Here is an article from the Toronto Star’s Stephen Marche (a novelist and culture columnist). He disusses the recent rise of puppetry into mainstream media!
Toronto Star Article dated November 14th, 2009.
“The reappearance of puppets in our culture has been swift and sudden. Only 10 years ago, John Cusack’s depressed and impoverished puppeteer from Being John Malkovich was an icon of slovenly failure. When Catherine Keener’s character meets him in a bar, she asks “What do you do?” He replies, “I’m a puppeteer,” and she immediately hollers, “Cheque, please!” Back then, puppetry represented a combination of extreme dedication on the part of the artist and total social irrelevance. (No doubt embodying Charlie Kaufman’s tortured feelings about his own craft.) Kaufman and everybody else at the time were willing to accept puppetry as the definitive example of outmoded art. No way that same joke would fly today.
The puppet has become the foremost means of resisting the mainstream – a way of reacting against mass-produced, technologically driven, personality-obsessed celebrity culture. But puppetry has also come to dominate the mainstream it seemingly stands opposed to. The 40th anniversary of Sesame Street – the show that provided several generations with a puppet-filled childhood – has coincided with the release of Where the Wild Things Are, a film which added huge, weird talking stuffed monsters to the children’s classic. The cultural tide is ebbing, as it periodically does, back to the past, and grownups want to watch the things of their childhood: stories about bespectacled wizards, Transformers, and now puppets. The beauty of puppet nostalgia is that it isn’t limited to any particular decade. Puppets belong neither to the ’60s nor the ’70s nor the ’80s. They belong to everybody’s childhood equally. They remind everybody of a kinder, simpler world.
Which is why puppets can serve artists as well as entertainers, high art as well as children’s movies. Canada is quickly becoming a hotbed for art puppetry. Just last week Ronnie Burkett – a name by this point synonymous with “genius puppeteer” – won the Elinor and Lou Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. He takes home a big cheque, but the best feature of the Siminovitch Prize is that the winner gets to allocate a further $25,000 to an up-and-comer in his or her field. Burkett took a long time to select his protégé before settling on avant-garde Montreal puppeteer Clea Minaker, who often works with shadows, and has been known to provide accompaniment for performances by indie pop singer Feist. Apparently we live in a world in which there are many different Canadian avant-garde puppeteers to choose from. That fact makes the world seem like a brighter, better place to me.
Puppets are spreading to other performance genres too. The biggest cultural event of this fall in Toronto was Robert Lepage’s staging of Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Other Short Fables for the Canadian Opera Company, a performance that combined vocal virtuosity with hand shadows and Vietnamese water puppetry. The effect was overwhelming – contemporary and primitive simultaneously. It made the Four Seasons Hall, in all its slick modernity, seem like a cave whose audience huddled together to watch the patterns of a flickering fire against the wall as they would have done 20,000 years ago. Throughout the performance I saw, the audience was gasping with pleasure. They were gasping at tricks with shadows and carved wooden dolls.
Puppets can be pure indulgence as well as aesthetic challenge – Avenue Q just ended its run on Broadway after six years and moved off-Broadway, where it continues to fill theatres. The ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s 2008 Christmas special drew 6.6 million viewers, becoming the most-watched telecast in Comedy Central history. In 2008 he sold more than $19 million worth of tickets, making him the most successful stand-up that year. Not just the most successful puppet act – the most successful comedy act.
The key to Dunham’s success is that his show moves as far as possible from the cutting edge. His puppet characters are all stereotypes – a grouchy old white man named Walter, an angry, bumbling dead terrorist named Achmed, and Dunham’s “manager,” Sweet Daddy D. He actually tells jokes with his puppets – a comic format that disappeared nearly 50 years ago – and his are of the tepidly risqué and non-threatening variety that might warm up a Kiwanis club dinner. How did Achmed the Dead Terrorist die? “Premature Detonation.” Grumpy Walter thinks his house is haunted. “Why?” “My wife is there.” And so on. Dunham’s old-fashioned material mirrors his old-fashioned medium. In a world dominated by performers like Lady Gaga, who is more or less a human puppet, it is a relief to encounter Jeff Dunham, who hides himself behind his little dolls.
No doubt it will horrify Ronnie Burkett and Clea Minaker to hear the comparison, but their appeal derives from the same source as Dunham’s. All have chosen an art form that, while immensely popular, runs deliberately against the current of the mainstream. With Burkett in particular, the beauty of the experience is its detailed handcraftedness. In the case of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, the shadows that tell the songs’ stories are literally handcrafted, making foxes and shifting cat’s eyes and doves out of the fingers of the performers. This is artisanal art – like Quebec cheeses or vegetables from a farmer that you know.
The brilliant conceit of the COC’s production was to combine the inherently humble art of puppets with the most grandiloquent and self-aggrandizing art ever invented, the opera. (Sopranos, unlike puppeteers, tend not to be self-effacing. They like to have desserts named after them.) The combination of opera and puppets was like mixing uppers with downers, red wine with cocaine. In other words, a mighty good time.
One question did remain at the end of the opera, however: Whom were we applauding? The singers and performers were the ones bowing. Let them pretend, I guess. Most of us, I’m sure, were cheering for their mute wooden counterparts.”
Siebenstein ist der Titel einer der erfolgreichsten deutschen Kinderserie mit. Die Serie wird seid 1989 im ZDF und KI.KA. ausgestrahlt!
Two days ago the 
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