All strung out

>> Next-gen puppetry champions sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—and revolution

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Holy shit, dude, they’re everywhere.
They’re rapping rhymes in Berlin and busting out the bon temps vibe in New Orleans. In Montreal, they’re go-go dancing for the neo-electro kidz, talkin’ ’bout a revolution in boho cafés and doing the nasty on late-night TV. Decked out in dollar-store chic and soaked in beer, they’re upstaging DJs and rock stars, freaking out the uninitiated and challenging the fundamentals of nocturnal art and entertainment. If they weren’t only a foot tall on average, dangling from strings or tolerating hands up their asses, they’d be an insurmountable threat to boredom and complacency in the nightlife scene.
They’re puppets, see, and for a variety of reasons, it might not be unreasonable to say they’re the new punk rock.

Czech this out
One local puppet that’s got chins wagging—and booties wiggling—is a bald, bug-eyed, elf-eared freakazoid from the Czech Republic. His name is Spejbl, and he made his auspicious Montreal debut last November at the Neon night at SAT, executing nonchalant groove-moves on multiple video screens. His nimble-fingered manipulator is Thomas Lord of the Marionette, who now recalls that fateful night. “It really hit a nerve,” says the Lord, “like people had been waiting for it.”

Like most of our next-gen puppeteers, the Lord sorta stumbled into his calling by accident. Four years ago, local DJ Thomas Sontag (yeah, brother of Tiga) was in Prague, “czeching” out the vibrant street theatre scene. Large, wooden marionettes abounded there, Thomas was intrigued, and, on a whim, he picked one up.

Getting to the point he’s at now was a gradual process for Thomas, who you can now respectfully call the Lord. “It hasn’t been regimented practicing, like, two hours a day before sunrise. I’ve just fiddled around with it—it got started, more than anything, once I got my video camera two years ago. As soon as I saw him on film, I realized how good he looked and how many different things I could do with it. But by that point I’d already gotten comfortable with the controls and could make him dance a bit.

“They’re fairly limited,” the Lord admits. “There’s certain things, even simple, basic things, that you just can’t do. Certain poses, even a convincing walk.”

Maybe, but man, can that puppet dance. “What starts happening is, the more you play around with it and get into the rhythm, even if your motions are really simple, he gets into his own rhythm. Even if you couldn’t do a certain motion on its own, once it’s already moving, it’s like a pendulum—it goes on its own. Once he warms up, he can rock!”

Moreover, he can move a room to rock. When Spejbl did his funky thing at the more recent Neon night with Miss Kittin & the Hacker, letting his backbone (or equivalent chunk of wood) slide over a checkered, day-glo backdrop, he was clutching placards cajoling clubgoers to “spaz with me” and “dance like a psycho.” They did.

Not surprisingly, the Lord is less enamoured of DJing these days. “Puppeteering is a much better release for me. The performance element—I’m not a dancer, but I’ve always had total respect and admiration for people who do something with their bodies. I love watching awesome breakdancers and so on, I wish I could do it, but I never felt comfortable going for it. This is a close surrogate, in a way.”

Thomas and Spejbl (and his new girlfriend?) reappear on May 18, at the next Neon night. Check it out.

Mean, green and on the scene

Another puppet out to get the party started is Marionetti, protégé of Mocky, himself part of Kitty-Yo continuum based in Berlin. Like his friends Peaches and Chilly Gonzales, Mocky’s a T.O. ex-pat now pimping the “Canadian jackass styles” (no, it’s a real thing…) in Europe.
Mocky opened for Euro-crooner Louie Austen at la Sala Rossa a month and change back, and opening for Mocky, or rather kicking off his set of goofball chip-hop, was said puppet, made of “a bunch of green furry stuff and tons of beer and other stimulants.
“Marionetti is a 3-year-old (in human years, 333 in puppet years) troublemaker,” explains Mocky. “He makes his living by MCing at raves and parties. He looks like a cute frog but he’s not as innocent as you would think. Marionetti tends to have a very dirty mouth when he raps at parties, but people never get offended.”

Mocky’s intro to puppeteering was pretty casual. “I met a guy in Berlin called Paul PM, and he had a lot of connections with puppets in the underground scene—namely the Puppetmastaz, who are like the Wu-tang Clan of puppet hip hop.”

Actually, Puppetmastaz are about the only crew in puppet hip hop. Huge in Germany, they have yet to “break” over here, but Marionetti’s certainly setting the stage for the hip-hop handjobs. Provided Mocky keeps him around, that is—he’s jealous of the attention the puppet gets (guess girls like Marionetti better), and his arms are getting tired to boot. “I would like to see him get a bit more mature and then to go solo,” grumbles Mocky, “and handle his own business.”

Sock it to me, baby

Even if you’re at home on a weekend night (handling your own business, so to speak), you can’t dodge puppet power. Those who tuned in to CBC’s ZeD TV pilot (the test run for a new “open source” indie-flick anthology show) a couple of weeks ago might have caught a few raunchy little porn vignettes—starring socks.

That’s right, that most primeval of puppets, the sock with the eyes and mouth drawn on, has graduated from distraction for toddlers to distraction for homebound horndogs hankerin’ for a yank.

The creation of Bastard Amber Productions of Outremont, Naughty Soxxx is a series of two-minute shorts that trot out all the porn clichés. The horny housewife, the loose-living disco stud, the overeager student, they’re all there.

“It was originally Chantal Houtterman’s idea,” says Bastard Amber producer Elza Kephart, trying to pass the blame off on her co-writer/co-director. “She and her boyfriend were sitting around talking about random things, including how funny it would be to do sock-puppet porn. They laughed about it, but then she mentioned it to me over dinner one evening last summer, and I thought it was hysterical. I told her we should try to actually do something and put it on the Internet. She said that if I got involved, it would actually happen.

Happen it did, what with a call for submissions from Zed TV. Racing to meet the April Fool’s Day production deadline, the ladies got down to brass tacks. “Chantal, the art director, and I did watch ’70s porn one day—that was more for, uh, research purposes. I think we watched Deep Throat and Devil in Miss Jones. We got some great lines from that. I haven’t seen a lot of pornos, but everyone knows the pizza boy and the plumber thing, so we just sat down and came up with really lame porno ideas.”

It remains to be seen whether Naughty Soxxx will make the viewer’s-choice cut and return when Zed TV does in September (smart money says it will). In the meantime, Kephart’s sending tapes to short-film fests and Stateside broadcasters, but curious locals can check out naughtysoxxx.com for cheap, 100 per cent cotton thrills.

Rockin’ rodents

One puppeteer bridging the gap between TV and the live show is Miss Pussycat of New Orleans. She’s the squeeze, and maraca-shakin’ backup, of Quintron, he of the evil organ party jams and the remarkable Drum Buddy device. Miss Pussycat has been putting on puppet shows in the couple’s Spellcaster Lounge for some years now, but has recently completed North Pole Nutrias, a half-hour Christmas special set to air next holiday season. Nutrias, so you know, is the polite term for muskrats—the special sees a pair win a trip to Santa’s hangout, where they confront a toy-destroying, day-glo, rock ’n’ roll virus out to derail X-mas.

Fans of Quintron and Pussycat will already be familiar with Flossie and the Unicorns, her all-puppet rock band. “They started the band in 1996 after using a brain machine,” explains Miss Pussycat, “and then they found a message in a bottle, with the name ‘Flossie and the Unicorns.’ They practiced very hard for one day and then won the Nobel Prize for science.
“All three puppet show soundtrack albums I have put out are under the name Flossie and the Unicorns. Those puppets are very old now and have retired, but I still put their name on the records because they are, well, you know, my good friends. There are many, many other puppet bands in the magical forest now, and they all love Princess Pandora Stardust, the guitar player for Flossie. The new bands go on tour all over the world in a helicopter, if they play guitar, or on a train, if they play Drum Buddies.”

Miss Pussycat’s hesitant to regard what she does as in any way underground—the Spellcaster Lounge is in a basement, does that count? Her shows, for all their wild ideas and idiosyncrasies, are fairly traditional in style and function. “I started out doing puppet shows in church. In junior high school, I was in the Christian Puppet Youth Ministry, and we went on tour to other churches, in Oklahoma. Eventually I started doing puppet shows about bands and doing shows in rock clubs.”

Next stop, superstardom. “In 1999, Flossie and the Unicorns did a real, live Peel Session at BBC 1. The puppet bands have travelled all over the world, including Europe twice. We were just at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where we had a headlining showcase (eat your heart out, Greg the Bunny)! The latest show is called Mystery at Squirrel Ranch—it is about Picky the Squirrel. Later this month, Quintron and the squirrels and I are going on tour with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.”

Jot this down on your calendar—Quintron and Miss Pussycat hit Montreal (though not with JSBX) on June 9.

Power to the (puppet) people

If what Miss Pussycat does is traditional, what Montreal’s Petit Théâtre d’Absolu do is flat-out historical, in more ways than one. They summon up episodes from the early days of socialism and bring them to life using an archaic form called toy theatre, involving flat, paper puppets taken from vintage engravings, as well as song, poetry, slogans and more.
“It’s a form that was incredibly popular, from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, before cinema,” explains PTA member Gabe Levine. “It started as a kind of souvenir-selling device for operas. They used to sell them as books, the theatre itself would be cut out and slotted and tabbed together. The characters would also be cut-outs, with a little system to make them move around.”

Introduced to the concept by friends in NYC, Levine and company used the form to spin the yarn of the communes in 19th-century Paris, and are working on a second show now. “It’ll be called Haymarket, about the Chicago anarchists who were hung for allegedly conspiring to throw a bomb at police during a demonstration. It’ll be a different kind of show, slower and more meditative, with more singing.”

Puppetry, Levine has discovered, is an artform that keeps well with the leftist values of the PTA. “It’s cheap. We, and the other puppetry groups we work with, come from the perspective that everything should be done as cheaply as possible, finding materials in the garbage and so on. It’s just cardboard and papier-maché, which you can make out of corn starch and water. Add a little paint and presto, basically.”

Presto, they’re part of a scene that’s larger than they initially thought. “People are still doing that old style of toy theatre. We’re going to a festival in Troyes, France, next week—le Rencontre internationale de théâtre de papier. After that, we’ll be performing at more, like, political places in France—anarchist bookstores, squats and so on.”

Manipulating magic

As Levine sees it, puppetry on the edge is not a new thing. “The puppeteers were always social critics, using their marginal status to poke at the powerful. Puppetry, historically, has never been taken seriously as an artform, which gives it a kind of freedom.”
Whatever party line they tow, puppets have a weird effect on audiences, alternately delighting, intriguing and creeping people out. “So many things from childhood completely lose their effectiveness, the key to your imagination,” says Thomas. “Somehow, this really does keep that. Maybe it’s because people haven’t had that much exposure to it. It hasn’t been overly exploited, commercially. On the other hand, most people have had some limited exposure to it as kids.”

Mocky’s got a similar theory. “People like to play, and like to let themselves be hypnotized and interact with other lifeforms.” He notes that when Marionetti hits the stage, “people’s eyes get really big, and then they try to grab his head.”

Make of that what you will. Miss Pussycat seems the most assured in her explanation of the mysterious appeal that puppets harbour. “It’s because they are so cute. They are another species, in a parallel universe, a secret little world that is full of colours that we can’t even see, and sewing machines that make magic dresses and bands that can make their heads fly off when they do guitar solos.” 7