Book review by Celia

First book review for puppeteers

My first book review is about an article by Philippe Genty (french director and puppeteer, founder of the theatre company Philippe Genty Cie) called "The imagination door" in the french puppetry magazine PUCK n°4 which title is "Des corps dans l'espace" / "Bodies in space".

In this article Philippe Genty exposes one of his work focus which is the relationship between inert and living.
He starts by explaining that when facing the inert living suddenly becomes much more alive, the movement of the inert communicate itself to the body which send back a real momentum.
That’s also why the stronger moments in theatre are when the inert starts to move and give more value to the living. When it seems that the living by itself got something missing.

Then his topic moves to the interesting choice between sobriety and over-acting. His point is that choosing over-acting for inert characters doesn’t work because it makes them look too artificial. As same as if animated characters start to interpret, to play as an actor : they’re too weak compare to living comedians so they need a sober and more natural acting. He then makes the link with the object theatre saying that over-acting works perfectly for it, probably because the convention in it is very different.
So more the theatre form is abstract more it gets away from realism and more the characters in it can and should over-act. Vice more a universe is realistic less it supports over-acting.
Objects and puppet theatre are fund on a relation mode which could remind how children play with objects : we choose what is who and what is it and we add fuel to feed the illusion.

Why do I recommend this article to other puppeteers?
I think that this article is extremely interesting for puppeteers because the basic topic is one of the essential question in puppetry : does the immobility or the inert is dead?
I believe that Philippe Genty’s view about it is very well explained and got very good exemples to support it. I mean that reading this article really helped me to understand more and clearly why an inert object could be even more alive than a living figure.
This question has a very strong influence on any kind of puppetry or object theatre work for me, and I do think that we have to ask ourselves everytime . First about why we choosed inerts or dead object or puppets and second how the fact that they seem inerts or dead could make it work in our direction, in our meaning.
I'll use a quote from Matisse (the painter) that Caroline gave us last week to end :
" Immobility isn't an obstacle to the feeling of mouvement."