A larger-than-life leg crawls across a dark stage. A disembodied arm appears and makes its way across the stage to explore and embrace a skull. Did I mention that these severed, anatomically-correct body parts have been flayed, displaying their muscles, veins, and bones?
Kevin Augustine of Lone Wolf Tribes brought his most recent work, Body Concert, to the Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival this week. Inspired by Japanese Butoh dance theater and accompanied by a haunting electronic score, the work was a bravura display of movement and puppetry.
It’s no surprise that puppetry is popular with children, who readily use their imagination to give life to inanimate creatures. At least in the United States, puppet shows are less common for adults. But we adults, too, can tap into that imaginative world. Why should critics have been surprised when Milky White, the expertly-puppeted cow in the recent revival of Into the Woods, became a breakout star of the show?
And the imaginative world of Body Concert is a rich one. Augustine’s eerie images and soundscape, and incomplete but evocative narratives resist easy analysis but work on us on a deeper level.
Vignettes unfold on the darkened stage, and we see a skull, a leg, an arm, a baby. They begin in isolation, but soon work together, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with determination, to make a connection. At one point, the leg and the arm strip back their muscles and tendons and reach over to one another. In a breathtakingly intimate moment, they gently touch, bone to bone.
A baby crawls with determination toward the skull on the other side of the stage. What nourishment can this skull possibly provide? The huge eye that has been overlooking the scene magically transforms into a breast and the baby finds comfort.
The 50-minute show is uncanny throughout, but also tender in presenting a wistful search for connection, for wholeness. It is not by chance that the show begins with Augustine slowly emerging from beneath a black blanket. Wearing only a dance belt, with lower arms, legs and head covered in white greasepaint, he seems to be a latter-day creature of Dr. Frankenstein. As he tentatively explores his new world, we remember that Frankenstein’s creature, too, yearned for connection.
The world we have is limited and the connection we desire is always partial at best, but it’s what we have. The final stunning tableau suggests a precarious but palpable wholeness.
Bravo to Sandglass Theater for bringing this festival and this stunning show to Brattleboro.
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