How Do You Get a Puppet Into a Wetsuit?
The Symphonie Fantastique is a truly original idea that has somehow been allowed to flourish. For those of you who haven’t seen the media onslaught, the Symphonie Fantastique is basically a puppet show underwater. In this case, the puppets aren’t little miniature people or animals, they’re things like fabric or foil streamers or plastic cut out in odd shapes. All of this takes place in a 1000-gallon underwater tank that goes through many, many interesting light changes.
I love puppets. Always have. I think a cat puppet with a baseball bat beating the brains out of a dog puppet is one of the loveliest sights there is. Obviously, puppet shows are for the young, with their ability to suspend disbelief and imagine that yes, that sock is a talking, beating cat who can evoke hilarity form behind its tiny stage. Maybe that’s why I love puppets, or maybe I just like the primitive, stripped-to-its essence form of entertainment that puppetry represents. Last year I watched Don Giovanni performed by puppets (well, they were lip syncing to a record) in Prague. Puppet theater is huge in the Czech Republic. A point which was replied to by a friend as, "Of course, puppets are for poor people." (Please send your hate mail to him, not me.)
The crowd at the Symphonie Fantastique is certainly not poor, however. The tickets, at $20 or $30 for a regular seat, $50 for a special "patron’s tour," certainly aren’t cheap, either. You sit and watch the tank – smaller than you’d think – while listening to a recording. For all its pretensions to be an "entirely different form of art" it’s actually not that different than those laser shows stoned teenagers have been enjoying in planetariums for years. The music’s not Pink Floyd, but the concept is the same. Of course, there are real people behind the tank manipulating the objects, not some computer generated laser. There is something about Symphonie Fantastique that strikes me as acutely pre-turn of the century. It’s decadence in the most decadent way: $30 to watch scarves floating underwater. It reminds me of 1890s dandyism with its loud colors and fine feathers. The 1990s: another gilded age where technology executives pay to get back to the "simpler things."
My friend expressed skepticism after the show. "I felt like the people behind the tank were probably laughing at all of us. We were taken." The creator of the show, Basil Twist, certainly isn’t laughing at his audience. He takes his art seriously, and upon hearing him speak about his show, my heart was certainly moved to appreciate what he’s doing. But perhaps I need too much narrative; if the puppets can’t be anthropomorphised enough to take on personalities my mind wanders. Whatever the case, while I enjoyed the novelty of the evening, I can’t say I’d tell my friends to spend their cash or evening on it. It’s a bit dull.
It reminded me too much of a bad family experience I once had at Waltzing Water’s, a tourist attraction in the Scottish highlands. Waltzing Waters consists of big fountains of colored water spurting in various directions to the rhythm of Hooked on Classics. My family loved it, and that’s probably not surprising as the MacPherson Clan Museum is just a few kilometers down the road, believe it or not. This was our heritage after all. The blue hairs in attendance ate up the show and promptly bought their own miniature pink fountains complete with matching collectable spoon in the gift shop. I’m amused that so many people in our ever-more-pretentious city put on their black finest and get on down to the Symphonie Fantastique. In another context, I have a feeling all those theater lovers wouldn’t think it was so happening. I’m sure they all laugh at the hippies grooving to Zeppelin while tripping on mushrooms down at the community college. But if it’s at the Zeum Theater, on the cover of the Datebook and originally from New York, it must be art.
The Symphonie Fantastique makes for an interesting evening. I was just never much for laser shows or Berlioz.
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