Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article ''The Animated Worlds of Basil Twist" by Eileen Blumenthal (©2005 by Theater Communications Group). Passage B is adapted from the article "Dancing 'Like a Fish' in Underwater Puppet Theater" by Robert Greskovic (©2003 by Dow Jones and Company, Inc.)

Passage A by Eileen Blumenthal

"I feel like I'm a little old-fashioned ," says master puppeteer Basil Twist.

Old-fashioned? Twist staged Symphonie Fantastique (1998) in a 1,000-gallon tank of water. For Red Beads (2005) , he animated the scenery with electric fans, while live actors played the human characters. His puppets for both Symphonie Fantastique and Petrushka (2001) included unadorned lengths of fabric.

Actually, the contradiction is only skin-deep. Whatever techniques Twist uses for a particular show, the core for him is the age-old basis of puppetry: as he puts it, “animating-giving breath and soul-to something inanimate.”

Thinking back to a festival he attended on the theme "music and puppetry ," Twist recalls, "There was a lot of Baroque music played on strange instruments, but it wasn't a puppet show.”

Twist decided he would create a visual equivalent of a musical work using totally abstract puppet—pieces of fabric, feathers, tinsel, poles, non-figurative cutouts. Light of varying color and intensity, sometimes smooth, sometimes in bursts, would underscore the emotion in the music. And—the clincher—he would get a sense of other worldliness and (literal) fluidity by staging the show underwater in a giant tank . To animate this world, hidden puppeteers would work from the sides of the tank and suspended above it in harnesses.

Twist did temper the abstraction, in a way, by choosing Hector Berlioz' s programmatic Symphonie Fantastique, which tells in music a story of an artist's obsession with a woman. But Twist chose the work despite rather than for its story. He liked the music's emotional richness and dramatic structure. And even for viewers who knew the "plot" (not mentioned in Twist's program), objects refused to have clear identities. The silk that swirled and swooped to a violin melody could be an image of the protagonist' s beloved, or it could be his mood, or it could be a breeze. Or all of them. The rigid vertical forms could be a vision of prison bars, or a feeling of being pursued, or of being doomed. Or all of them.

Passage B by Robert Greskovic

In an attempt to define music-inspired choreography, George Balanchine suggested that "it was like an aquarium: music was all around and the dancer was like a fish." Symphonie Fantastique, Basil Twist's enchanting, underwater presentation of puppet theater to Hector Berlioz's famed composition of the same name, takes such a thought at face value and swims to glory with it.

It's hard to suggest with words just what Twist's Symphonie does with the music and within the 1,000-gallon tank. Connections to Disney's 1940 animated film Fantasia come readily to mind, but the one-for-one, note-for-note Mickey Mouse emphasis favored by Disney's gifted animators isn't Twist's way; he works for a less literal, more free-spirited vision.

The cast of floating and swirling "characters" ranges from geometric, flat shapes to anthropomorphic figures, in the form of whisked lengths of fabric, unfurled sheets of cloth, and a variety of fringed pieces reminiscent of feathers, cheerleader pompons or angel­hair-like curtains of filament.

Berlioz's 1830 symphonic composition comes down to us shot through with impetuous passion. Its five movements each have poetic headings, "A Ball" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath, " for example , and were further elaborated by the composer with specific program notes. Berlioz didn't insist on publishing the individual episodes he imagined, but he did want his movement titles printed whenever his symphony was played. Twist uses Berlioz's titles, but not the program notes. His fantastical symphony is story less but by no means lacking in character, or even characters. When­ever the music's recurring theme is heard, suggesting the compelling beloved of the original narrative, Twist brings in his most gracefully swimming swath of white fabric, which variously takes the shape of an eel, a stingray or a wisp of smoke potent enough to cut through watery depths.

The aquatic world through which Symphonie's recurrent white figure winds, slips and streaks is rich with musically motivated activity. Sometimes, especially in the little pauses between movements, you can hear some sloshing from puppeteers readying their labors. Rather than distracting from the dreamlike nature of the silken proceedings, these signs of human activity help give the show an added gravity. If Twist's symphonic achievement were created by carefully edited animation it would be remarkable enough, but the fact that it' s done live, by unseen manipulators working through water, makes his theatrical marvels all the more amazing.