THEATRE: David Le Page
IN a world where dizzying entertainment media are evolving towards the even more dazzling prospects of on-line virtual reality, it’s tempting to pity the puppeteer. No matter what his or her skill, how, one is forced to wonder, could puppetry compete with the spectacle of such technological visions?
The answer, in a word, is Sunjata. More an elemental force than theatre in any familiar sense, it is an utterly extraordinary production by Amoros et Augustin and Groupe Ki-Yi Mbock that sweeps the observer into the heart of a mythical reality. Part of the African International Puppet Theatre Festival at the Johannesburg Civic, this French/Ivorian production is staged in the Tesson Theatre, where a huge tan screen now marks the front of the stage. A circular aperture opens in the middle of it to reveal three or four more screens lowered to different heights behind it.
Lights placed behind the screens stain the tan with patches of yellow. To one side are two drummers and a man with a synthesiser.
The lights dim to the level of an ancestral dawn, and the spirits awake. Grotesque shadows with gaping, toothy mouths, bulbous eyes and jagged outlines pitch and yaw and sway on the screens. They look rather like the temple carvings Erich von Daniken would have us believe represent ancient astronauts. The drums thunder, the synthesiser fills the atmosphere with the chitter of insects, and Ivorian voices rise and fall in song. We are in the ancient kingdom of Mandingo, among the spirits of its inhabitants as they re-enact an eternal drama.
A cacophony of voices rises. We hear the words of Maghan Kenfata the lion king, his wife Sogolon the water buffalo woman, and their people. Sogolon conceives and gives birth to an infant, Sunjata, heir to the throne.
After seven years of life Sunjata is still unable to walk. His shape hangs upside down in a coloured circle on the screen, perhaps the womb he has not really escaped. His father appoints him a minstrel and dies. Voices mocking the cripple grow, and Sunjata’s half- brother, a stammering fool, becomes king.
The techniques used to create the shadows vary. Sometimes they are hard, black silhouettes, at other times coloured and transparent. At times dancers emerge between the screens to cavort with puppet stencils in each hand, their legs flying out at Shivaesque angles.
Eventually Sunjata learns to walk, the imprisoning circle disappears, and sturdy legs seem to straddle the kingdom. But he is forced into exile, and watches as his father’s realm descends into chaos and is overrun by the neighbouring king of Sosso, Soumaoro Kante. Later he returns to confront the invader in battle and defeat him.
The story is not complicated but rings with archetypal strength. The fascination of the production is more in the beauty of the savage shapes and their expressive power. When Sunjata’s mother dies, his quivering shape is a perfect cross-section of grief; the spear that penetrates Soumaoro Kante releases a visible spark of life in a moment of exquisite power. Only the ending of this spectacle is uncertain, like a leaf circling unevenly to the ground. But by then, Sunjata seems like a live thing understandably resentful at being put to
Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s a phrase coined by Richard Wagner and still used in the German world. Loosely translated, it means “consummate or ultimate art form”. It’s the word Austrian performer Airan Berg uses to describe the heights he feels are reached by puppetry in its most eloquent parabolas.
Berg and fellow artist Martina Winkel of Theater Ohne Grenzen are performing Mordsgaudi, or Fatal Fun, at the Puppet Theatre Festival. They’re not specialist puppeteers, but the characters they have chosen to animate in this series of bizarre cameos on racism do not demand the skills of experienced manipulators.
For the world Berg and Winkel have chosen as their stage is a kitchen table — decked in a red gingham cloth and inhabited, naturally, by spoons (spoons are the most abominable racists, you know), and knives and forks, fruit, vegetables and other implements. These are the characters in this drama of undisguised prejudice and hate: a ruthless critique of racism that uses obviously Austrian points of reference, yet which has a universal resonance.
Fatal Fun begins with an array of desperate immigrants — coffeebeans — entering Austria, where they end up being processed by the “mills of justice”, a coffee- grinder. But it is not long before the ugly face behind the bland facade of heartless bureaucracy is revealed. Yes, it’s the spoons. “Germans of the Alps have a right to defend ourselves against vermin, leeches, lice!”
And who are the vermin, leeches and lice? Pretty much everyone who isn’t Aryan Austrian. Asians, Jews, niggers, gypsies, Turks, all are part of the despised plague. And if that isn’t bad enough, now the Slavs are swarming on the borders. “The Russians are coming!” goes the frantic cry. But never fear. The master race triumphs, and in a moment these rejected sausages fly miserably through the air.
The accompaniment to this blizzard of events is the voices of Winkel and Berg, who sing, chant, recite, speak and quote non-stop, often battering out a percussive accompaniment on pots and pans. Sometimes the percussion is synchronised to impacts between far smaller implements, a trick which wonderfully amplifies the miniature drama.
“Puppets are created three times”, says Berg — by the person who makes them, the person who manipulates them, and the person who watches them. More than the ferocity of its contempt and the clarity of its conscience, the genius of Fatal Fun is the amount of creating it leaves up to its audience. And of course, it pricks the imagination: one is left wondering what a certain pillar of the right might learn from his overworked and oppressed underpants, if he would but listen.
Fatal Fun is in the Pianola Bar at the Civic at10pm tonight and tomorrow, and on Sunday at 6pm; Sunjata will be staged tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm at the Tesson Theatre