Magnificent puppet menagerie ready for adventure

The orangutan, the hyena and the Bengal tiger took millions of years of evolution to reach their modern forms. Their zoological counterparts that take the stage in Life of Pi came to life after about 3,500 hours of 3D printing.

Earlier this year, Calgary studio Puppet Stuff Canada began recreating the anthropomorphic characters that populate Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Olivier Award-winning theatrical adaptation, which opens at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre tonight.

But the four-person team had strict instructions: its menagerie couldn’t replicate the originals used in England or during its Broadway run. From tooth to claw, each creature had to be designed, printed and assembled from scratch.

“When these Broadway shows become available for other theatres to produce, there’s two ways the rights holder will go about it. The rights holder for Little Shop of Horrors, for instance, will say this is how we built the Audrey II. Go ahead — do it. Go build the plant. In this case, the rights holder said, ‘We don’t want you to copy what we did for the first show. We want you to put your own spin on it,’” Puppet Stuff co-founder Brendan James Boyd says.

That was no simple feat, says Boyd, whose studio worked on an accelerated two-month timeline.

A tiger silhouette should look like a tiger silhouette, and the orangutan’s knuckled walk should mimic that ape’s authentic strut, so any variations in character design had to be rooted in both material and texture, Boyd says.

“How do you reinvent the tiger?” he says.

“I like fighting against the trend. And ever since Life of Pi came out, everyone’s using what was used in the (original), which is a type of foam. It’s great, but I wanted to see if we could come up with a different look and texture. I also needed to do something fast that didn’t require one artist sitting and carving for hours and hours because we had limited time and budget.”

So the Puppet Stuff team sculpted each character in miniature before heading to the 3D scanner.

To print every sculpted component required a total of about 30 kilograms of light-weight filament.

“It came with a learning curve, I won’t deny that, but it opened up a lot of doors and possibilities for doing more with this technology moving forward,” Boyd says.

While the original productions of Life of Pi had puppetry that evoked driftwood, the animals created by the studio were largely influenced by wave patterns, he says.

“That was our a-ha moment,” says Boyd, who told director Haysam Kadri and set designer Beyata Hackborn (who conceived of the delightfully askew mansion in last year’s RMTC-Citadel production of The Play That Goes Wrong) about the design’s oceanic direction.

“Beyata took that motif and incorporated it into the entire set. The floor, the shape, the movement, the framing of the stage, is all water. And if you look very carefully, you’ll see that in the tips of the puppets’ silhouettes and joints, there are waves coming off of everything.”

Once the puppets leave the studio, Puppet Stuff defers its zookeeping to the on-stage puppeteers and to puppetry director Dayna Tietzen, whose experience includes international productions of War Horse, another acclaimed stage show with a mammalian puppet at its heart.

But the puppets’ lives aren’t easy after they leave captivity for the brutal open waters of the stage.

“Every night our puppets take fractures or broken joints and need things replaced. It was really important to the director that the puppet didn’t limit what the performers could do to sell the gravity of the action in the situation. The puppets get tossed around and beaten, taken to the puppet hospital almost daily,” Boyd says.

A dedicated puppet tech is on hand every night.

“They’re really the heroes of the show, beyond the puppeteers, because they have to handle the day to day maintenance,” he says.

“Every day, constantly fixing. It’s just the nature of the beast. No pun intended.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca