Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 26

DC - I would enjoy not seeing the wires in a stage production. Seeing the rigging feels old fashioned
and amateurish, but CG is too easy a cheat nowadays. The real magic comes from not knowing how it's
done but knowing it is incredibly simple with no Heath Robinson involvement or computer trickery. The
Ooooohh factor.
JC - It's hard to compare fi lms with live performance. Realism isn't always important … something can
be 'believable' without being realistic.
The puppet family
Impressionists
The word 'impression' is probably the reason why these performers do not work for me … an
impression doesn't seem as committed as an illusion. It seems a bit half-hearted. Too often a
loose approximation of the voice was seemingly enough. Not for me, and neither was I won
over with elaborate costumes and make-up, clearly trying to convince where the voice failed.
The only impressionists I have enjoyed are those who do it raw, transforming their whole face
and body in front of us into the character, unaided by props or costumes. We are back with my
naked magician. It's about overcoming the apparent limitations, and seeing the trick. Too many
impressionists rely on the skill of the make-up artist, but those who can walk onstage and assume
character after character and many at the same time get my attention. Steve Martin's physical
performance in All of Me is a masterclass in transformation. He plays a man with a female spirit
inhabiting one side of his body. With no special make-up or wardrobe ef ects, he walks down the
street clearly as both male and female. This physicality dei nitely appeals to me, and drives much
of my work. This would have been such a glorious animation challenge, but would the control
of animation have been cheating? The Scottish character actor Stanley Baxter has the uncanny
knack of overcoming a huge physical build to portray an astonishingly recognisable Queen
Elizabeth II. Although he had wigs and great costumes, the performance is not about accuracy
or i nding the impression, but about looking at all the body language, the rhythms, the way of
moving, the bearing, the physical and vocal tics of his character, and using the ones that tell the
story of the character most clearly. This is what animation is all about. It's not slavishly copying
real life, but it's about playing up observations and details that dei ne a character, the essence of
what makes a character, and simplifying things, throwing out the unnecessary clutter.
Ventriloquists
The voice and the face, perhaps because my own are a constant source of disappointment, have
never been the primary factor for my interest in a performance, show me something moving
and I am immediately interested. I never warmed to ventriloquist puppets. Originally I was
unsettled by the operator and the puppet often being dressed identically, but now I
can understand the osmosis of the personalities too well. Again, here is a complicity
with the audience. The experience of ventriloquism only works if the audience is
aware of and enjoys the trick: if you remove the visual trick of the performer trying
not to move his lips, and the constant placing of obstacles to make the trick harder
(gottle of geer, anyone?), then ventriloquism falls to pieces rather quickly. To build a
whole career about trying not to move one's lips, of trying to make a hard trick look