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THE
TEENY WEENIE PUPPET SHOW
SPRING/SUMMER 2007- ISSUE NO. 21
Contents • Editor's Note
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PLAYING
WITH MATCHES : LAURA HEIT EXPLODES OUR SENSE OF SCALE
by Susan Simpson
It is a tired old analogy to compare the relationship
between puppeteer and puppet to that of God and man,
but when God shows up slightly tipsy, wearing red lipstick
and a blue sequined tube top it is possible for the idea
to seem fresh again. When God
appears, in person, to bother the curtains in the bedroom
with a burst of breath through her pursed crimson lips,
then the concept of divine intervention takes on new
meaning. When God's giant mug squeezes into the room
and poses the question "What is your fondest desire?"
one immediately gains a visceral understanding of the
value of prayer.
The God I am referring to here is Laura Heit, and the
universe she presides over exists in a single cigar box.
It is a parallel universe, parallel to the contents of
her brain. It comes to life according to her whims on occasions she
calls The Matchbox Shows. The Matchbox Shows are a series
of short vignettes performed in tiny sets constructed,
as the title would suggest, from matchboxes. The matches
function as tree trunks, puppet rods and, of course,
as points of ignition. The show is usually performed
late at night for boisterous crowds while Heit sips a
glass of red wine. As she performs, every thing itty-bitty
is also humongous. A video simulcast of the tiny dramas
is projected above her. The vignettes portray a frightening
dream of perfection, a ghost story, a forest fire, and
a late night hook-up that ends in outer space, among
other things.
In the Matchbox universe there is no stricture
on portraying the Godhead. Graven images are, in fact,
celebrated and so the show ends with "30 Pictures of
Myself Naked," a series of naïve line drawings of the
artist engaged in mundane everyday activities (driving,
welding, teaching, etc.) all sans clothing.
Heinrich
Von Kliest and then Edward Gordon Craig both held fantasies
of unselfconscious action, notions that the empty vessel
of the puppet could channel God directly and thus express
a state of grace. This is not what is happening in The
Matchbox Shows; this God seems unconcerned with any state
of grace. She is capricious and silly and revels in her
oversized nature. She performs miracles occasionally,
but is just as likely to set things on fire. She is almost
human; in fact her behavior often resembles the humanity
of a child playing with toys. She speaks for the characters
in a high thin voice that can only be associated with
games of pretend. Paper people and props slide and bounce
across the stage. Figures are conjured one moment and
then literally cast aside the next.
There are many connotations that
go along with bringing tiny figures to life: the diminutive
as innocent, the miniature as domestic. Heit subverts
these notions with mischievous glee. Young girls, for
years, have been cutting Barbie dolls' hair, but in Heit's
vignette "Blair's Desire," she cuts off not the hair,
but the fingertips of the little puppet of her friend.
This classic act of torture, performed with a pair of
orange-handled scissors, brings winces and gasps from
the audience. But this, she makes clear in her narration,
was the fulfillment of Blair's fondest desire. He believed
that he was imperfect because all his fingers were different
lengths. So snip. Snip. Snip. "And then he was perfect,"
Heit declares in a sweet-as-pie voice, and with that
she tosses aside the maimed hand.
Then there is the Summer Side Sausage Fairy, who turns
little girls' dolls into sausages. As this is a physically
and narratively condensed version of a play that Heit
wrote and performed as a very young girl, it reads like
a miniature object lesson on how the adult world, filtered
through the eyes of innocence, can be a very perverse
domain indeed.
Finally, The Matchbox Shows close with
the last "Picture of Myself Naked." It is called "F___ing
Chicago," a tiny picture of a giant Heit doing just that
to the Sears tower &.. and the dollhouse was never the
same again!
Susan Simpson: Can you tell me about how The Matchbox
Shows began?
Laura Heit: I made the very first matchbox theater for
a friend of mine. We had both been working at a theater
doing very large-scale spectacle shows. Things like fourteen-foot
devil heads and main stage shows with forty-foot whales.
After many years he decided he wanted to go back to making
smaller puppet shows and so I made him a tiny theater
in a matchbox. The second one I made was a miniature
replica of a show I directed called Succubus. In the
tradition of Toy Theater, you could reenact the show
whenever you wanted in the palm of your hand.
I know that you have done this show many times during
the past several years. Over time, have you discovered
what kind of images or stories are most suited to this
very small scale?
Well they have to be short stories that need little explanation.
Nonsense works well, visual jokes and dreams. I try and
make a new show for every performance I do, and I never
rehearse them so I usually find out on stage what ideas
work the best. There have been a few that lived very
short lives. There are often a few that are based on
current events and have a short life span. For example
I had a show where Bush and Gore were professing their
love to Miss Florida (2000) and another one where a bunch
of my friends were in jail for making puppets before
the Republican convention that same year (a true story)
and I don t do those anymore.
Have you ever performed The Matchbox Shows without the
video simulcast?
The very first time I did the The Matchbox Shows there
wasn t a video simulcast and everyone sat on the floor
around me.I found myself explaining what they were seeing
a lot.
What do you think is the effect for the audience of seeing
the show very small and very large at the same time?
I think the video projection of the tiny puppet show
adds legitimacy to it. It commands a certain amount of
attention. In the beginning, it was a simple solution
to allow an audience to see the shows, but now I think
it s a very important part. It allows me to enter the
stage and interact with myself. It feels more like an
act, like a magic show. There is also something very
intriguing about seeing something so small so big; it s
a bit like being let in on a secret.
Do you remember as a kid being really immersed in or
enthralled with very small environments?
I have always loved little things. My favorite stuffed
animal, as a child, was a little three-inch long flat
elephant I called anteater and took with me everywhere.
I had an empty sugar packet I filled with tiny origami
cranes I would make when we went out to restaurants.
Then in junior high I started a dollhouse club. There
were about six of us who would meet regularly to decorate
a friend s great aunt s antique
dollhouse.
Will you tell me about "The Night of the Summer
Side Sausage Fairy?"
In 4th and 5th grade, my best friend and I were prolific
play writers. We wrote and performed a play for our class
on a weekly basis. The most popular play, though, was
"The Night of the Summer Side Sausage Fairy." It was
a very simple story about a fairy that would sneak into
little girls homes at night and turn their dolls into
sausages. It made sense to us then because we had a great
fairy costume and a pillow that looked just like a summer
sausage. I was telling a friend about this play later
when I was in college and had to stop myself because
I was so embarrassed when I realized for the first time
how overtly sexual it was. Now I think it s really funny.
What inspired you to make "30 Pictures of Myself Naked?"
I have always been in the habit of drawing little pictures
of myself and they are almost always naked, so this was
not a far stretch. As the show is usually performed in
a late night cabaret, I thought a little nudity would
be appropriate. There are pictures of me doing various
things like watering the garden, working at the computer,
doing yoga, having dinner with my parents, and on and
on. They always get a lot of laughs and I am always adding
more. It started out being twenty-four pictures of myself
naked and now I think it s up past thirty.
After a show,
a friend came up to me and said her son really liked
it, but was too embarrassed to talk to me. I had known
him since he was five and he was now twelve or thirteen.
She said she thought it was one of his first experiences
seeing a naked woman. It s a funny thing, they are just
drawings, but somehow they read as very intimate, like
at a little peep hole where you can see into my very
private life.
Do you have a favorite moment in the show?
There is a little show called "Look for Me" that is funny
and sad, which I think is the perfect combination for
a show. It has a little forest that I light on fire and
then I unroll a tiny cranky that depicts all the people
running out of the forest fire. It ultimately ends in
tragedy, but there is lots of screaming and hoping. I
really like performing this one because I get to light
things on fire.
Laura is a filmmaker, finger puppet maker,
and teacher at Cal Arts in California. She s performed
her Matchbox Shows at venues around the world. www.lauraheit.com
Susan Simpson is a filmmaker and puppet theatre artist
living in Los Angeles. She is co-director of Automata
and teaches at CalArts. |
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