No Strings Attached: Puppetmongers Play In The Shadows And On Table Tops

In his darkened Dundas Street East workshop David Powell hovers behind a tuna can containing a small halogen light rigged to a bamboo post, controlling the movements of a little boy named Rocket projected on the wall.

“I’m very fond of mechanics,” Powell, one half of the theatre company  Puppetmongers, said about the process of putting together a show. “I love finding a solution to something.”

There are surely plenty of potential problems to be solved while designing the intricate show his company is currently working on with Roseneath Theatre for the upcoming Luminato Festival this June.

“Rocket and the Queen of Dreams” is a theatrical journey into the dream world of a little boy. Human actors are featured in the show, which is partly based on real dream experiences of children from two Toronto elementary schools, as well as some 250 shadow puppets.

“While you’re doing one scene you’re having to sort of know what happens in the next one and putting everything in exactly the right spot at every time or it won’t work through,” Powell told CityNews.ca.

Three people, including two actors, will run the production, aimed at children from senior kindergarten to grade three, by manipulating the dozens of puppets – many with small moving parts.  The play takes place in Rocket’s room and the shadow dream sequences are projected on a large scrim.

The Puppetmongers are brother and sister David and Ann Powell who’ve been creating shows for 33 years with characters and sets built in their Toronto workshop. While the pair helps to design productions with other companies the duo has also produced about a dozen original shows, which are often retellings of old tales and myths – some familiar and some not as recognizable.

They’re currently touring one of those productions to schools across Ottawa and later in Toronto. “Cinderella in Muddy York” was created nearly a decade ago and the professional puppeteers found the classic tale fit well into a 19th century Toronto setting.

“1834 is when (the city) got renamed to Toronto from York so there’s the excuse for the ball right away,” Ann Powell explained. “And instead of a prince it’s the son of the Lieutenant-Governor and just looking at the situation then – who were the important people … who might Cinderella have been? Who were the stepmother and stepsisters and why were they not coping? Well, they’d just come from England, which was very, very different.”

“We really tried to look at the characters, not just these are the bad guys these are the good guys.”

The Puppetmongers’ shows involve incredible amounts of research. When time permits, the pair will spend a year, sometimes two, fleshing out the details of a particular story and its time period, brainstorming ideas and designing sets and puppets.

“Just about every show we build, I have to say, we really do it first of all to entertain ourselves, the child in us and the adult in us and all the things that interest us and questions that we’re trying to answer,” Ann explained.

“All that research, not all of it goes into the show and not all of it is obvious to the audience but it also helps us in retelling the story.”

Children often pick up on the nuances and subtleties of their tireless fact finding and if they don’t get a sufficient answer from the performance the Puppetmongers can easily provide highly detailed explanations to curious youngsters in the question and answer periods following the show.

“Kids want information,” David said.

The pair has been working with puppets since childhood, putting on shows for family and neighbours. Later, both Ann and David attended the Ontario College of Art where they found great support for their puppetry skills and went on to start their company. Their talents have taken them across North America and around the world. They’ve performed in Iran, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Romania and Indonesia.

While many may associate professional puppetry with marionettes, David and Ann work mainly with characters designed for use on a tabletop. In their production “The Pirate Widow Cheng” the pair uses figures of different styles to tell the story of a woman who is considered to be the most successful pirate of all time.

“We used detailed human figures as the main characters and they could stand on their own and you could leave them, they were like dolls almost,” David explained. “And then there was a group of the next level of importance … they had similar costuming but their heads and hands and stuff were rocks and lumps of wood.”

The next level down is represented using sticks with fabric and blocks of wood.

There is a spectrum of characters in the Puppetmongers’ performance arsenal, from highly-designed figures to simple unaltered objects such as bricks.

In their show “The Brick Bros. Circus” , David and Ann act as ringmasters, barking orders to a cast of bricks, which perform interesting tricks.

“We’re bringing the audience’s attention to look at the brick that is wearing a tutu and is going to dance on a tightrope,” David explained.

“Because it’s a circus most of them don’t have a particular character, they have an act. So there’s a lot of brick jokes, brick puns – the Buildovich family from the former Brickoslovakia.”

Some of the characters are a little more developed. Bricko the clown gets quite emotional and cries a lot to the audience, David added.

The Puppetmongers toured this show to a festival in France in the 1970s where they came across a French puppetry company working with fruits and vegetables, a troupe from Israel and another from Spain working with pots and pans and kitchen equipment.

Strangely, none of these companies had seen one another’s work.

“And this is the first time anyone had seen object theatre and it was four different companies from different places,” David explained.

While the Puppetmongers’ passion and attention to detail are limitless, their budget is not and they find creative and innovative uses for everyday materials to build sets and puppets.

The company performed a children’s show called “Foolish Tales for Foolish Times” using real toys they’d picked up at Value Village and other second hand shops.

“Once you’ve got the story, you can tell it with anything,” Ann said, adding that she and her brother spend a lot of time scouring hardware stores, filing away information and ideas for a later date.

But working with everyday items isn’t only about keeping a budget in check, David added.

“We like to be very transparent in how we’re doing stuff,” he said. “We try to let … audiences know what the technique is and they think ‘I could do that, I understand that’, so seeing everyday stuff made into other things is part of that.”

The Puppetmongers are also currently working on a retelling of the Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times” , which they expect to mount in 2009 at Theatre Passe Murraile.

• Puppetmongers also run a School of Puppetry. For more information on classes, click here.

shawne.mckeown@chumtv.com