Megan Harris is a puppeteer and puppet creator. Marco is her creation, via the text of Under the Poppy. These are Meg’s photos as Marco took shape in her hands, on her worktable, moving through her vision and skill into tangible life.

Marco is very soon to undergo a further, more emotionally drastic transformation – puppets change, of course, like people, when the forces are strong enough.

Meeting and working with Meg has been one of the greatest pleasures for me, in this project full of pleasures. Les mecs and Istvan would surely approve of her methods, as well as her ruthless, subtle, humorous artist’s eye.

This is seriously a match made in puppet heaven: the louche and passionate partisans of the Poppy, actors both live and constructed, disporting in the gorgeous confines of the Danto Lecture Hall at the Detroit Institute of Arts, as part of the Friday Night Live! series. Is it a coincidence that the doors of this hall open upon some of the players of the world-renown Paul McPharlin Collection? Or is it a wink from the spirit of artful play?

We’re thrilled to be invited to appear in such a gorgeous venue, thanks to Larry Baranski, puppet partisan extraordinaire! Save the date – 2/17/12, 8 PM, and come prepared to enjoy a performance, an experience, of the pleasures of the Poppy, offered by a troupe of players out of dark Victoriana, whose only aim is to give you, dear gentlemen and ladies, everything that you deserve.

Wonderful to see Detroit’s PuppetART get a loving shout-out here. It’s one of the highlights, along with the McPharlin Collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, not to be missed by the visiting devotee of puppetry.

From the start, we’ve been dedicated to Detroit as our Under the Poppy venue.  Our narrative events have traveled from Hart Plaza to the Russell Industrial Center to District VII Detroit, with our next appearance in February 2012 to take place in the heart of the city’s cultural center. Watch this space for that announcement . . .

And in national culture, puppets are seen to be having a moment – but of course, the moment is always theirs.

Here Under the Poppy, we love stories, for stories are purest theatre. And what better way to inaugurate a new series of guest posts than with one from artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a puppet story, three acts of mystery.
Haunted by Puppets. [Photo of CH-J courtesy CH-J.]

I have a mystery in my life… a ghost story if you like… that is ongoing. It has un-spooled in episodes of hallucinatory clarity across the years, but awaits… or more precisely I await… a denouement! It started with a prologue that to date has been followed by two acts. Now a two-act drama is always unsatisfactory, so of course there must be a third, though in this case decades have elapsed since the second. Three, why is the magic number always three? When I paint a still-life there must always be three objects in it. Two unnerve me. Though the present interval in this ‘drama’ has now been going on for nearly forty years, I knew with complete certainty once the curtain had come down on the first act, that the story would not, could not be complete, until the end of a third.

Prologue
When I was a boy of six living in South Wales, I made my first glove-puppet. It was a green-faced witch… echoes of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West there… and had a head modelled from papier mâché. I made a steeple-hat for her from a page torn out of one of my mother’s magazines. The paper had a full-page advertisement on one side in which most of the background was black. I cut and scrolled it into a cone and taped on a wide brim snipped from the same sheet. It was black all over, but the under-brim and the inside of the hat were covered in print. Interesting that I left it like that, that at some level I made the aesthetic choice there should be a cache of cut-off sentences hidden in the crown and barely visible in the shadows under the brim. I’ve always loved stories, poetry, text. Maybe I thought the oddity of a hat lined with words was apt for a witch versed in spells.

I was mightily pleased with my puppet creation, but at some point she went missing, as things made by children so often do, or did back then, when there was less sentiment about the fledgling skills of the very young. Parents weary of clutter threw juvenilia away. My mother threw away plenty, so it would come as no surprise were I to find that the green-faced witch had been discarded by her when she’d thought I’d outgrown it. The truth is I’ll never know what happened to the puppet. It just disappeared, and I’m not entirely sure I even noticed at the time.

Act 1
Some years have passed. I’ve forgotten about the witch. I’m perhaps nine or ten and I’m walking along the street where we live. I’m on the opposite side of the road from where our house is. The weight of my school satchel is against my hip, but I’m heading away from the direction of school and home, though why I’d be doing that I can’t imagine and don’t recall. I’m passing sombre red brick terraced houses with narrow strips in front of them hemmed by walls of varying heights, some low but some as high as my shoulder. Few plants in these ‘front gardens’. Most are paved and used as spaces to park bicycles. Ahead of me I see something small, dark and conical perched on the top of one of the higher walls. My step slows as I draw level. l look up and down the street to scout whether anyone is about, stare at the blank front window beyond the wall to see whether anyone is looking out. This isn’t a house where anyone known to me lives, so I must be careful about picking up anything that may have been put out on the wall for a purpose. I reach out my hand to the witch’s hat, still pristine as the day it was made years before. I turn the brim toward me to see what I know will be inside, the odd, disjointed, random text I’d memorised, my witch’s words of magic. I place the steeple-hat back on the wall and walk away. I don’t look back, even though I dearly want to. Nothing will ever be quite the same again for me, because now I know there are mysteries, and this one is mine and will always be with me.

Act 2
I’m in my twenties, a choreographer living and working in London. I’m rehearsing dancers in a dingy hall at the Elephant & Castle. Things are not going too well and I slip away in my lunch-break to walk the empty, shabby back streets while I try to think my way through the problems. It’s chill and I’m wearing a dancer’s flimsy rehearsal clothes, regretting already that I didn’t grab a coat on my way out. I’m striding with my head down, preoccupied, arms folded against the wind. The gutter is full of rubbish blowing about. Something there catches my eye, nails me to the spot, peels back time and makes the hair at my nape stand on end.

When I return to rehearsals I’m twenty minutes late, and the dancers, so recalcitrant and ill-tempered that morning, have become worried and concerned because I am known to be never late. I carry on where we left off, working now at speed and with renewed focus to shape the choreography to the music. Everyone is exhilarated, relieved, smiling. But roiling around in my head are the remembered words of magic I’d read while hunkered at the pavement edge, having prised apart the fragile, crushed-though-familiar paper steeple-hat to find them hidden within.

The Dream of the Moving Statue: the dream of the artist, the word-made-flesh of the puppeteer: here is that uncanny life, that endless fascination.  A must-read here at the Poppy.

“For can there ever be an actor more suitable for the vagaries of desire? to perform the most amazing feats, turn inside out and die a thousand times? Only to live again on the morrow, refreshed and ready for more abuse: just like the heart!” The road of desire took the Poppy partisans – those watching in the secluded backroom booth, tucked in the midst of Victorian Opulence, or peering down from the stairs – into deeper shadows than before. If love is a puppet that passes through many hands, whose fingers ply the strings becomes all-important. And a young man who sees a handsome traveler may be deceived by his own eyes.It was a performance as brief and intense as great pleasure – or pain – itself, and, like all performances on the road, a one-night-only appearance.  Istvan continues on his way, toward his absolute destination, for “Love’s always a show, and always with a hero at its heart.” Journey with us on this road that leads Under the Poppy . . . Its next venue might surprise you! [Photos by Rick Lieder.]

More event photos of the opulencce can be seen here.

If you will join us at the Victorian Opulence event at District VII Detroit this Saturday, you’ll see partygoers in their top hat finery, you’ll see swags and drapes and bunting, exquisitely fragile tea cups, the glitter of light refracted from a salvaged chandelier … such lights shine all the brighter for having once gone dim, you’ll no doubt agree. And come a certain time in the evening, you’ll tease aside black curtains to see the space we’re dressing now become an enclosure for an evening’s brief performance, two young men sharing the space of desire.

For Istvan, you see, is still on the road, journeying toward Rupert, his heart’s real home. But the nights are long, and when a kind of solace beckons – a fellow who sees, or thinks he sees, a kindred spirit in this one-night-stand performer, this lonely and desirous puppeteer – why, it is so easy to say yes, to step beside a stranger into that space of desire, to let the body’s heat masquerade for a moment as the warmth of true love.

This moment lives between the lines of the novel Under the Poppy, not on the page, yet surely in the story. Istvan gets where he’s going, certainly, and with a flourish (just ask Pearl!); still it takes him time to arrive . . . Our players will present to you this episode, this on-the-road moment, if you will pull aside the curtain, and step into the shadows past the reborn chandelier.

Tim Walker: these are sublime fun, these models-turned-puppets-turned-models-again. I can’t possibly choose a favorite amongst them but I know I would like to see them all in action in some dreamland of mist and trailing wires, I would like to hear the music they hear, I would like to ask that dandified pair a question or two. Viva imaginary friends!

Corsets? Yes, of course. Exotic beverages? Yes. A puppet? Again, of course (is any occasion complete without one?). An ivy-drenched brick warehouse, the moon glittering on the river, the flicker of oil light, your boot tips crunching on the gravel . . . yes.  And a meditation on desire, enriched by the experiences of the folk at the Poppy: naturally. Save the date, those in the Detroit/Windsor areas and all surrounding. More info as it arrives.

Oh … and what is your desire? Because you shall be asked.