by ROBERT MORE
Director

I vividly remember my introduction to puppet animation. At the time I was a young actor who had done quite a bit of work with neutral mask and clown, and this led to working with the brilliant Felix Mirbt on a production of Büchner's Woyzeck. He called his wonderful puppet creations "animated masks" and was looking for actors who he felt would be responsive to the inner techniques of puppet manipulation. None of the actors had ever worked with puppets before and during the first few weeks we struggled mightily. Learning to support the puppets with an open, relaxed energy, learning the art of moving the mask from fixed point to fixed point in a way that had effortless flow, and learning to put the mask first, was an exhilarating but highly challenging process.

Puppet manipulation in this Bunraku style demands certain things. The animators or puppeteers are visible with nothing to hide their faces or bodies and yet they must appear invisible to the audience so that the mask and puppets can be dominant. The puppets are the characters; they must take the focus since their passions are the play. The manipulator must feel the emotions of the puppet characters without acting out these emotions him/ herself. His/ her face can reflect the action but he/ she cannot release into the face or the eyes because if he/ she does, he/ she will draw focus from the puppet.

At first, this duality seemed impossible to solve. For many weeks, being a puppet manipulator felt like being required to be a "split personality", a walking contradiction, a performance conundrum. However, by the time we opened Woyzeck, it started to make sense. Three years later, when we did Strindberg's A Dream Play, again at the National Arts Center with Felix Mirbt, the intensive training had taken hold and we realized that the answer to this duality lies in finding the right state of mind and learning to inhabit the "space between".

For the manipulator to function effectively, it is absolutely necessary that he/ she becomes an "empathetic connector" whose primary job is to provide a steady link between actor and puppet, text and mask, the audience and the inner life of the play. When the manipulator learns to function as a creative conduit for his own inner creative impulse, and then allows this impulse, sparked by imagination and belief, to flow directly from the solar plexus (the abdominal brain) through the body, into the arms, to the hands, through the fingertips, and into the mask, only then will the puppet become fully alive.

In Song of This Place, locating and sustaining this frame of mind, this essential state of being, is no easy task. In the first shows, such as Woyzeck, A Dream Play, and Brecht's Happy End, the manipulators were

silent since other actors supplied the voices of the puppets. The actions of the manipulators and the spoken word of "les voix" met in the puppet. This form was demanding enough, but in Song of This Place, the manipulator's role has been stretched to the limit. In Song, the manipulator is also actor and singer and the puppet manipulation itself is far more complicated. The manipulator often provides the voice for the puppets him/ herself and sometimes he/ she is required to manipulate one puppet while at the same time providing the voice for another. In the fluid world of Song of This Place, the manipulator's role is, by far, the most multi-dimensional, fluid, and taxing.

The manipulator's primary job is first and foremost to get out of the way and become an open channel for creative energy. Any diminishment of this energy will result immediately in diminishing the life of the mask. Any tension, any doubt or judgement, hesitation or lack of clarity, will rob the puppet of life. In this sense, the puppet manipulator is truly an embodiment of Emily Carr's own notion of the creative sensibility with its understanding that the first duty of the artist is to maintain clear pathways for the self so that the inner voice may be heard. The manipulator is the living representative of the "space between". He/ she is an open channel for thought and a puppet is thought manifested in his/ her hands.

In Song of This Place, Joy Coghill has set out to capture the essence of the creative process itself. In order to do this, she has turned to the power of the mask, which through distilled gesture and the magic of evocation, allows us to "see" the inner life of the character in a way that can be startling and is often deeply moving. Capturing this inner life, the "soul stuff", is the dream of Frieda in the play, as it was Emily Carr's dream as well. To realize this dream, Coghill has dared to bring the "soul stuff" to the stage and to capture the "song" in a startling piece of theatre that is honest, exciting and wholly original.