String theory
Breathing life into the inanimate through the fine art of puppetry
By Jenny Lower 10/08/2009
Joseph Cashore was 11, vacationing with his family on the Jersey shore, when he saw his first marionette. The stringed puppet, a pirate, was hanging from the ceiling of a gift shop, and Cashore begged to play with it. When the proprietor refused, he went home and jury-rigged his own: using two chunks of wood for the chest and torso, he attached clothespins for the arms and legs, a tin can for the head, cobbled the whole contraption together with string and suspended it from two cross sticks, as he’d seen in Pinocchio.
“It didn’t really work very well,” says Cashore, “but every once in a while, just by accident, it would move just right, and in that instant it would look alive to me. I remembered that sensation.”
Upon his graduation from college, he returned seriously to puppetry. More than 40 years later, Cashore’s marionettes have evolved from this rudimentary effort into two-foot-tall marvels of engineering, sometimes requiring as many as 42 strings. The Pennsylvania-based artist has built an international reputation on his ability to delight children and adults with vignettes that capture, with surprising elegance and maturity, the moments of our everyday lives.
On Oct. 16, Cashore will perform two shows, “Simple Gifts” and “Life in Motion,” at the Scherr Forum Theatre, for the 2009 season of “Performances to Grow On,” a nonprofit group dedicated to bringing live arts entertainment to children and families. This marks the third time Cashore has performed in Ventura County.
Brian Bemel, the organization’s founder and artistic director, first saw the puppeteer perform 12 years ago at the Toronto Milk Festival. “I was totally blown away by the artistry,” he says. “It’s very sophisticated and beautiful.”
Cashore, who began his career as a landscape artist, gathers inspiration through careful contemplation of his surroundings. The concept for a new puppet or piece, he says, is “always something I feel deeply about, something that moves me at a very elementary level.”
That initial idea sparks a series of sketches to ensure anatomical accuracy, and to plan which actions the marionette will perform, followed by the carving of the body from wood or foam. Then comes the slow, delicate work of experimenting with various springs, levers, pulleys and control mechanisms, adding counterweights and “solving mechanical problems” until the puppet is ready to show to an audience. The process typically takes about six months. In the case of one elephant that needed to pick up objects with its trunk, it took years. The test for any marionette, Cashore says, is that “you have to be able to hold it up with finesse. It has to feel right in your hands.”
Cashore now has about 20 puppets, which appear for the audience in short pieces set to classical music, dealing with themes funny, tender or sad. There is the Maestro Janos Zelinka, an elderly musician who plays “Lark Ascending” note for note on his violin; a homeless man named Mike, who roots through a garbage can; and Cyclone, a light bay horse whose neck arches forward in time to his gallop.
Michael Alexander, executive director of Grand Performances in Los Angeles, has seen Cashore perform during each of his two previous visits. Every time, Alexander says, “They’re magical. Adults are captivated and children are just in the palm of his hand. We’re each getting something different and equally exciting. I was just in love with them.”
Puppetry in the United States sometimes suffers from its reputation as children’s entertainment, but in Europe and Asia, where Cashore has performed before, it falls much closer to the high art tradition and typically draws a more adult audience. Cashore’s vignettes, with their explorations of universal but adult themes like love and mortality, are unlike anything most American audiences have seen before.
The marionettes’ power seems to lie precisely in those factors that usually limit their appeal — their miniature size and inanimate nature. These characteristics give them an intrinsic “poetic quality,” Cashore says, and make them “automatically a metaphor for life. They’re capable of expressing very deep emotional states. People are willing to feel with a marionette in a way they might not feel with a human actor … . There is a certain purity there.”
In order to tap these delicate emotions, Cashore crafts each vignette with the precision of a short-story writer. “There’s a lot of paring down of what’s not essential. I’m trying to crop away everything that doesn’t express the basic themes. The simpler it is, the stronger it is.” Each gesture, from a wriggling toe to a flattened ear, is calculated to evoke a naturalism that transports the audience into the illusion. The result is a series of pieces that, by virtue of their attentiveness to the tiniest details of movement and the ordinary experiences that mark our days, affirm humanity and life itself.
In each show, Cashore says, he tries to include something unexpected for the audience. In some cases, that instant of wonderment may come from within. “Adults are often surprised,” he says, “at how much it means to them.”
“Life in Motion,” Friday, Oct. 16, 7 p.m. at the Scherr Forum Theatre, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd. For tickets, call 449-2787 or order online at www.ptgo.org. For information on the Cashore Marionettes, visit http://cashoremarionettes.com/.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT