The World on a String

by Christopher Arnott

As titles go, the Black Sheep Puppet Festival is pretty redundant. Puppetry is the bastard performance artform, presumed by most casual partakers to be a haven for rank juvenilia, created by craftspersons so socially backward that they have to hide behind dolls. Black Sheep indeed.

I’ve endured the egregrious misunderstandings about this endlessly innovative artform myself. My father was a world-class puppeteer, author of a key work on the subject (Plays Without People, published
in 1962 and dedicated to a baby-sized me). On more than one occasion I’d be at one of his shows where 2- or 3-year-old children were being turned away, to the bitter complaints of parents who were appalled that the tots would be denied entry to a “puppet show.” It didn’t deter them that the performances in question were of Oedipus Rex, a classical Greek tragedy during which a monarch tears out his own eyes. My father, a classical scholar using his own translations and research, found marionettes a perfect medium to perform plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and others, since the size of the wooden performers in a standard auditorium was similar to what an audience might see if sitting in a Greek amphitheater looking at human-sized actors.

Puppetry’s an amazing medium for political theater, social satire, Latin American-style literary fantasies, horror, burlesque and melodrama. Such range and power is epitomized by the Black Sheep
Puppet Festival, whose ninth annual edition begins with a party at the Brew House (2100 Mary St.,412-381-7767, thebrewhouse@gmail.com) Friday Oct. 19.

Another artform which, like puppetry, gets short shrift because it seems to be merely a shrunken-down form of a supposedly higher art will also be regularly on view during the Black Sheep fest. That
unfairly maligned instrument of entertainment is the divine, misunderstood ukulele, equally capable of quaint savage-breast soothing and punk vigor. Liz Hammond strums original “ukulady” tunes at Friday’s opening, and Buddy Nutt (an eclectic singer- songwriter who moved to Pittsburgh’s shores just recently and is as adept on kazoo and didgeridoo as on uke) performs Pickleville, his “tragicomic opera for pickle puppets” among the featured festival performances on Oct. 26 & 27.

Other performers in the more-than-week-long fest include Indicator Species (“Dinner’s Ready”), Skin and Bone Theater (“The Errorist”), Major Arcana (“The Monkey’s Heart”), Body Invisible (“On TV”), Udienetta (“Secnarf Pool”), Joann Kielar (“Worlds for a Better World”) and The Ubuists, who present their inflatable adaptation of one of the landmark works of outré puppetry, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. All of the above can be found on the main performance program Oct. 26 & 27.

In its base form, Ubu Roi is as harrowing as anything in Oedipus Rex (or Macbeth, on which it’s loosely based). Bring young children to see it and face the glare of my imperious father looking down from
heaven with puppeteerial scorn.

There are all-ages programs for the kiddies, after all, on selected afternoons. The Black Sheep Puppet Festival also features lectures, demonstrations, special events at Tom Sarver’s Tom Museum, workshops with Sarah C. of Toronto’s Stranger Theatre, Pittsburgh puppetry icon Gregory Knipling showing off puppets from his collection, and an assorted of other diminutive yet grandiose delights. For a full schedule, stick your hand up http://www.blacksheeppuppet.com.

Photo: Buddy Nutt