The Hopkins Center's Festival of International Puppetry came to a close this weekend with a performance of "Twin Houses" by the Compagnie Nicole Mossoux/Patrick Bonte.
And what a finale it was.
The performance, the work of Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonte of Belgium, consisted of several scenes involving Mossoux and one or more exceedingly life-like mannequin-size puppets.
"Twin Houses" was a portrayal of the effects upon the human psyche of the numerous, and often contradictory, impulses and ideas that control our lives. Knowledge, vanity, evil, lust and compassion were all portrayed as one or more puppets that attempted to control Mossoux.
Several disjointed scenes made up the play, each dealing with an impulse. One scene included a puppet attempting to make Mossoux's character study, then attempting to cut her head off.
Another included a red shoe, which Mossoux's character tried but was unable to put on her foot. The puppet with her at the time put on the slipper and danced around, dragging Mossoux along.
Still another scene included a witch-like character who mixed up a magic potion of some type with various disgusting ingredients such as snakes and mushrooms.
Throughout the performance, Mossoux danced, stepped and interacted with the puppets, virtually bringing them to life.
At the same time, she adapted her own movements so that she too resembled a puppet.
She succeeded at this to the point where, in several instances, it appeared the puppets were actually controlling her, rather than vice versa. This was intentionally done to portray the controlling influence of the image portrayed.
Mossoux's amazing skill in making these figures move and in making them do such varied tasks as making love and decapitating her was even more impressive when it was revealed that this was the Compagnie's first piece involving puppetry.
Perhaps the best example of this skill occurred in one scene involving a bald-headed puppet named Adolf.
At first, she was lying beside this puppet, and then rolled the puppet over her while at the same time slipping her upper body inside the puppet.
When she stood up, her character (named "X," the only "puppet" in the show without a more familiar name) was gone, and only a very tall bald headed figure stood there.
The sheer gymnastics of accomplishing this feat, in addition to the numerous other dances and actions in the monologue show, speaks highly of Mossoux's physical abilities.
Preceding and following the performance were discussions with Bonte and Mossoux, where audience members could talk about the performance with them, and learn more about the Compagnie.
These discussions shed much light on "Twin Houses," including how the idea for the show came into being.
Mossoux's father had a twin brother, and the two men married two women who were sisters, lived in two halves of the same house, had the same number of children at roughly the same intervals, and even drove the same type of car.
Bonte said the Compagnie took this concrete example of existence as a twin and expanded it to make a universal portrayal of how all of mankind is subject to a bitter internal conflict between its differing impulses.
In his own words, they wanted to "give a voice to the several voices inside" through the use of puppets.
Bonte and Mossoux said the piece was designed to be open to varying interpretations by the audience.
Members of the audience who attended the discussion said they interpreted some of the scenes as portraying the dominating influence of the sexual drive, or making references to the classic fairy tales "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty."
According to Bonte, the Compagnie Nicole Mossoux/Patrick Bonte was founded in an effort to combine theater and dance in such a way that the movements become a "vocabulary."
They accomplished this, and more so, with their latest work. Mossoux's movements were, in essence, a "vocabulary" because they were the sole means by which she could communicate with the viewers.
Throughout the performance, which was accompanied by a brilliant synthesized musical score by Christian Genet and incredible stage lighting, Mossoux maintained a completely frozen facial expression and absolute silence in a successful attempt to make her look like one of her marionette co-stars.
She later explained that this was done to make the puppets appear more life-like than she was, so as to highlight the idea of her "domination" by interior forces.
The fact that each puppet was a slightly-altered version of her own face added to confusion on several occasions when it was difficult to tell who was human and who was not.
