CHRISTIE'S PROGRESS JOURNAL: OCTOBER 16-26, 2004

10-16-04 I read a book called, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales, by Marie-Louise von Franz, Spring Publications, Texas, 1982. Here are some things I picked up from her book:

-“Because the fairy tale is beyond cultural and racial differences it can migrate so easily. Fairy-tale language seems to be the international language of all mankind—of all ages and of all races and cultures. (18)”

-“[O]ne of the most ancient and basic forms of archetypal tales has this form—stories about anthropoid-animal beings, where fox speaks to mouse and hare talks to cat. (25)” (This is the most ancient type of mythological story.)

-“There are many poetical ways of expressing this nowhereness, this once-upon-a-time which, following M. Eliade, most mythologists now call the illud tempus, that timeless eternity, now and ever. (27)”  (ex: “Far beyond the end of the world and even beyond the Seven Dog Mountains there once was a king…)

-Peripeteia: (can be short or long) the ups and downs of the story. (28)

-“We have to be switched out of the fairy-tale world. (29)” (She is referring to the ends of fairy-tales when something is said to bring the audience back out into reality.)

-“There is a beautiful custom among Australian aborigines: when the rice does not grow well the women go into the rice field and squat among the rice and tell it the myth of the origin of rice. Then the rice knows again why it is there and grows like anything. (46)”

“Feathers represent thoughts or fantasies…(51)”

-“The original pagan Germanic and Celtic religions had many cults of Mother Earth and other nature goddesses, but the one-sided patriarchal super-structure of the Christian civilization slowly repressed this element…In the Middle Ages with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Troubadours, the recognition of the anima was much more alive than it was from the 16th century onwards, a time which is characterized by an increasing repression of the feminine element and of Eros-culture in our part of the world. (52)”

“Gold treasures can be buried in the earth and dug up unharmed after a thousand years, as is not the case with copper or silver or iron, so it is the immortal, the transcendental element, that which outlasts ephemeral existence; it is the eternal, the divine and most precious, and whenever something is made of gold it is said to have that eternal quality. That is why a wedding ring is made of gold, for it is meant to last forever; it should not be corrupted by any negative earthly influences. (60)”

“A wood is a region where visibility is limited, where one loses one’s way, where wild animals and unexpected dangers may be present, and therefore, like the sea, it is a symbol of the unconscious. (93)”

-“[W]ood is vegetable life, an organic form that draws life directly from the earth and transforms the soil. Through plants, inorganic matter becomes living. Since plants take their nourishment in part from the mineral contents of the earth, they signify that form of life which is closely connected with inorganic matter, and this can be said to parallel the life of the body in its intimate connection with the unconscious. (93)”

-“The fish is famous as a Christian symbol; the apostles were called ‘fishers of men,’ and Christ himself (ichthys) is symbolized by the fish and is so celebrated in the eucharistic meal of fishes…In the Middle Ages the fish was thought to be a symbol of earthly pleasure ‘because they are so greedy’; perhaps also because Leviathan was a fish-monster. Jewish Tradition asserts that the pious will eat Leviathan as a eucharistic meal on Doomsday…In India, too, the fish is connected with the saviour symbol. The god Manu transformed himself into a fish and saved the holy books from the flood. (113-4)”

-“As Jung observes in Psychology and Alchemy, we are Christianized in the higher levels of the psyche, but down below we are still completely pagan. While fairy tales are for the most part entirely pagan, some of them, especially those of a late date…contain symbols which one can understand only as being an attempt of the unconscious to unite again the sunken pagan tradition with the Christian field of consciousness. (116-7)” (*A book to get: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, by Jung and Kerenyl.)

-“Hair is a source of magic power or mana. Ringlets of hair, preserved as keepsakes, are believed to connect one individual with another over a distance. Cutting the hair and sacrificing it often means submission to a new collective state—a giving up and a rebirth. (132)”

10-22-04 I read another book called, Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre, by Catriona Kelly, Cambridge University Press, Oxford, 1990. Here are some interesting things I learned from that book:

-“The puppet theatres were more numerous [than any other type of entertainment] at the carnivals.” –Yury Dmitriev

-Sergey Obraztsov, in 1927, said: “A puppeteer or organ grinder has only to appear in our courtyard and every proletarian in the place practically falls out of the seventh floor windows for joy.” (179)

- I also learned that heavily subsidized state puppet theatres killed off most street puppet shows, and that agitprop puppet theatre (agitation and propaganda) was used a lot, not by typical showmen, but by young people…the intelligentsia.

-“Throughout the 1920s, active puppet collectives traveled around European Russia staging shows which were based on the adventures of the glove-puppet hero of the Russian fairground, Petrushka. (193)”

-“From the first years of Soviet Power, the puppet theatre had a central place in official theatre policy. (193)”

10-24-04 Today I finished my first draft of my adapted Russian folktale. I hope to attend a meeting of a local Playwright’s group in November. I have also designed two of the puppets for the production, and am working on drawing up the others.

10-26-04 I read through a book called, Expert Puppet Technique:A Manual of Production for Puppeteers, by Eric Bramall and Christopher C. Somerville, published by Plays, Inc., Boston, 1966. It gave me great insight into the world of puppet shows, as this will be the first I will be producing. Here are some things I found to be of worth as I dive into this puppet endeavor:

-“The attribution of human emotions to the puppets is a piece of whimsy in which audiences delight. If anyone—other than a child who accepts miracles unquestioningly—really believed a puppet was alive, they would not be charmed but horrified. As it is, however, audiences know when attending a puppet show that they are indulging themselves in a belief in the impossible. Here is an escape from reality, a release from, or a rude little laugh at, the mundane everyday world, an escape to a dream world, where animals wearing clothes and walking upright and talking, birds singing grand opera, fishes swimming in the air wearing hats and smoking pipes, are accepted unquestioningly. (15)”

-“The hand and rod puppet has one of the manipulator’s hands inside it to produce head and body movements but the arms are worked by slender rods, the upper end of which are attached to the puppet’s hands or forearms and the lower ends of which are held in the manipulator’s other hand. (18)”

-“Essentially a producer must be all of three things. He must be a psychologist, a craftsman of the theatre and an artist who has something to say. As an artist he will have a point of view, a vision which penetrates deeper than that of the man in the street. The producer must look at the world and show us, in his presentation, just what he sees. (24)”

-“As important question is: What should be the length of a puppet play? Effimova, the famous Russian puppeteer, maintained that the length of a play should correspond with the size of puppet in comparison with the size of the live actor. Thus, if a stage play lasts three hours, a puppet play performed by puppets one-third life size, should last one hour. This is a very broad and controversial rule. Common sense and careful judgment are the best guides. A good puppet play might run for an hour but it would have to be really good to hold the audience’s attention for so long. At the Harlequin we consider thirty minutes to be a reasonable extreme length for a play of two or three scene changes. Plays comparable with the live theatre’s one-act play can last as long as a live theatre one-act play, i.e. from ten to even twenty-five minutes. (29)”

-“Ideally the voice for each puppet character should be supplied at the time of performance by the puppet’s manipulator. Such a ‘live’ performance has the great advantage of flexibility, enabling the puppets to play to their audience, adapting their pace according to the audience’s reactions and so permitting a fine degree of timing. It goes without saying, however, that such a system means that every manipulator must have a good voice and must be able to act with his, or her, voice whilst manipulating the puppet. (42)”

-“If the voice fits the character being portrayed by the puppet, it will be accepted unquestioningly by the audience as being the voice of the puppet. It must be remembered, though, that when puppets are playing human characters those characters have invariably been reduced to caricatures, in appearance, in speech and in action. The voices for such characters, though essentially human, must nevertheless have a melodramatic quality suitable to that broadly drawn characterization which is peculiar to the puppet. (44)”

-“People are apt to applaud puppets because they seem lifelike. Puppets, however, are not lifelike, they only approximate life, pointing certain idiosyncrasies and parodying human movement. People really applaud their own gullibility as much as the cleverness of the puppets, for they are easily taken in by the antics of a puppet in the hands of a good manipulator. The puppet is an instrument with which the manipulator can arouse and exploit the audiences’ imagination. The puppet as an actor moves within very narrow limits of expression when compared with the living actor and the manipulator has to squeeze his emotions into these limits to the best of his ability. At times, to the sensitive actor-manipulator, this can be very frustrating—like trying to play a symphony on a mouth organ, until the manipulator realizes that though a symphony is not possible on a single instrument, a sonata is, and can be just as moving. (50)”

-“Exaggeration of proportions in comparison with human proportions are normal and accepted practice in puppet design…Small heads and hands—smaller than in life—give an air of refinement and elegance to the puppet…(51)”

-“The puppets hands are of great importance. A great amount of character can be expressed through the hands. The live actor has an endless range of minute gestures at his command; the puppet has only one position of his fingers with which to express himself. (51)”

-“It is vitally important that a puppet should epitomize the general traits of a character in appearance, for its appearance, except in rare instances, is maintained throughout the play for it has only one expression of countenance and must rely on stance and gesture to communicate visually its mood. A puppet which is required to look sad one minute and happy the next does not want an acutely miserable expression nor a wide grin. (52)”

-“A good manipulator is one who can make a puppet do whatever he wants it to do, with certainty and every time. No two puppets are alike, however, and the manipulator’s first job is to get to know the puppet he is handling; he must explore the range of its movements and decide how best he can convey to the audience the idea, mood, or emotion required. (59)”

-“Only confidence on the part of the manipulator can give confidence to the puppet, and confidence comes through the manipulator knowing what he is doing. (61)”

-“A puppet should move with ease and with rhythm. Its movements should ‘flow’. For instance, when a puppet has finished speaking, its arms should not just drop lifelessly to its sides but should hold the final gesture until the opportunity arises to change it as a natural reaction to whatever is happening next. The ability of a puppet to “freeze” when another is speaking, and by so doing avoid detracting the audience’s attention from the speaker is a characteristic which has been much praised by theorists and has been held up as an example to live actors. (61)”

-“Movements of the torso of a puppet are very useful in punctuating speeches and in suggesting mood through a stance. The most used movement is an inclination forward of the body from the hips, sometimes from the waist…(67)”

-“A puppet’s hand should not incline in any direction more than 45 degrees from the line of the arm. (68)”

-“The dance should be a thing of beauty, not a battle between a gramophone record and a frantic puppeteer. (76)”

-“Once all the major difficulties have been ironed out it remains for the scene to be polished. It should be run through several times without stops before the next scene is tackled. Eventually every scene will have been rehearsed separately and it remains to run through the whole show without stops. (94)”

-“There is, you will remember, an old theatrical maxim: Always leave your audience wanting more. This is equally applicable to puppetry. (95)”

-“A comfortable audience is a happy audience and it is the happy audience who applaud. (98)”