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| John Keats’ epitaph: Here Lies One Whose Name was writ in Water |
Dear Nicola,
This year, it’s the 15th anniversary of the Festival so we are planning to have a special edition of the programme, with the information of the plays we’re presenting this year but also with some texts from artists that Tarumba has a special affection for.
We would like to invite you to write for this programme/edition a text about the relation between visual arts and puppetry. We don’t want to limit your thoughts about it concerning the thematic of the text, but I’ll have to limit the maximum of characters… let's say 2.500 maximum…
Dear Joaquim,
Sitting down and trying to write about the two disciplines mentioned above, I find myself uneasy making statements about either. Though I do like art, have visited exhibitions and participated in some with either videos or drawings and though I feel for puppetry and have performed at various festivals, I feel a poor judge.
Flashback. Sitting in a car with the team that picked us up from the airport. It is the first time I am invited to show at the International Festival for Puppetry&Animation in Warsaw and I will perform Phantom Story. The team consists of lots of young people, we chat: Have you been here before? Do you know Poland? Then they ask: Who is the puppeteer, who will perform? Paul and I exchange a look. Actually, no one is a puppeteer. I reply: I am not trained at handling objects; I studied theater science in Giessen. Silence in the car, you could hear a needle drop. Oh dear!
What do you do when you feel at the wrong place at the wrong time?
You just continue doing what you did before.
Dear Joaquim,
I guess I got asked to write around this topic because my performances are based on strong visual choices. In my work I always end up with a rigid technical setup that helps creating images, often involving a beamer. In addition there is a topic and I circle around it, involving different points of views, using text fragments or imagery, a network of elements that enriches the format. A cross-discipline collage, if you need a label. While drawing used to be my teenage rage outlet, video editing and DIY-animations replaced it in my ‘professional career’.
Flashback. I finished my studies of theater science, my thesis barely passed and my professors advise me to stick to the practical side of theater. No wonder. The first time I had to hand in a written paper, I gave them a 13 pgs. Comic. (Probably the first one about religious theater in the Middle Ages!)
Though it had a reference list it was not accepted and I had to do it all over again. Oh dear!
What do you do when you feel at the wrong place at the wrong time?
You just continue doing what you did before.
Kind of driven. You can try to turn on ‘reflective modus’ but your thoughts do not carry you far.
So you have to find something else to trust. A pattern maybe.
Dear Joaquim,
How did I learn to make these choices?
I didn’t. (But maybe I still could if I just make enough performances for enough time). Time.
Looking at where my inspiration is coming from, I realize it has been a long time a ‘new inspiration’ has entered my mind. The ones I find inspiring caught my attention 10 years ago, or even longer. I keep on coming back to them and feed again.
Flashback. Entering the Museum für moderne Kunst in Frankfurt for the first time at the age of 17. I was inside and at the same time the sky had opened. I will never forget this.
Most of my inspirations – artists, writers and filmmakers but strangely enough no theatermaker – are dead. Makes me a vulture flying from corpse to corpse. The older I get I also find that inspiration is hidden in my memories, flashbacks. And I have the chance to re-interpret them again.
One can think that eternal recurrence is boring, but it is comforting as well.
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| Lotte Reiniger at work |
Dear Joaquim,
Probably the best puppetry works and convincing art pieces are the ones that have a logic and consequence of their own. With an underlying pattern that your mind detects, responds and obeys to. And it does not matter whether they happen to be in a gallery, in an object theater festival or some self-postulate avant-garde place because you are simply at the right time at the right place.
(And I am so looking forward to seeing these works in the future.)
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| Colloque de chiens by Raoul Ruiz |
Yours,
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| The author as a toddler |
BIO
Nicola Unger (NL): Visual artist, performer and director.
She played in FIMFA with Phantom Story (Museu da Marioneta, 2014).
