Action Refraction

Ass-Head Assets

"An ass's nole I fixed on his head"
(Puck, Dream, III.ii)

If you're staging A Midsummer Night's Dream, all you usually have to worry about is the head of a donkey. But the War Horse folks downtown at the House of Mirvish go nose-to-tail:

And here's a wider look at the puppet genius behind War Horse: a TED Talk by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of the Handspring Puppet Company, "a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse." Their philosophy on breath is especially intriguing...

Julie Taymor's "Double Event"

BOTTOM
Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves: to
bring in — God shield us! — a lion among ladies, is a
most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful
wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to
look to 't.

SNOUT
Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.

BOTTOM
Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must
be seen through the lion's neck: and he himself
must speak through, saying thus, or to the same
defect, — 'Ladies,' — or 'Fair-ladies — I would wish
You,' — or 'I would request you,' — or 'I would
entreat you, — not to fear, not to tremble: my life
for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it
were pity of my life: no I am no such thing; I am a
man as other men are;' and there indeed let him name
his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.

(Dream, III.i)

After posting "Low Tech vs. High Budget" last week, I pulled a book off the shelf that I don't think I'd cracked since I bought it a dozen years ago: Pride Rock on Broadway, a riveting blow-by-blow account of how Julie Taymor adapted Disney's animated film The Lion King to the stage.

Esquire's 2011 profile of Taymor describes the show's Big Idea, dubbed the double event:

"She was a little-known avant-garde theater director with a MacArthur genius grant — a 'nobody,' she says — when she got the call from Disney and came up with the revolutionary idea of mixing masked live actors with puppets to stage the musical.... what Taymor has called 'the double event' in theater, in which puppeteers and other technicians aren't hidden from view but rather visible to the audience. We still lose ourselves in the story and suspend disbelief, but because we understand how the magic happens, we believe in the magic that much more.... 'They said we want what you do, we want your vision,' she remembers. 'But Michael Ovitz and others from Hollywood would say, "I don't think you can do it with puppets, it won't have emotion."' But she staged a series of trial performances with and without puppets for Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and as Taymor recalls, 'He said the greatest line: "They all work, but I want to go with your first idea [involving the puppets] because it's the bigger risk, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff."'"

Here's an expanded account from a 1999 interview by Richard Schechner, "Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King", from The Drama Review:

TAYMOR: ...Well, what is animation? It's that you can really put life into inanimate objects. And that's the magic of puppetry. You know it's dead and therefore you're giving it a soul, a life....

As the director I hadn't hired the designer yet, but I had to come up with the concept. My deal with Disney had three parts, the first being conceptual. If we all agreed on the concept I'd go to the next part. That suited me just fine because the last thing I wanted was to be enmeshed in something that I couldn't stand behind. Disney felt the same way. ...

The first puppet I conceived [was] the Gazelle Wheel. The Gazelle Wheel represents the entire concept. You know what I'm talking about? The wheels with the gazelles that leap? With one person moving across the stage you get eight or nine leaping gazelles. Which is a miniature, too. So you get the long-shot and the close-up. I brought the miniature to Michael Eisner [of Disney] and I said, okay, in traditional puppet theatre, there is a black-masking or something that hides the wheels, and you see these little gazelles going like that. The puppeteer is hidden. But let's just get rid of the masking. Because when you get rid of the masking, then even though the mechanics are apparent, the whole effect is more magical. And this is where theatre has a power over film and television. This is absolutely where its magic works. It's not because it's an illusion and we don't know how it's done. It's because we know exactly how it's done. On top of that, this little Gazelle Wheel is the circle of life. So then over and over again, with the audience conscious or not, I'm reinforcing this idea of the wheel.

SCHECHNER: Did Eisner immediately go for it?

TAYMOR: Completely. He said, "Got it!" I knew then that I could do the masks on the heads. I could show the process. There are places where the mechanics are hidden, but they're not very important places. You don't see the machinery under the floor for Pride Rock, but pretty much everything else is visible.

SCHECHNER: One of the things I like very much in The Lion King is the tension between what you see, what you imagine, and what you know. I've forgotten the name of the actor, but you know, the guy who plays Zazu—

TAYMOR: Geoff Hoyle.

SCHECHNER: He's very special. When I first saw him, I said to myself, OK, I'm going to watch him and not his puppet. But that was impossible. I kept slipping into watching the puppet.

TAYMOR: It's because he puts his energy into the puppet.

SCHECHNER: It was like the bunraku master puppeteer who is so good he doesn't have to wear a black cloth over his face. A double magic: you see the puppet and the puppeteer together. In that universe, God is visible.

TAYMOR: I've been calling that the "double event" of The Lion King. It's not just the story that's being told. It's how it's being told.

SCHECHNER: But you did that earlier, didn't you?

TAYMOR: I first did it in The Green Bird where, even though the actor was all in black, I didn't put a mask on his face. I didn't want to hide his facial expression because of the story — a prince transformed into a bird. So he wore black, but his costume was the costume of a prince. And he is the shadow of the bird. So the personality, the yearning to be a prince again, was always there. I explored the dialectic between the puppet and the human character. So finally the bird flies away and the prince comes down; it's the same silhouette, only now he's got his human face and his green coat.

In Juan Darién there's no speaking. There's no speaking in bunraku either, the speaking all comes from the side. The Green Bird is the first time where I had the puppeteer both visible and speaking, rather than the neutral puppeteer.

SCHECHNER: The tension in The Lion King for me was in the danger that the performance might fail, that the dialectic would not hold. What makes it thrilling for a grown-up, is to see if they can all pull it off.

TAYMOR: Right. Michael Eisner and the other producers, Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider, were very concerned in 1996 when I did my first prototypes with four characters. Michael Ovitz and the whole shebang of Disney people were there. Things weren't working like they were supposed to work. The main problem was we were working in daylight, we were ten feet away. The actors weren't secure enough to not upstage the puppets. Some of the actors were so nervous in front of this crowd that the puppets were dead. Dead. So everybody said, "Uh, you can't do it for the principal characters." And I said, "But you saw the Hyena and Pumbaa work." "Well we're frightened about it because you don't know where to look. The actor is more interesting than the puppet." So I said, "Well I agree with you. This didn't work." I knew that.

But I also knew why it didn't work and I knew where it could go. See, a good thing about Disney is that they have money to do the next workshop. So I said, "Look, I hate puppets. I'm sick of them. I'm happy to do this with actors, with makeup, Peking opera-style, kabuki. I don't give a shit. I've got nothing to prove. If that's the best way to tell the story, let's do it that way. But I don't think that's why you wanted to work with me." And they answered, "Well, you can do it for the chorus animals, but not the principals." So I said, "All right, what I'm gonna do--and this is as much for me as you, because this is the first opportunity I've had to spend the amount of money it takes to do this experiment--I'm gonna do two or three versions of each character. I'll do full makeup and wig for Scar. And for Geoff Hoyle--we'd hired Geoff by then--I'll do it first with the bird and then without the bird. But we have to do it in the New Amsterdam, in a black environment, with all the lights, all the makeup, and full costumes. And you have to be 30 feet away."

And that's what I did. A true experiment. And it worked. Michael Eisner said, "Let's do all the puppet stuff. Because it is definitely more risky, but the payoff is bigger." So that was it. And there were no more worries about it.

Disney's YouTube channel features a series of 17 videos, The Lion King: Behind the Scenes, of which the first two, "From Screen to Stage" and "Behind the Story" are especially relevant here:

And of course the official trailer is pretty rockin', too:

In closing, an anecdote from a Vegas.com feature, "The Power of Puppetry":

"Michael Curry has designed puppetry and props not only for 'Lion King,' but also 'KÀ,' 'LOVE,' 'Believe' and 'Le Rêve' in Las Vegas.... Curry, who worked with Director Julie Taymor in creating 'The Lion King's' puppets, likes to tell the story of the audience member who came up to him and commented about the show, saying: 'I love it when the eyebrows move on the puppets.'

Only one problem – the eyebrows are painted on.

'That was the actors’ eyebrows moving,' says Curry. 'This is what is so great. We’re so expert in reading the human face that when the actor does that, it transposes to the puppet … they fill in the lost lines.'"

Nightlights and Shadow Sprites

"Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery...
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?"
(Fairy, Dream I.ii)

Pixar's latest film, Brave, features sighing, wafty blue-light creatures who lead our heroine down the forest path.

The website Mysterious Britain says:

"The Will o' the Wisp is the most common name given to the mysterious lights that were said to lead travellers from the well-trodden paths into treacherous marshes. The tradition exists with slight variation throughout Britain, the lights often bearing a regional name...:

Hertfordshire & East Anglia: The Hobby Lantern
Lancashire: Peg-a-Lantern
Cornwall & Somerset: Joan the Wad
East Anglia: The Lantern Man
Somerset & Devon: Hinky Punk
Shropshire: Will the Smith
Worcestershire: Pinket
The West Country: Jacky Lantern, Jack-a-Lantern
Lowland Scotland: Spunkies
Wales: Pwca, Ellylldan
Norfolk: Will o' the Wikes
Warwickshire & Gloucestershire: Hobbedy's Lantern
North Yorkshire & Northumberland: Jenny with the Lantern...

There are various explanations for the Will o' the Wisps, the most general being that they are malevolent spirits either of the dead or non-human intelligence. They have a mischievous and often malevolent nature, luring unwary travellers into dangerous situations."

Wikipedia's page on the 19th century Denham Tracts provides an extensive list of other names for the same phenomenon: Jemmy-burties, kit-a-can-sticks, melch-dicks, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, Meg-with-the-wads, spunks, Jack-in-the-Wads, hob-and-lanthorns, friars' lanthorns, Jinny-burnt-tails and corpse lights or corpse candles:

"A corpse candle or light is a flame or ball of light, often blue, that is seen to travel just above the ground on the route from the cemetery to the dying person's house and back again.... Among European rural people, especially in Gaelic, Slavic and Germanic folk cultures,[9] the will-o'-the-wisps are held to be mischievous spirits of the dead or other supernatural beings attempting to lead travellers astray (compare Puck). Sometimes they are believed to be the spirits of unbaptized or stillborn children, flitting between heaven and hell. Other names are Jack O' Lantern, or Joan of the Wad, Jenny Burn-tail, Kitty wi' the Whisp, or Spunkie."

Puck alludes to corpse candles in V.i: "Now it is the time of night, / That the graves all gaping wide, / Every one lets forth his sprite, / In the church-way paths to glide."

Luckily for Merida, her will-o'-the-wisps, diverging from legend, lead not to her doom but to her destiny:

The image of glowing sprites thronging the woods reminded me of Avatar's bioluminescent milkweed seeds...

...as well as the kodama in Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (starting at 0:20 in this clip):

According to Wikipedia, the will o' the wisp is specifically linked with Puck:

"The will-o'-the-wisp can be found in numerous folk tales around the United Kingdom, and is often a malicious character in the stories. In Welsh folklore, it is said that the light is "fairy fire" held in the hand of a púca, or pwca, a small goblin-like fairy that mischievously leads lone travelers off the beaten path at night. As the traveler follows the púca through the marsh or bog, the fire is extinguished, leaving the man lost.... Other stories tell of travelers getting lost in the woodland and coming upon a will-o'-the-wisp, and depending on how they treated the will-o'-the-wisp, the spirit would either get them lost further in the woods or guide them out.... [The] related Pixy-light from Devon and Cornwall... can generate uncanny sounds... frequently blowing out candles on unsuspecting courting couples or producing obscene kissing sounds, which were always misinterpreted by parents."

In W.B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, "the púca [puck] is a deft shapeshifter, capable of assuming a variety of terrifying or pleasing forms, and may appear as a horse, rabbit, goat, goblin, or dog. No matter what shape the púca takes, its fur is almost always dark. It most commonly takes the form of a sleek black horse with a flowing mane and luminescent golden eyes." (While that immediately brings to mind the glowing-eyed beast in John Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare, it's interesting to note that the term mare in this case refers not to a female horse, but "a spirit believed to produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal" (O.E.D.), and so the real "nightmare" in Fusili's painting is the goblin sitting on the dreamer's chest.)

Puck's famous line "If we shadows have offended" (V.i) and his addressing Oberon as "King of Shadows" (III.ii) lead me to imagine that perhaps Titania's fairies (who "dew her orbs upon the green"), have powers of night-lighting, like fireflies or will-o-the-wisps, while Oberon controls the shadows. What would the opposite of fireflies look like? Perhaps the soot sprites susuwatari in Ghibli's My Neighbour Totoro? (starting at 0:40 in this clip):

Ines Buchli turned me on to the Australian dance company Chunky Move, whose piece Mortal Engine uses motion-capture technology to control lighting, lasers and music. Nothing is pre-rendered: "Pre-composed phrases are triggered by the dancers’ motions, or by the operator at the correct point in the performance." As far as I can tell, they're using a similar trick to what Don Sinclair did in Bugzzz: A Cautionary Tale, where the Microsoft Kinect infrared sensor allowed the actor playing a firefly to be lit by video projections that mapped directly to her moving form, with little overspill onto the background. Mortal Engine also reverses the trick: "lighting" with moving shadow. There are some incredibly striking images in this video, but the most powerful to me are where darkness comes alive: as creepy-crawlies or shadow sprites (1:45), as infection (0:55), as smear (2:55), as swarm (3:50):

Returning to Pixar as a cheerier postscript, the short "La Luna", which screened before Brave, features some of the cutest nightlights in recent memory:

Stolen from an Indian King

"The king doth keep his revels here to-night.
Take heed the queen come not within his sight,
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling..."
(Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream I.ii)

In 2008, Nina Paley's funny and stunning feature-length animated film Sita Sings the Blues burst onto the scene, mixing Flash animation, Annette Hanshaw blues tracks, and the ancient Indian epic of the Ramayana - specifically, the adventures of Sita, wife of Rama, who is kidnapped by the evil Ravana and rescued by her husband with the help of the monkey-faced Hanuman.

The film jumps back and forth between the tale itself, comedic commentary by a chorus of experts, and scenes from Paley's own life. Different visual styles are used in each of these parallel narratives: 18th-century Rajput painting, shadow puppets traditional to much of south and southeast Asia, geometric "vector graphic" animation, and the energetic "Squigglevision" technique.

Ravana approaches Sita during her captivity:

The shadow puppet narrators discuss Rama's attitude towards Sita after her trial by fire:

Rishis:

Ravana Abducts Sita to Lanka:

Surya (Sun deity):

Chandra (Moon deity):

In a bookstore recently I stumbled across Pixar animator Sanjay Patel's exquisite Ramayana – Divine Loophole, which shares elements of both subject matter and style with Paley's film.

You can watch all one hour and twenty minutes of Sita Sings the Blues on YouTube, or read a New York Times article about how San Francisco's Asian Art Museum "hired Mr. Patel to cover the museum’s exterior with his effervescent Pop Art, transforming the stodgy gray neo-Classical-style building into a bright tableau of color and Hindu whimsy. In November, the museum will hand Mr. Patel the keys to an interior gallery, where it will present his Disneyesque illustrations, a magical kingdom of mythic Indian characters, in a show called Deities, Demons and Dudes With ’Staches."

Me, I'm keeping an eye out for The Little Book of Hindu Deities. How can you not love a Kali this kawaii?

Low Tech vs. High Budget

The Atlantic, reporting from the Aspen Ideas Festival last week:

"When Julie Taymor was invited to interpret The Lion King for Broadway, she had her doubts. At the time, she was in Japan putting on the Stravinsky opera Oedipus Rex. As she says wryly in this conversation with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, 'Disney's aesthetic and my aesthetic are not the same.'

What finally moved her to accept, she says, was the challenge of reimagining the Disney story in a stripped-down form. She wanted to figure out how to create a stampede, or a sunset, on a stage. And she made the bold decision that instead of hiding the puppeteers behind a curtain, she would 'expose the magic -- expose the strings, the rods and the mechanics -- so the telling of the story would be as spiritually moving as emotionally moving as the story itself.' Here, she talks about that project, and her admiration for 'the low-tech beauty of theater.'"

Later in that same interview, on Spider-Man:

And finally, on the question of theatre versus the iPad: