A road show promoting heritage, culture

Australian theatre company’s puppet parade begins at 4 p.m. on Vysial Street today

December 27, 2014 10:37 am | Updated 10:37 am IST - PUDUCHERRY:

Rehearsals for the People's Puppet Project on in Puducherry on Friday.

Rehearsals for the People's Puppet Project on in Puducherry on Friday.

Size and spectacle could be central to the mise-en-scène.

But, leave aside the theatrics, the Snuff Puppets show on Saturday will seek to prompt an introspection on the value of culture and heritage and the social responsibility towards preserving it.

Snuff Puppets, the Australian theatre company, is in the city for the ‘People’s Puppet Project,’ which is billed as a unique model in which diverse community groups work intensively with Snuff Puppets to design, build and perform their own outdoor giant puppet spectacles.

The aim of the event, scheduled as a parade through Vysial Street followed by a performance in the Boulevard, is to promote the local heritage and culture of our cities through “large-format public performances,” while stirring up awareness of heritage conservation — in the case of Puducherry its unique Franco-Tamil heritage and culture, as well as its wealth of global heritage.

Matching the larger-than-life puppet creations is the sheer scale of the group effort that is going into the show — participants include artists from Indianostrum Theatre, Urban Design Collective, craftsmen specialised in heritage building conservation, folk musicians, schoolchildren from the Lycee Francaise, INTACH staff, and social workers from the NGO Sharana.

The event is also supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-India Council, which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Snuff Puppets may have taken puppetry to a different plane of sensibility using larger-than-life puppet creatures, spectacle, live music and physical theatre. But, this is less of a Snuff Puppets show and more a community-inspired and collaborative production is what Rebecca Rutter, Snuff Puppets director seems to convey.

“We’ve basically been listening in on the stories that volunteers suggested,” said Ms. Rutter who has led a four-member team of Snuff Puppet artists to the city.

Once the central idea was settled, over a two-week-long workshop the discussion progressed to choosing puppet characters.

The participants began the exercise by sketching a host of characters and suggesting inputs for the storyline, said volunteers Emmanuel from Sharana and Sharath, an architecture student from Anna University.

They then proceeded to design and build the puppets from fabric and bamboo and tweaking the narrative around the set of five main ‘characters’ — the clown, grandmother, the granddaughter, Ravana and the house, which is much more than an immobile prop.

“The idea is that even after we exit, our collaborators can continue to design and build their own puppets and continue to tell interesting stories,” Ms. Rutter said.

Help has poured in from all quarters of Puducherry, with volunteers assisting with puppet building, donation of materials, and organisation of other aspects of the workshop, truly a ‘Made in Pondicherry’ production, says Devangi Ramakrishnan of INTACH.

The bare bones of the storyline is this: A grandmother no longer narrates stories for her granddaughter as she is obsessed with the soaps on television. One of the characters in the plot is the ten-headed Ravana who smashes up the TV set but is the catalyst for making the grandmother introspect and decide to resume storytelling.

Divulging anything more is tantamount to a spoiler for a Snuff Puppet show given the theatre group’s penchant for surprise, “chaos” and challenging traditional ways of audience engagement.

According to schedule, the Puppet Parade commences along Vysial Street at 4 p.m. with two roughly half-hour shows of ‘Pomeka’ near the Le Cafe (junction of Dumas Street and Mahe de Labourdonnais) at 6.30 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Snuff Puppets will take the show to Dakshinchitra in Chennai on Sunday.

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