The Object of My Affection

PUNCH Puppet Slam
Location: Galapagos Art Space
Cost: $5
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: Low to Moderate

April 26, 2006

“You can do it!” yells a female audience member encouragingly, as if to an athlete about to attempt a double axel. The object of her attention, Bolzo, is attempting to leap over progressively taller wooden planks in a sort of side show with a Germanic theme. Was her exhortation in vein, given that Bolzo is a red rubber ball?

Yes, that’s right. Controlled by a single string, Bolzo (which sounds, to my American ears, suspiciously like Bozo), is a marriage of marionette and minimalism, like what we might see if the artist who created “White Square” and “Black Circle” delved into puppets. (Sorry to be obscure, I had to look this guy up; I was hoping it was something with more instant recognition like “Van Gogh”). Bolzo, I should add, also has an inner life that can be inferred from his voice, a sort of baritone Swedish chef, that becomes more of an alto when anxious or exerting himself (himself? Should I use a pronoun? Oh the grammatical dilemmas presented by such rubbery androgyny). This is clearly the kind of vulnerability that earns many female, soft-hearted sympathizers for Bolzo.

Bolzo is one of several personalities to make their debut at PUNCH, a monthly "puppet slam" where artists experiment and try out their latest "puppet-flavored fare,” according to its curator, Gretchen Van Lente. PUNCH is held on the last Tuesday of every month at Galapagos Art Space. Van Lente's company Drama of Works had impressed me a few years ago with its innovative take on the Shakespearean gore-fest Titus Andronicus, and I was eager to find out what kind of work she was bringing to the series.

The voice in fact, comes from Bolzo’s maker, Nate Wilson, who is either making a clever statement on how little technical wizardry is needed to project humanity onto, well, rubber balls, or else…he is simply having a good time. The beauty of events like PUNCH is the fact we might as well give him credit for both. Admission is $5 at Galapagos, and no one need differentiate, at these early stages, on whether the puppeteers strutting their wares have exhausted the limits of their innovation within a ten-minute sketch, or whether they are on the verge of a three hour gesamkunstwerk.

Other performers on tonight's performance (April 25) are two contributions from Sarah Frechette that rely on music: a feisty marionette lip-sync and a lazy husband who is a spud, both literally and figuratively (entitled “Warning: To All Things Potatoe"). The program also includes a bit of shadow puppetry by Wilson and an excerpt from Die Hard, the Puppet Musical that seems to belong to the same oeuvre as fringe festival productions like Silence! The Musical and SUV The Musical.

One piece already on its way to an more fruitful afterlife is an excerpt from the upcoming Bride, created by Kevin Augustine and his company, Lone Wolf Tribe. Lone Wolf Tribe was the source behind the haunting 2003 production Animal, an invective against the future of gene therapy and the country’s obsession with antidepressants. It looks like we can expect more moral and spiritual messiness in Bride, billed as a riff on the Frankenstein legend. The teasingly brief excerpt forecasts the return of Augustine’s impressive anatomical virtuosity, as he mobilizes his creations with toes, legs and elbows. The presence of a much-bandaged and immobilized central character signals we can also expect more beautiful, sensitive, big-eyed foam puppets prone to injury, illness and other paths to harm's way.

Pathos, thy name is puppet.

If the sample from Bride plants more questions than it answers, than PUNCH is at least succeeding in whetting the audience’s appetite. Faster and looser than HERE’s Puppet Parlor (in which almost everything will be expanded upon into a larger show, whether it has the robustness to do so or not) PUNCH’s freewheeling cabaret aims to provide a "safe place for performers to experiment and play," according to Van Lente. The brainchild of Galapagos' artistic director Travis Chamberlain, PUNCH was inaugurated a year-and-a-half ago to fill a void, given the paucity of regular puppet cabarets in the New York City area. Although puppet theatre is the ideal medium to present flights of fancy that are too absurd, too fantastical or too perverse for naturalistic theatre, it requires a good deal of upfront investment, and the cabaret format provides a convenient intermediate stop between raw concept and finished product.

So Bolzo here is not one of the gesamkunstwerks. But the crowd has bought into the sheer ridiculousness, and the artist uses this fact to his advantage. As Bolzo balks at his seemingly Sisyphean task, his operator diagnoses the source of our hero’s lapsed performance in a Germanic accent: “Ladies and Gentleman; every night I give Bolzo a massage. But tonight I forget.”

I don’t really think I need to tell you what it looks like when a grown man gives a rubber ball a massage.