Architecture and Puppetry

A Conversation with Oliver Smart, Puppeteer

An established puppeteer, Oliver Smart is ever inventive and surprising. I visited Oliver while he was rehearsing for ‘Life Still’, a ‘science fiction in wartime’, which recently premiered in Paris.

Oliver lives in a converted warehouse that is immediately theatrical, a large concreted open area under tall rooflights, with ropes hanging from the ceiling, stage lighting on rigs, black curtains framing the ‘stage’, stairs running up into high loft spaces.

A bedroom constructed in the triangular rooflight opens onto an inclined plane of corrugated iron covered in a growth of mosses, which as Oliver notes is like a forest of kanuka, if you squint. There’s a small timber deck, floor to ceiling fire-glass insulated with bubble wrap - altogether an interesting bricolage of found materials.

As Oliver introduces me to his puppets, he describes his art using a language familiar to architecture, ‘every object has textures which describe the whole object, movement-texture, sound-texture, light-texture’. To my mind these words describe a spatial experience, and the changes in sound and light when moving through the space.

Oliver talks about the parallel between puppeteers and architects. Both ‘orchestrate’ an event – a performance or an architecture, which ‘lives’ or operates independently of the designer. There is an effacement of the presence of the puppeteer / architect once the event begins.

Both choreograph puppets, objects or materials, structures, forms and space, whilst also being controlled by other forces beyond their remit. Both attempt to express an experience beyond the materiality of the object, and use a similar techniques: suspension of belief, illusion, assemblage and detailing, transformation of found object, found materials, found stories, meanings and memory.

Oliver’s puppets start their formation from found objects. The objects arrive with a history, memories, and associations. Over time, Oliver says, their ‘personality’ emerges.

The above photo is of the ‘chicken’, created from down pillows with leather mechanisms and two stick-like legs. Through minimal intervention and precise detailing Oliver plays with the illusion of ‘giving life’ to this inanimate object. The viewer’s mind recognises the movements and shape of the pillow as a chicken, yet without obvious anthropomorphic cues such as eyes or a beak, ‘there is still some pillow in the chicken’.

Oliver creates spatial conditions on stage using the puppets, for example the choreography between the ‘tank’ (above) and ‘moth’. The tank is an assemblage of found objects, a Super 16 film projector mounted on a deckchair on a piano trolley. It projects a rectangle of white light that attracts a ‘moth’, made from an old umbrella.

An ever-changing, flickering space is created on stage as the tank follows the moth and in turn the moth follows the projected light from the tank.

Another puppet based on Hieronymus Bosch is a piece of fabric and two pegs which unpack from a small set of wooden drawers. The puppet continues to unpack haberdashery objects from the drawers onto his workspace on top of the cabinet. He assembles a church, which gets destroyed, a city scape, which also gets destroyed by a Victorian plant waterer slowly squirting feathers. Oliver plays with the quality of the objects and their function, ‘You can’t be violent with feathers, they absorb all violence’.

Oliver describes puppets as having a complete connection to the puppeteer. The action to move the puppet becomes automatic and the puppet an extension of the puppeteers mind. This description reminds me of the system created between a person drawing and the drawing, how one can become immersed in a drawing so that progression into the drawing is like moving through ones mind, controlling the drawing yet allowing the process to be led by the drawing. The drawing emerges like the puppets are slowly infused with life and their qualities emerge.

As a collection, or collective, the puppets have a museum-like quality, found objects with a history and memory. In the curative hands of the puppeteer a new narrative emerges.

The puppeteer sets up a magical alter-reality, and as the audience starts to believe in this strange emergence of life, as all the ‘dead things’ are finding their identity, the puppeteer’s ego dissolves.

I find it inspiring to consider architecture through the puppeteers language, an architecture that can suspend belief. Transformation of space is alchemical, everyday objects transformed in unexpected ways into strange and beautiful scenes. Architecture of magic realism, where we start to believe that the inanimate can become alive, can ‘remember’, and can express ideas about the human condition.

For clips from the Paris show check out:

www.foldedfeather.com

Tank makes itself useful when not working - it also plays Felix the Cat movies.