the Fantasist

This year at the Fringe, I am mostly excited by object manipulation. Mostly, this consists of cutting and pasting press releases to look like I came up with the artist's smart ideas, but I just found out that this is actually the cool way to refer to the art form formerly known as puppetry. It's nice when on and off stage can come together so easily.

The Fantasist is not just object manipulation - it has a title that probably describes my mental state. Ailin Conant, Artistic Director of Theatre Témoin took some time to answer my questions about their debut at the Fringe.
I am going to start off the same every time ... the dread question - why the fringe?

That's a bit like saying, "Why drop acid," or even "Why make a play," is it not?  It's not like you can sit down and rationally list the pros and cons of the Edfringe experience to come out with a balance sheet that clearly indicates a steady return on some kind of calm investment.  You do it because there's something in the experience itself that will take you further as a human being and an artist.  You do it because it will exhaust and surprise you.  And you do it because something amazing will come out of it in the end, even if it's usually not the thing you expected it to be.  

I am excited about the rise of puppetry: I am really getting into it at the moment. Can you tell me a little about how this piece uses puppetry, why it is a good technique for the story, and how it might fit into the tradition of puppetry?

This piece combines puppetry with physical theatre, so you've got human actors playing opposite puppet creatures...I guess it's like some kind of Jacques Lecoq / Jim Henson mash-up.  Actually, to be more specific, we have one human character, Louise, playing against a slew of puppets that represent her various inner voices and moods.  The style has proven incredibly useful in allowing us to explore an internal, private world in an external and poetic way.  I find that puppets are more evocative than their human counterparts because they're a blank slate - as an audience you can project your own darkest bile and lightest affection on them in a way that is much harder to do with live actors.  


In terms of "tradition," you'd actually probably have a clearer idea of that than I would.  This is our first puppet show and we tackled puppetry the same way we tackle most things - we mucked in and figured it out as we went along.  It wasn't until after we started building the show in 2011 that we got really into studying puppetry and going to workshops.  We've probably learned the most about "tradition" from conversations with keen puppet-theatregoers in the bar after our performances.  I kind of fantasize about the conversations that "real" puppet companies might have in the rehearsal room: "What puppeteer costuming will serve this puppet best?  An understated cap or full Bunraku black hoods?"  In our rehearsal you're much more likely to hear something like, "Is this hood-thingie keeping the focus off my face, or do I just look like a wanker?"

The Fantasist deals with issues of mental ill-health. How easy is it to get across the bipolar mind set on stage?

It's about as easy as it is to get across any mindset on stage, which is to say, not easy.  In a way, it's not the "bipolar" part that's most challenging, it's the "mind" part, the internal part, the part about trying to visibly stage something that is by definition intangible and invisible.  Once you develop a language for that, you can communicate anyone's experience--"healthy" and "sane" are subjective concepts anyways; they only apply in the context of a person's behaviour in relation to other human beings.  


What goes on in someone's mind--anyone's mind--is so full of swirling and often incomprehensible ups and downs that, shown from the inside, we're all a bit mad.  That's perhaps the most important thing to understand about this piece and our approach to it: our attraction to this theme came from a place of deep empathy, as two of the original devising cast had had direct personal experience as carers of bipolar family members.  So our goal is not to map out and define the differences that constitute a "bipolar mind."  It's actually the other way around--we go into Louise's head to uncover and make visible the myriad ways in which she is just like us.
 Theatre Témoin have done work in the past with soldiers suffering from trauma. Was this a form of therapy, and how did it work?

The company has a done a great deal of work with ex-combatants in the last few years, it's been kind of a personal meditation of mine.  It all started with Nobody's Home, an Odyssey adaptation that I was co-developing with a company called Grafted Cede (you might have seen us at the Gilded Balloon last year).  Basically as soon as we made the link between Odysseus's epic "fight to get home after war" and the seemingly unending stream of stories about returning Afghan - and Iraq - War vets who were battling their own post-war monsters, we saw that the myth was a perfect vehicle for exploring war trauma and soldiers' returns.  


We built the show based on a great deal of reading and research, but as civilians with no personal experience of PTSD, were all slightly terrified of actually touring the show to real veteran's communities. We decided to hold a response and development workshop with American Combat Vets as part of the first leg of our tour, which was nothing like "therapy" and much more like "specialist consulting." It was a total blag - here I am cold-calling VA centres and promising a "mutually beneficial creative exchange" when in reality I have no idea what ex-soldiers might want that we can offer and vice versa. In the end, though, it was brilliant.  We were a small team: myself, the 2 actors, one psychologist, four veterans, and an external applied drama facilitator who we hired in so that it wasn't us leading the sessions. 


The vets saw the show and then in the workshop we basically forum-ed it.  They would be like, "play back that scene with the Cyclops" and the actors would get up and start playing until one of the vets would shout "freeze" and then jump on stage to show us something so spot-on that it would immediately get incorporated into the subsequent performances.  For us it was about understanding and communicating the story as clearly as we could, and for the vets it was about having a voice and making sure that we were telling their story.  Was it theraputic?  Certainly, for all of us.  But "therapy" was never the stated goal, and I'm always a bit suspicious of any creatvive activity where it is.  I think there's a humility that we have to have as artists; the ability to say, "this is as much about my growth and learning as it is yours, we're all in this together, we're all building towards one collective external goal--one piece of theatre."  I think anything less than total collaboration indicates a lack of respect, an inability to take someone on equal footing as a peer with things to teach to us and learn from us.  


Since that workshop I've done a number of creative projects with and by groups of ex-combatants.  In Lebanon I worked with former commanders from opposing sides of the civil conflict to write a play.  In Rwanda I worked with a group of recently demobilized child soldiers to stage a devised piece.  In Israel I interviewed wounded IDF combatants to create a verbatim text.  In every project the collaborative spirit - the philosophy of shared goals and efforts - remained the same.
 
Sorry for throwing in such big questions in  so small a space... 
We love big questions in small spaces!  That's Fringe theatre defined! 


Underbelly, 3 -27 August