A workshop slated for early October will make techniques of Bunraku , the 400-year-old Japanese puppet theatre, accessible to participants from the city. A major force in Indian puppetry, Anurupa Roy, will facilitate the workshop under the aegis of arts organisation Extensions Arts.
Roy is the artistic director of the Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, which has been at the forefront of contemporary puppetry in the country since 2006, and has toured the world with its productions.
What drew you to the Bunraku technique?
Japanese Bunraku is very precise. The chanters and shamisen musicians are always present on stage, and the movements of the puppets are very particular, perfectly calibrated to denote social parameters. They still perform 17th century texts.
Global puppeteers dispensed with much of the prescribed aspects of the form. What interested them was how three puppeteers controlled a puppet’s entire range of movements. I came across it when I was studying puppetry at Stockholm in 2001. In other forms, puppets are manoeuvred at different elevations or at a distance. We have such a close proximity to the puppet, at human height. The kind of articulation you can achieve is remarkable. It breaks down a gesture into every small movement, and you can replicate that in an inanimate doll, or even a piece of fabric, with a vocabulary that is complete in itself.
Are you able to bring in Indian elements?
We were looking for an indigenous movement vocabulary and in 2005, we came across Chau. The Purulia Chau is quite acrobatic, but the Seraikella and Mayurbhanj streams employ slow, precise movements and clean extensions of the limbs. That’s something we appropriated. We use a lot of realism, drawn from the rhythm and pace of everyday living. We use physical theatre principles and Kalaripayattu. In puppet school, I learned mime, and some of that grammar is seen in our works.
What about Indian puppetry?
I came to the form from the outside to the inside, so to say. Traditional practitioners have had access to years of knowledge, which they imbibe from a very young age in family set-ups devoted to a form.
What we discovered was that every single manipulator of puppets works with essentially the same principles, whether they are conscious about it or not. We work with many traditional puppeteers now.
The puppets are very sentient on stage, obviously. What is your relationship with them off stage?
It is the same powerful connect a musician has with an instrument. The show is not possible without the puppet. We are aware that we are not as important, we need to recede into the background. In other forms, actors and dancers can use their own bodies and become larger than their own physicality on stage. We are focused on becoming much smaller.
We are very careful with our puppets. Of course, they have names. Backstage, you could hear someone say, ‘I can’t find Lady Olivia’. Some of our puppets play different parts with a costume change, but a lot of them never change character. In About Ram , both Ram and Hanuman begin to embody one another. This is suggested in the Ramayana itself; we take the metaphor further.
Puppetry is often considered to cater to younger audiences.
We’ve just made The Mahabharata , which is totally not for children. It is an issue with producers, who expect that all our shows should be accessible to children. For people to realise that puppetry could be for adults as well, or adults only, it will take some time. Traditionally the performances were for adults. Children watched till late evening and went to bed. The adults would continue watching till sundown. In Kerala, it’s adults who watch the 2,000-year-old Tholpavakoothu form in Pallakad. In the end, the themes determine everything: how the puppets move, what is being represented.
The Mahabharata is a psychological drama. Very often, you don’t see an entire body on stage, just parts of it. These dismembered visuals, flitting between characters, can result in a very complex narrative, full of subtleties. It can also be very dark, like when Ashwatthama disintegrates and his demonic self emerges.
What kind of training has your team received?
Most of them have trained on the job. They have worked with me, and with Dadi Pudumjee of the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust. Our group has dancers who have worked with Astad Deboo. Some are sculptors, so many skill-sets are brought in by each member. Each project involves a small contained group, so there is a lot of sharing. We have 12 people in total, and not everyone works in every play.
Have you thought of setting up pedagogy for puppetry in India?
In 2018, we are looking to start our own puppet school. We have run master classes for four years, biannually, which have essentially been labs to determine the kind of training that could work in a school ethos. There is a real necessity for professionally trained puppeteers.
What are the conduits you create with other art streams?
We recognise that puppet theatre is a very collaborative form, since the plastic arts and the performing arts have already come together.
We have collaborated with Bharatanatyam and Chau dancers, with animators, writers, and theatre groups. The fact that our own artistes come from diverse backgrounds creates an active ferment for the pooling in of sensibilities.
We invite one guest artiste each year. Hamesha Samidha with the Jana Natya Manch and Palestine’s Freedom Theatre was an extension of that practice.
About Ram has been performed for 10 years now.
Our shows take different trajectories. Some ideas that are a little premature are kept in cold storage. Others are technically complex, and we don’t want to push them into the market.
About Ram is obviously a universal tale, which explains its longevity.
It’s a non-verbal piece with the visual appeal that works with both adults and children. The music and Vishal Dar’s animation plays a huge part.
What would you impart in your workshop?
The skills that we have unearthed have involved working with actors constantly. What they get out of it is a stronger articulation of anatomy. Actors work with their bodies intuitively. It is something they take for granted. To transfer gestures to an inanimate object allows them to observe themselves with greater clarity.
There is also the frugality of movement: how much to move. These exact, subtle ideas are invaluable to any kind of movement practitioner.
What is it that is so markedly different in a puppet performance?
The essential difference is what goes on in the audience’s head. An actor tries to convince the audience that he or she can become a character; the puppet attempts to convince us that it is alive. Its presence is a living metaphor that is communicated in the manner of an interesting duality. The audience knows the puppet isn’t alive, but they still invest themselves into its emoting.
Their grappling with this duality, their suspension of disbelief, is what makes puppet theatre so special.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
Anurupa Roy’s workshop: October 3 –8, 6 to 9 p.m., Future School of Performing Arts, Kalina. Fee: Rs. 9,500. Registrations: extensions.email @gmail.com
