And Now For The Entertainment: The Traditions and Aesthetics of Music Hall

In exploring the aesthetics of Mr. Pim's "welcome home" song for Sara it might be helpful to examine the conventions of music hall, a form of entertainment popular in Britain from the mid-1800's to WWII.

Music hall similar to, and a contemporary of, American vaudeville. Like American vaudeville music hall featured comic and musical acts, performed for an audience in pubs and (later) in venues designed for light entertainment. Music had its roots in traditional folk ballads, but as the form developed, songs were written by professional songwriters, and the music was increasingly influenced by jazz and ragtime. Performers usually sang the verses as solos but invited the audience to sing along with the catchy, simple choruses.

A sampling of remastered recordings of music hall songs, courtesy of Amazon.com:

A Night At the Music Hall
The Golden Years of Music Hall
Cockney Kings of Music Hall

And below is a contemporary interpretation of the music hall tradition:

Betty's Music Hall

Pleasing Punch

Two members of Lathan's "family," Nop and Nam Nopnam, are meant to invoke Punch and Judy of British (by way of Italian) tradition. Punch is known for his high, cackling voice, his stick (as large as the puppet), and for his catch phrase "That's the way you do it!"

Until late Victorian times the Punch and Judy show was intended for adult audiences; sexual innuendo was common, and violence crucial, to the show's plots. Since its first recorded staging (the late 1600s) the show, and Punch's character in particular, were renounced as undermining bourgeouis values. True enough: these puppet shows, at their finest, used sight gags and subversive humor to satirize political and moral sensibilities. It's not hard to see why Punch's traditional disdain for social and religious conventions (he regularly abuses police officers and the devil) would appeal to Lathan.

The excerpts below offer critical and historical context for Punch and Judy shows:

“’Master Punch’ must, as it were, singlehandedly face down a broad spectrum of bourgeouis values – education, moral improvement, aesthetic reform, disdain for the low, and . . . [Punch is] construed as healthy voice of common sense silenced by the obsessive demands of middle-class distinction.”
--Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and "Popular" Culture

"In my opinion the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence, and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct..."
--Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol V, 1847 - 1849

The website The Punch Page presents a pdf file(1.9MB)facsimile of the script and illustrations from an 1832 edition of the original book published by S. Prowett in London in 1828.

And here is a video recording of a traditional Punch and Judy show.

Puppetry and Movement

We are more like animators or illustrators when it comes to body movements. . . . [Animators] have to know how bodies move and express emotions so that they can accurately illustrate a character doing those things.

- Amy Harder, PuppetryLab.com

You know, they look like puppets on the stage, when you sit in back they all look very small and their legs going up and down together.

- Lathan, RHYMES WITH EVIL

An excellent resource for more experienced puppeteers is Amy Harder's PuppetryLab.com, which provides beyond-the-basics training and practical helps for puppeteers, puppet teams, and team directors. Of particular use to this production are her articles on puppetry and movement (links below); I was especially intrigued by her discussions of the connection between puppetry and animation, and the tension between realism and stylization.

http://puppetrylab.com/acting-and-characters/movements/
http://puppetrylab.com/acting-and-characters/moremovements/#more-178

Strings Attached? An Overview of Five Basic Puppet Types

A puppet is not an actor and a puppet theatre is not human theatre in miniature, because when an actor 'represents', a puppet 'is.'

- David Currell, An Introduction to Puppets and Puppetmaking

They all have their own personalities. They're all very human, more so in some ways than people with blood in their veins.
- RHYMES WITH EVIL

Before tackling the thematic complexities of RHYMES WITH EVIL it might be helpful to explore the nuts and bolts (or strings and rods) of puppetry: the basic types of puppet. Conventions vary across history and cultures, but most puppets may be classified as one of the following five types: hand/glove, rod, marionette, flat figure, and shadow puppet. Many thanks to Encyclopedia Britannica for the information.

1) Hand or glove puppets

A hollow cloth body fits over the manipulator’s hand; his fingers fit into the head and the arms and give them motion. The figure is seen from the waist upward, and there are normally no legs. The head is usually of wood, papier-mâché, or rubber material, the hands of wood or felt. One of the most common ways to fit the puppet on the hand is for the first finger to go into the head, and the thumb and second finger to go into the arms.

Pros: agility and quickness
Cons: small size and limited arm gestures.

2) Marionettes or string puppets

These full-length figures, controlled from above, are normally moved by strings or threads which lead from the limbs to a control or crutch held by the manipulator. Movement is imparted to a large extent by tilting or rocking the control, but individual strings are plucked when a decided movement is required. A simple marionette may have nine strings—one to each leg, one to each hand, one to each shoulder, one to each ear (for head movements), and one to the base of the spine (for bowing); but special effects will require special strings that may double or treble this number. The manipulation of a many-stringed marionette is a highly skilled operation. Controls are of two main types—horizontal (or aeroplane) and vertical.

Pros: articulated pieces allow marionette to imitate nearly any human or animal gesture
Cons: strings provide only indirect control, and do not allow for the sharp, clear gestures possible with rod puppets.

3) Rod puppets

Like hand puppets, rod puppets are manipulated from below, but they are full-length, supported by a rod running inside the body to the head. Separate thin rods may move the hands and, if necessary, the legs. The hand-rod puppet combines the advantages of the hand and rod puppets; in this figure the hand passes inside the puppet’s body to grasp a short rod to the head, the arms being manipulated by rods in the usual way. One great advantage of this technique is that it permits bending of the body, the manipulator’s wrist corresponding to the puppet’s waist.

Pros: large size, greater range of movement than hand puppets
Cons: complex rod puppets can be very difficult to control

4) Flat figures

Flat figures, worked from above like marionettes, with hinged flaps that could be raised or lowered, were sometimes used for trick transformations; flat jointed figures, operated by piston-type arms attached to revolving wheels below, were used in displays that featured processions. But the greatest use of flat figures was in toy theatres. These seem to have originated in England by a printseller in about 1811 as a kind of theatrical souvenir; one bought engraved sheets of characters and scenery for popular plays of the time, mounted them and cut them out, and performed the play at home. During a period of about 50 years some 300 plays—all originally performed in the London theatres—were adapted and published for toy-theatre performance in what came to be called the “Juvenile Drama.”

5) Shadow figures

These are a special type of flat figure, in which the shadow is seen through a translucent screen. They may be cut from leather or some other opaque material, as in the traditional theatres of Java, Bali, and Thailand, in the so-called ombres chinoises (French: literally “Chinese shadows”) of 18th-century Europe, and in the art theatres of 19th-century Paris; or they may be cut from coloured fish skins or some other translucent material, as in the traditional theatres of China, India, Turkey, and Greece, and in the recent work of several European theatres. They may be operated by rods from below, as in the Javanese theatres; by rods held at right angles to the screen, as in the Chinese and Greek theatres; or by threads concealed behind the figures, as in the ombres chinoises and in its successor that came to be known as the English galanty show. The shadow theatre is a medium of great delicacy, and the insubstantial character of shadow puppets exemplifies all the truest features of puppetry as an art form.

Summoning the Snevil

Welcome! InFusion Theatre is proud to produce the Midwest premiere of RHYMES WITH EVIL, by Charles R. Traeger. The RHYMES production team is delighted to explore Traeger's beautiful, eerie world where puppets sometimes pull the strings. This blog will trace our research of puppetry, folktales and psychosis as we mount this disturbing, very human tale.