THE PUPPET'S ART

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 144, 20 June 1931, Page 23

THE PUPPET'S ART

There is a renaissance of the marionette.;" Thb puppets are invading new ■fields; they arc deserting vaudeville and sotting themselves up in the art theatres.^ AIL over tho world < they are. receiving'new acclaim and playing new roles,--writes -Meyer Levin in the "New York Times." Hero in the United States the field of tho marionette grows by leaps and bounds. Books of puppet plays and directions for producing them appear; a research foundation grants a scholarship for the study of the history of marionettes; in two universities there are courses in puppetry; in Los Angeles movie stars come to see themselves caricatured by cpllege-bTed marionettes manipulated by a group of Yale puppeteers; in New York a dozen professional and scoros of amateur companies have sprung up. In Europe also the marionette is winning new ■ laurels. In Paris a <*roup of painters, writers, and sculptors has established a modern experimental marionette theatro called the Are-en-Ciol. In Pilsen and in Prague theatres have been built exclusively for the showing; of puppets;, in. Czechoslovakia alone 2000 puppet companies are listed. To the great councils of tho nations to the League of Nations and the World Courts-there is now added an international marionette union, called "Unima." For its slogan some- wit has suggested, "Marionettes, ot ■ the world, unite! Yon havo nothing to lose but'your strings." . This unique congress was held recently Jn Liege. For four days puppets from the United States, England, France, Germany, Czecho-Sloyakia, Switzerland, and Japan followed one another on the stage in a continuous festival ot marionette plays. This convention will be repeated at Essen this year, ana it is- planned for the Chicago's World's Fair in 1933. , The renaissance of the marionette may have received its impulse in Gordon Craig's enunciation of the theory of the "actor as marionette. From that theory emerged the "marionette as actor." Some point out that

REVIVAL OF MARIONETTE

a mechanistic world finds that the marionetto theatre is most expressive of its temper, that the niarionotto is tho machine actor of the machino age. Yet it is false to consider the niarionctto only as machine. Human dancers, with such numbers as tho "Dance of t.ho Wooden Soldiers," have spread the notion that tho marionette's movement is precise, automatic, staccato. But no marionette coula ever be as wooden as a hnraau actor imitating a marionette.

Tho marionette is reborn of our times rather, because there has come about a general liberation of tho arts, and particularly of the theatrical arts. Artists seek for .new materials,, new mediums in which to express a new age; they find them or invent them. Tho marionette is partly found, partly newly invented. ■ For the entire modern emphasis in tho theatrical arts is upon the general harmony of a production; the director, and not the star actor, is the chief creator. The marionette theatro is .the director's heaven. For ouco ho can do everything exactly as ho likes. No matinee idol personality will protrude to interfere, with the general pattern of. the production. . It is not an insignificant ilum- in the career of a director like tho Russian, Meierho.ld, that much of his early work, was experimentation with marionettes. Ho turned to tho human theatre only to impose upon tho human actors the technique ho had learned from marionettes. His company is regarded as the most significant in the modern theatre world. ' Though Meierhold went from the marionette to- the human theatre", another' Russian director, Stareviteh-, gave up .the human theatre in order to devote himself entirely to making motion pictures with puppets. .. '"..''■._ ": Of course, . the marionette theatre will remain a .minor form) though it will serve more and more- as a means of expression to people" with a general creative talent as a laboratory of theatrical, art and as a means of porform-nnee-for tho fanciful; tho extravagant, the poetic, the non-realist play.