At the practice of The Sprite of The Salt Deep , a recently staged life-size puppet production at David Hall in Fort Kochi, director Shubhra Nayar is encouraging actors to imagine an incongruity—“You are a line obsessed by becoming a circle,” she says, helping actors slip into a new idiom of puppetry. “Puppetry is always an engagement with a non-human form or an exaggerated human form. There is magic in something that is not real. In life-size puppet productions, actors have to borrow the puppet form as their own and remove their identity. Once that happens they become the characters,” explains Shubhra, who started her theatre outfit Tirasila Theatre Practice (TTP) five years ago.
The challenge actors face in this form of puppeteering is the need to meld their identities with that of the puppet or ‘life’ with ‘form’. The experiment does not end there. The audience too, interestingly, has a responsibility of nurturing and keeping the puppets alive and hence turns interactive partly by default and partly by direction.
Shubhra studied theatre design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where she did set and costume design for contemporary dance. One of the big challenges presented to her was to pre-design free size costumes for 40 dancers, which had to be fitting. “I like to work within some constraints as that brings out something new,” she says. In Aduni and the Water Tutu, her debut production, Shubhra began with a conventional setting but veered towards a more interactive form in The Sprite . The play shifts between indoors and the garden with the puppets and the audience parading in a space that heightens theatrical exchange.
The walking life-size puppets inspire wonder and awe. Shubhra designs and sometimes makes them too, being fastidious about the facial details. “I am particular about textures and colours and work closely with carpenters,” she says. Her inspiration comes from global practices in this field, from forms like the Japanese Bunraku, Wayang Golek Rod Puppetry, Wayang Kulit, Tolpaavkoothu (shadow puppetry) and Carnival style Bamana puppets of Mali.
On the direction side, Shubhra works with actors helping them fuse with the puppets to a point that they begin identifying with the character.
She begins with encouraging actors to do breathing exercises. The audience too participates under direction, making continual eye-contact with the action.
“If the audience does not give it breath, the puppet will die,” says Shubhra, who has begun working on the second edition of the play to be held at the Kerala Museum of Art and History in the city in August.
