Nori Sawa: Japanese-Czech Fusion Puppet Theatre

Nov. 7, 2009

Thanks to Anne scoring three cancelled tickets, Alli, Anne and I went to see a puppet show Friday night. Although this week is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, there were no muppets, but an entirely different sort of experience. Rather than watching Kermit on TV, we hiked up to the turret theatre in the Reynolds Club at the University of Chicago campus to take in the show in a barn-like, not quite black box theatre. For the second year in a row puppeteer Nori Sawa, a Japanese ex-pat who has been living in Prague the past 18 years, was bringing to Chicago his performance that blends both Japanese and Czech puppet theatre into something that hovers between utterly uncanny and hilariously cute.

Before the show began, the PHD candidate responsible for making announcements reminded parents to keep a muzzle on the “small children” scattered throughout the audience and the two little girls next to Alli asked their dad so the whole theatre to hear, “Are we small children?”
Darkness descended on the house and Nori Sawa came on stage. Wearing all black with a head wrap that fully covered his eyes, only his nose, mouth and arms were exposed as he walked across the stage with bells jingling on his feet. With what began as a ceremonial pantomime, he threw reflective paper into an orange and green spot on either side of the stage to transition from actor into puppeteer and to call the spirits of the “real” actors to the stage.

While we usually think of puppets in the context of children’s entertainment, the first piece Forest had a darkness to it that almost immediately silenced the little girls next to us and sent them out of the theatre soon after it began. Somber and full of pathos, Forest told the tale of a warrior who falls on the battlefield and is visited by a woman in white. With a minimal stage Sawa picks up the limp puppet to begin the tale with the white samurai who immediately leaps to life. With sword thrusts and parries we are immediately sucked into his worlds by the precision of his movements. The puppet is not a thing of wood and screws, but a new life on stage heaving his chest in breath and turning his head to survey the area for invisible enemies.

Sawa holds the samurai as a ventriloquist might but silently. He is not projecting words but life into the diminutive being that holds all of our attention. With the puppeteer’s eyes covered we’re immediately sucked into the puppet’s world as the small warrior battles one unseen foe after another until taking a final blow in the other worldly flood of green light. With haggard breathing and sword dragging, the warrior falls, and Nori Sawa gently lays him on a small screen. As a spirit leaving its body the puppeteer moves to another pile of fabric on the stage, turning his back to the audience and breathing life into the white woman.

Less corporeal than the warrior, her delicate porcelain hands and oval face like a three-dimensional Modigliani painting are her only features that seem solid with her body being made up of the flowing kimono. The silken woman is more of the spirit world, streaming across the stage like a ghost at first searching and then finding the fallen warrior. From behind the screen she calls forth a mask, a large silver mask that mimics the face of the warrior. Her delicate hand waves it before her, as she either becomes aware or finally acknowledges that she is aware of her puppeteer. In a delicate dance with puppeteer and puppet, the white woman places the mask on the performer, suddenly drawing him out of his role as the psychologically off-stage manipulator of the narrative and into the narrative himself. Confused by the crossing of boundaries, the seemingly blind puppeteer now becomes the spirit of the warrior and finds himself being led by the white woman, the puppeteer now being led by the puppet.

This particular piece demonstrates Nori Sawa’s mastery not over just puppets and the stage but of the uncanny. He takes full advantage the puppet’s ability to mimic life, subverting himself as a human actor for the more animated more lively constumed puppets, but all the while acknowledging them as extensions of his self. As an audience we get sucked into another world that he brings to life but it a world over which he seems to admit he does not have complete control.

After the dark world of Forest, the stage lights come on and Nori Sawa’s mask comes off. His round face has a full smile and he speaks to the audience. The remainder of the performances seem to involve him more, each breaking down the boundaries between the puppet and puppeteer even further but relying less on tragedy and more on comedy and transformation. The simple short piece Rabbit begins with a tiny puppet only four inches high with him ducking behind a small screen in the middle of the stage.

Setting up a stage within a stage, the little rabbit erupts in a cutely annoying song that makes everyone, child and adult burst in laughter. The little tan bunny elicits a few sneezes from the puppeteer and gets his ears caught in his nose. Soon the singing and sneezing awake a curmudgeonly old puppet who’s a little drunk and sings in a deep baritone. A caricature of one of his neighbors in Prague, the old man puppet gets a whiff of the little rabbit and realizes he will make a tasty snack, only to get close and sneeze off his toboggan and coat, revealing that he himself is an even bigger rabbit. Embracing the cute and the sinister, Nori Sawa animates a snippet of his own life with a cuddly cannibal, which is good for laughs, but the most profound piece draws upon a personal narrative and uses transformation not for humor but to find meaning in the death of his mother.

When he first moved to the Czech Republic eighteen years ago his mother fell ill with cancer and he narrowly returned to Japan to be at her bedside, but she already was to the point where she couldn’t recognize him. His mother was a maker of kimonos and she left him hundreds of the silk robes when she died. He selected one of these to make a puppet for the piece Mother in which a haunting female hovers across the stage, but unlike the white woman of Forest, her kimono is black.

Something seems to possess this black woman and as she looks up into what might be the heavens a second puppet head emerges, a dragon’s skull or some bony demon pulls out of her neck destroying her life but coughing up a strange fleshy egg. Nori Sawa takes the egg and places it on the stage and when the black woman comes to rest on the stage floor, he unwraps the egg to reveal a new puppet, at first a newborn baby, but with a fold of fabric what becomes a smaller man.

There are no laughs from the audience, just quiet contemplation. The art of puppetry demands a suspension of disbelief from the audience that is easier for other forms of theater to create with human actors. To get us to believe in the world of puppets we have to forget the puppeteer. We rarely see the crews in the pits beneath the streets of Sesame, allowing us to more easily believe in their worlds, but Nori Sawa creates for a us a world not separate from our own but blending our own reality- his own stories- into the world of the imaginary. Nori Sawa’s subtle narratives are both playful and dark, playing with our own sense of the real and the world of spirits.