Puppets Come Alive in German Theater

"It is difficult to arrange every phenomenon into its place and oneself remain un-deranged," reads German puppeteer Michael Vogel from the diary of composer Robert Schumann, the subject of Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel's Toccata. It is equally difficult to arrange every aspect of Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel's Toccata into a cohesive analysis without deranging the meaning of the piece. The Austin Arts Center brought the German puppetry duo Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel to Goodwin Theater Friday night as part of the Austin Arts Center's Guest Artist's Series Performances (GASP!). Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel was founded by puppeteer Michael Vogel and composer Charlotte Wilde in 1991 and, since its inception, has traveled throughout the world performing at various festivals.

Toccata is based on the life and writing of German composer Robert Schumann. When Schumann was young, he had aspirations to become a poet and a musician. His dream of being a pianist was cut short when he badly injured his hand, an injury that had possibly resulted from the use of a self-made practicing machine. Schumann also suffered from depression throughout his life and feared that he was becoming mad. He began suffering from headaches and hallucinations that drove him to a suicide attempt in 1854 when he jumped into the Rhine. He was pulled out of the river and put in an asylum for the last two years of his life.

Toccata is a performance that incorporates these events in Schumann's life and turns them into art by fusing puppetry with live action, text with music, meaning with madness. In the program for the show, Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel describe its work as using "the technique of collage in its productions and animates puppets, materials and objects which can be freely combined." The program goes on to explain: "The open play, where the puppeteer is visible on the stage, facilitates a continuous dialogue between the puppeteer and the puppet and stimulates the imagination of the audience. The acoustic level is treated with equal value to the visual. Music and language are included in the productions as independent forms of art."

I include so much of Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel's self-description of the performance in my own description because I have found in my experience with avant-garde art that many times the artist, rather than the critic, more coherently answers the audience's central question: 'what's going on here?'

Watching Toccata, 'what's going on here?' was certainly what was on the audience's mind before, during, and even after the performance. It's one thing to flip open your program and read about "the technique of collage" and "freely combining" objects, but it's quite another to see a man sitting under a table while a clothed figure above him drums its fingers loudly on the table while water drips into a filling cup in the corner. It's one thing to read about music and language as "independent forms of art;" it's another to listen to Wilde playing a manic piece on the organ sitting on the stage half-masked behind a gauzy piece of cloth, while Vogel breaks the long stretches of his silence with bursts of German and excerpts from Schumann's diary.

Toccata is about the life of Schumann, but not the life you'd expect. It is not the life of achievements that you see in most pieces that take up the challenge of retelling a life on stage. Toccata is about the life Schumann lived in his head. It is about the depressed man, the hallucinations. Instead of explaining to you Schumann's emotional state as a footnote to the greater story of his life, Wilde and Vogel focus on this aspect, endeavoring to put you in his place, to show you what he sees through his mind's eye and to experience in your own way some of the same emotions that he feels.

This endeavor is all around fantastical, and so is the piece that results from it. Watching Toccata is like being caught in a dream, whether that dream is pleasant or nightmarish is up for debate. The puppets Vogel uses are both frightening and comical. They range in size from huge (doubling Vogel's size when he embodies it), to tiny enough to fit in your hand. The subjects of the puppets range from small woodland creatures, to butterflies, to a giant horse, but a majority of the puppets are some degree of human. Each of the human puppets has a ghost-like quality about it; many are draped in thin layers of gauze to enhance that effect.

The most interesting aspect of these puppets is how they are manipulated. When you think 'puppet' you think of strings manipulating the puppet's movements and the svengali-esq puppeteer hiding in the rafters directing the show from behind the scenes. In Toccata, Vogel stands on stage with the puppets, as much a part of the action as they are. The approach Vogel takes to puppeteering is much more direct, and I think all the more effective because of it.

Aside from puppets, Vogel also used a mask throughout the piece. What was interesting about the mask was that it was clearly molded from Vogel's own face. The same was true for one of the puppets on stage. In reading the brief biography of Schumann in the program notes, there is a section dedicated to Schumann's use of two pseudonyms: "Florestan" and "Eusebius." I thought the idea of putting on a mask of your self was a very thought-provoking and interesting way to comment on Schumann's "experiments with identities, masks and doppelgangers."

You might think having the puppeteer on stage with his puppets would distract the viewer's eye away from the puppets and ruin the illusion of the puppet's autonomous movement, but in reality, I found the opposite to be true. Vogel's own subdued movement served as a relief to the majestic movement of the puppets, causing them to appear more alive than he himself was.

I spent a majority of the show with my mouth open, leaning forward in my seat, and my eyes squinted, trying to capture every minute movement of the puppets Vogel manipulated. Not only did Vogel pull strings and make things move, he often became the puppet; his hand became the puppet's hand, his head: the puppet's head. This union of puppeteer and puppet left you wondering which one of the two was really alive; the answer, I believe, is both.