary, because the most popular of the string characters in these Bible tales was Mary." There was little evol! ution un til the early years of television, when wooden marionettes, hand puppets and stop-action clay figures proved popular. In recent decades, Jim Henson's Muppets and Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit have delighted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, while shadow puppets have grown even more popular throughout Asia. In Minneapolis, the puppet theater In the Heart of the Beast has enjoyed 33 years of steady success with few resources, save an abundance of imagination, in crafting its outsized puppets and masks. The most recent trend, Krefting said, has been integrating puppetry into other art forms. Seamless examples range from Hollywood films ("Being John Malkovich") to local theater productions (Michael Sommers' Open Eye Theatre) to the Broadway hits "Avenue Q" and "The Lion King."Technology has helped individual puppeteers create their own music, use playback, be more innovative with lightweight materials," said Krefting. "There are only so many ways you can joint a marionette, but there are more fabrics and styles, and remote control is a lot better than when Jim Henson was first doing it with 'Fraggle Rock.' " At its heart, though, a lot of puppetry is still kid stuff, using the most basic of materials. Sommers puts on driveway shows around the Twin Cities; Krefting books performances in local parks in the summer and libraries year-round, and the local Shoestring Theatre Company recently delighted Fringe Festival audiences of all ages with "The Adventures of Can-Man!," a show using nothing but garbage for materials. Somewhere, Kukla, Fran and perhaps even Ollie are smiling. Bill Ward 612-673-7643 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
_______________________________________________ Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org) [email protected] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html http://macmmuf.org/mailman/listinfo/list_macmmuf.org
