Customer Reviews

PUPPET FESTIVAL [VHS]

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Warner Blake's video, Puppet Festival, is a fine overview of contemporary puppetry. Blake, a longtime player in the Seattle puppet scene, captures the intensity, humor, and collegial generosity with which today's puppeteers go about their work. Puppet Festival takes the viewer through several days of the national Puppeteers of America conference at Seattle's University of Washington in 1999. What is perhaps most impressive about the video is the openness of the puppeteers. Amateurs and pros alike; they are all teachers, sharing their tricks and techniques with deep enthusiasm.
With a roving camera and an eye for the deep talent and phenomenal humanity that marks most successful puppeteers, Blake shows how puppetry continues to redefine itself. For Inez Zeller Bass of Sandglass Theater in Vermont, puppets are small toy figures that Bass moves through a tiny landscape, like an adult version of a schoolgirl with her dolls. On the other hand, for Ariely and Inbar of Israel, the puppets in their Gertrude show are life-size extensions of themselves, joined at the waist.
Blake also provides good-sized chunks of some of the best performances at the festival, including the US debut of the master marionettist Huang Yi Que, from Guangzhou, China. Huang has a wonderful way of making his marionettes change identity in mid-motion. With the flick of a wrist, a puppet can be completely transformed. Also on the bill are Yang Feng and Yang Xie Zheng, Chinese puppeteers who also work in Seattle. We see their work from the audience's perspective, but also from backstage, in a fluid dance that the audience never sees.