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Dust

Creator Performer: Ana Craciun-Lambru

Studio Theatre UCONN

24 March 2016

DUST is cubist theatre.

Elements of the work are looked at from several view-points. 
Those view-points sometimes come from different places or different times.

We often see the same moment in time from the perspective of different people.

Dust is cubist in many ways.

The story is passed from medium to medium as the play continues.  Sometimes the primary narrative line is passed from the actor, to the puppet, to the performing object, to the shadows that are being projected.

With all of this abstraction, metaphor and implication the story might be in danger of becoming diffused, but it does not.

One of the most important lessons in the performing arts is to “respect your audience.” Ana Cracuin-Lambru respects her audience and is not afraid to share her emotions, her history and her theatrical method. This is what we hope for, not just from puppet theatre but from all theatrical productions.

This work can be fully appreciated by both adults and school age children. It is also informative because it shows us that puppet theatre can be much more than a silly Punch and Judy show.

The opening trope of the work turns a sewing machine into a cow using high heel shoes as the horns then adding a cowbell and a milk pail.  The cow Craciun-Lambru builds on stage looks like a sculpture by Picasso.

Although the work is abstract it is full of emotion.  We feel anxiety for what

we know is going to happen next, hoping against hope that she escapes from the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building.

Craciun-Lambru changes from a shy child, to an old father, to a young woman setting out to explore the world. She is a girl on an adventure.

The sewing machine becomes, among other things, a fire truck, a cow, and the Triangle Shirt waist building on Washington Square.

The earth-color tonalities that run throughout the stage picture help set the mood and attune our senses to the story being told. We see umber, burnt sienna, brown madder, and grayish blue. The combination of the lighting and the color palate helps draw us into the story and the mood of the piece

Dust is a work of American history and Romanian history and an essay on cubist historiography.

Lighting a stage for three different shows that allow very little time between pieces, in a theatre that has limited space for placement of instruments, is not an easy task.  It is one that lighting designer Daniele Vekennes manages with both creativity and professionalism. Sometimes frontlight was used to give a bright presence to the actors, puppets, performing objects, and set pieces, but when she wants a more sculpted look she comes in from the wings at a sharper angle. The angularity works particularly well in setting off the stark reality of tragical-history in Dust by Craciun-Lambru. The photos in my essays on this evening of puppet performances are all by Gerry Goodstein.

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l

Kalob Martinez 

El Beto

writer, director: Kalob Martinez

performers: Martinez and Natalia Cuevas

composer: Lucas Gorham

3D modeler: Leslie Prunier

projections: Joseph Rosen

El Beto is a word with many meanings and implications. It can be a nick name. It might mean a large sexual organ, or a lucky person, or a crazy person. Either a king of Scotland or a drug lord in Mexico might acquire that nickname if they were big enough, crazy enough, and/or lucky enough. Martinez uses the story of Macbeth and images of Mexico to draw parallels between those two types of overwhelming ambition. He uses famous monologues from the Scottish play as the script of his drama. But sometimes he speaks in English and sometimes in Spanish. Often code switching in mid soliloquy. The effect is compelling; we hear the well known speeches in a different timbre.  Kalob Martinez brings the speeches from Shakespeare to life. He knows what the phrases mean and speaks them so as to help us understand how those words come together as a story. The puppets and projections hold our attention. This show would be a great introduction to Macbeth for a younger audience.

In the course of the three-play evening there were only four performers, two women and two men, both women moved with an awareness of their body that bespoke training in dance and consciousness of the fact that every part of the mise en scene is important, and that the puppeteer is part of the mise en scene. 

Although Natalia Cuevas did not operate a puppet but acted in El Beto, she was able to fit her body and her emotions into the production at hand. She moves like a dancer and has an awareness of her body and her character's orientation in the stage space. She seems to be completely fluent in both English and Spanish. Cuevas is capable of carrying a much larger role.

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OK, LOVE YOU, BYE
actor puppeteer: Gavin Cummings
music Gwendolyn Rooker
Studio Theatre UCONN
24 March 2016

The initial entrance by Gavin Cummins, carrying a bright light on a piece of wood, brings us immediately into the piece. He enters through the back of the house muttering to himself, the character seems insane, homeless, ragged  and we feel we are in a dangerous place. The character, Cummins, then mounts the stage and begins the body of the work. He uses shadows well and creates a stage on his chest against which is another shadow puppet.

The voice and intonation of Cummings leave us with a sense of emptiness and loss. It is a false cheer that we sometimes adopt in the face of tragedy that opens the heart of the audience to what is about to take place. There are several astounding images. The work would have been more dense if the spoken words had been a bit richer, although the repetition of the title phrase took on layers of tragic, and forlorn meaning as they were spoken over and over again. 

This performance was a preview and one expects that on opening night the elements of the piece were more tightly woven together.

Don't Yell FIRE In A Crowded War

Speak Up. Speak Out. Bread & Puppet Theatre

Benton Museum  CT

May 28, 2015 to Oct.11 2015

reviewed by
Edmond Chibeau

Large Puppets, posters, and prints take up your personal space and crowd your intuition when you first walk into the show that opened tonight at the Benton.

Executive director Nancy Stula has a reputation for bringing in smart shows and collaborating with smart people.  She worked with John Bell, the creative and knowledgeable Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry to arrange a great “Bread & Puppet” exhibit at the museum on the UConn campus. 

Peter and Elka Schumann along with several Bread and Puppet regulars were present at the opening of the show at the Benton. 

Peter gave a moving talk.  By that I mean he moved around the room while he was speaking.  He walked with his fiddle and gave an impromptu free screech about each of the elements of the show.

Many of the pieces recalled important moments of oppression and social insurrection.  As well as Bread & Puppet stock characters such as the Washer Woman and her consort, and the Garbage Man, the works remembered:  Chico Mendez, a rubber tapper and union organizer, who was murdered in Brazil in 1988; Bishop Oscar Romero who was murdered in El Salvador in 1980; Attica Prison in 1971; MOVE, the Philadelphia based black liberation community founded by John Africa that was firebombed by the police in 1972.  There was also a piece from perhaps the most beautiful and compelling work by the collective, FIRE, about the self-immolation of three Americans to protest the war in Vietnam.  Buddhist monks in Vietnam had been setting themselves on fire as a form of protest and these three Quakers took up the cause.

In the gallery next to the Bread & Puppet exhibit is a show of posters and other material recalling the Vietnam conflict. 

Iraqi Women

An art lover who had recently seen the premiere exhibit at the new Whitney Museum (designed by Renzo Piano) in the meat packing district of NY could not help but notice the difference between the “love-me-I’m-liberal” political pieces at the Whitney, and the ongoing commitment to engaging the military-industrial complex at its root, that has long been the project of the Bread & Puppet Theatre.