The New Toy Theatre - #1: Oral Toy Theatre

Witnessing the works being showcased at the Great Small Works festival allows one to observe and reflect on the new directions these brave and reckless young creators of the future are marching in. How is the multi-disciplinary, fronteir-less attitude of today's artists integrating into this Victorian performance tradition? Several contributors to the festival program offer potential answers to my question, starting with..........

#1 Oral Toy Theatre (Puppetyranny)



I thought I had escaped from the excesses of toy theatre when I sneaked off to Brooklyn Bridge Park one balmy afternoon during the festival, but oh no, there on a park bench were Leslie Rogers and Zac Palladino of Philadelphia-based company Puppetyranny, using toy theatre techniques to promote the the inside of the mouth as a new performance environment. In the ancient Chinese visual storytelling tradition, after all, the term 'pien' is used, meaning "transformation", and how else could you describe what happens to the garlic clove which enters Puppetyranny's toy theatre as a pearly-white bulb and exits as a lumpy mush, to be spread onto an oatcake and offered out to the audience? This toy theatre is indeed a place of transformation in which ideas meet, sometimes fight against each other, but other times conjoin, undergoing a process which sends them out on their way as something altogether new.

Oral toy theatre. Anthropologists will one day manage to unearth the missing manuscript detailing this obscure aspect of the world's visual storytelling history. In the meantime, Puppetyranny are doing a good job of reviving the tradition.