King of the strings

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/02/2005 (7540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHETHER residing on Avenue Q or working for Team America, puppets are no longer playing second string in pop culture.

Puppetry is the artistic idiom du jour, pairing the familiar formula of wholesome kiddie entertainment with the raunchy language and themes of adulthood.

The theatre world was shocked when Avenue Q, a potty-mouthed blend of South Park and Rent, high-stepped off with the 2004 Tony Award for best musical.

A few months later those South Park bad boys Trey Parker and Matt Stone unleashed Team America: World Police, the incredibly rude $32-million flick in which marionettes vomit, swear and practise puppet sex. To top it off, the crude hand puppet Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, turned up at last year’s Quebec Winter Carnival and put the bite on French-Canadians.

“You can’t swing a cat without hitting a damn puppet,” says Ronnie Burkett, Canada’s foremost string-puller and pioneer in edgy puppetry.

“I think a lot of it is winking at one’s own cultural references.”

Burkett, who returns to the MTC Warehouse tonight with his latest solo creation, Provenance, is grateful for the attention his art form is attracting but finds much of the product as disposable as any pop-culture fad.

“Some of it is just crap,” he says, during an interview. “Team America is a sad waste of a lot of good money. Make a freakin’ puppet walk if you’re going to spend that much money.

“So puppets are hot right now. Call me in two years when balloon artists are the new chic thing to do.”

The 47-year-old jiggler has attempted to forge a more enduring emotional connection with audiences through puppets in such imaginatively bold, physically challenging works as Awful Manors, Tinka’s New Dress, Old Friends, Happy and Street of Blood. The devoted following he has built in Winnipeg is being duplicated in cities around the world.

The Ronnie realm includes Edmonton and Melbourne, Manchester and Vienna. After the MTC run, Provenance will record its 200th performance in Stockholm before moving on to Hamburg, Stuttgart and Zagreb.

“I can’t wait to go to Hamburg because those guys get me,” says the cultural export, who lives in Toronto. “The Vienna festival director came backstage after my show and said, ‘It’s your best work to date, it’s very German.’ I took it as a compliment, and then I thought, ‘I hope it was a compliment.'”

As a puppet Paladin — have puppet show, will travel — Burkett is always looking to expand his audience but he does draw the line, which in recent years runs right along the 49th parallel. He will not work in the United States.

“Politically, I hate them so much,” he says. “I won’t perform for those people. They are the stupidest audiences on the planet. They’re off the list.”

He could take the money and run back north. Four years ago, when he took Street of Blood to the New York Theatre Workshop, the near nine-week sell-out bested the original production of Rent, which originated there.

Even in a predominately Democratic state, Burkett gets a bad vibe from the assembled Yanks. Instead of coming together as one in the theatre, the audience remained 400 individuals. And there was more.

“I was playing Jesus and I crucify a guy on stage and they thought I was proselytizing for the Christians,” says the Emmy Award winner. “They go to the simple moral place really easily in the States right now because everyone is scared about censorship, and that doesn’t happen in Canada. I said to my agent not to send Provenance to the States because they see things at face value right now.”

On the surface, Provenance looks at the politics of beauty, what people do to become beautiful, how they attempt to possess beauty and sometimes destroy it. The 125-minute, one-act solo production keys on a young art history student named Pity Beane who has always been obsessed with a painting of a beautiful naked boy tied against a tree. Pity eventually travels to Vienna, where she discovers the real painting in a brothel and learns the work’s history from the madam.

“I honestly believe that anyone who doesn’t objectify other people is totally lying,” he says. “The idea is that two things are noticed in this world, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the millions and millions in between are plain people. It’s about finding the beautiful in that sea of plain.”

Burkett has taken a vow of silence to protect his voice, which gets an arduous workout every night. He now lives the life of an opera singer, declining to talk all day prior to a performance. And while his arthritic hands remain a problem, his creative spark is still burning intensely.

“I feel like I’m still getting started,” he says. “I’ve never been so energized about doing this every day.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca