Let there be life

Bruno Leone, traditional Italian glove puppeteer and one of my teachers often asks the audience at the end of his show “What is the secret of Pulchinella (his main character which symbolizes puppetry itself)?”. The audience makes many guesses. Some say co-ordination, some say skill and some say practice or design. Sometimes a child makes a the correct guess and Bruno smiles widely and Pulchinella cackles.

The right answer according to Bruno is “love”. For a puppet to come alive , speak, act, breathe and live the secret is “love”. I have often pondered about this critically, cynically and logically. At first it sounds soppy.

Bruno’s philosophy begins to make sense after a point. I have come to the conclusion that there is really no logic to why I am a puppeteer. The simple reason is that I “love” puppets, I love making them, designing them and then using them on stage.

Life and style of a puppeteer

This seems like a great opportunity to share what life is like for a professional puppeteer. What do we do daily? Well most of us do very varied work. These include puppet workshops for children and adults, we create performances, which require scripting, designing, puppet making, drawing and sketching, puppet making. The puppets could be made of wood, thermocol, papier mache , foam or fabric. Once a show is ready we perform it for the public, do repeat shows and then if we are lucky we get to take a show on tour. We do repeat shows of our performances in schools, at festival and at theatres. Some puppeteers also work on projects like awareness generation and education.

The Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust team has been doing a fair bit of all the above this last year.
We have been conducting regular school workshops. It is one way for us to reach children and young people and introduce them to puppetry hoping they will come to love puppets too.

Katkatha On the Move

We also had some exciting tours last year. In May we were invited to the 12th International Puppet and Film festival at Holon in Israel. The festival spans over 10 days and hosts over 30 Israeli and International groups. Holon is Tel Aviv’s twin city, an upcoming metro almost like Gurgaon. It has an overwhelming majority of children and young people. Hence the mayor of the city has allocated huge funds to start a puppet Centre called the Israeli Puppet Centre which houses a museum of over 200 puppets, a puppet school and this annual festival.

The force behind this fabulous puppet initiative is a man called Illan Savir who started as a puppeteer at the age of 12!! This is truly his labor of love. During this festival we had the opportunity to watch street puppet shows, park shows for small audiences, student shows, professional puppet companies from Europe, Asia and Israel and my favorite part, Puppet Films. Katkatha opened the festival with About Ram and we did three shows over three days. Excerpts of the show are now on Youtube.

Buxton Puppetry festival

In June, I represented Katkatha at the Buxton Puppetry festival. Along with puppeteer Puran Bhatt and magician Isamuddin and circus artist and clown, Arran Towers,

I conducted workshops for teenagers at the community school, Puran conducted a katputli workshop for adults too.

The workshops ended in a giant puppet parade on the main street and market of Buxton.They also did street shows and I had the opportunity to perform Durga, my solo show based on the Pather Panchali.

Once again this little festival with workshops , lectures, shows at three venues is an annual event and is a true labor of love. In this case the moving force behind this festival is a wonderfully passionate and energetic woman called Chris Agnew and her family or four children. This festivals high point is the venue. It is attached to may of the heritage sites of the city like the famous Buxton Opera House, the Tavern and the Pit . Three venues that contrast completely but are at least 300 years old each.!

Chennai’s Park Festival

Our other tours were to Chennai’s Park Festival with About Ram and Almost 12th Nights shows for Summertime at Prithvi at both Prithvi theatre and Horniman Circle garden.

The Little Blue Plant toured Mumbai twice for its premier and a second season at the Kala Ghora Festival.

Art/Stop AIDS

One tour very close to my heart is to West Bengal to work with Sparsha under an initiave by Make Art/Stop AIDS. Katkatha has been working in the area of generating awareness about HIV/AIDS with a focus on stigma reduction since 2003 . Our involvement and commitment has grown from strength to strength. This project was the next step in that direction. I had the opportunity to tour parts of West 24 Paragana and howrah district with the Sparsha team members. We met Baul(folk singers) and Torja(folk performers) from the area who were inducted into the project as those who would sing and spread the word. I had a wonderful time traveling from village to village, sitting through rehearsals, listening to beautiful song, visiting care centres, meeting positive people who have been victimized and discriminated against and have then re claimed their dignity and lives to then help others. As our continued effort for the cause we want venues and opportunity to perform our show “Virus ka Tamashah” and any if you can think of an opportunity to do so we will be grateful