John Kilby

"Told through and around the mask of Alfred Jarry, and in a new ergative-accusative language developed and scored for this specific piece, this show will be an examination of the algorithmic relationships between the tripartite - genius, creation and interpretation - in this life and in the next."

November 1, 2007 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Alfred Jarry. On this day, Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes will premier their latest work, The Armature of the Absolute at the Teatre Antic , Barcelona.

The international theatre troupe will be gathering artists and ‘pataphysicians (‘pataphysics= the science of sciences) from all over the world to celebrate this monumental moment. The participants will come from diverse disciplines of arts and sciences and will unite under the common enthusiasm for Alfred Jarry and his work.

Artists

Patrick Sims - Writer, director, music, puppet construction, puppeteer
buchingersboot@hotmail.com

Mafalda da Camara - Scenic design/construction, costumes, puppeteer
buchingersbootmarionettes@hotmail.com

Richard Penny - Stage design and construction, props, machines, puppeteer
richard-alien@hotmail.com.

Josephine Biereye - costumes, puppet construction, puppeteer

Philippe Hauer - Actor

Julian Weare - Lighting designer and technician
julian_lights@yahoo.uk

Oriol Viladomiu Sound technican

Ata Ekbhetar Music

See more at the buchingers website

Rather than being a piece solely about Jarry or his work, this performance will be choreographed according to a fusion of themes from both the artist's life and his creations, as well as the reactions, interpretations, and inspirations or detestations they have elicited in the past 100 years. We will be taking into account the fact that Jarry died on all Saints Day, that his last request was for a toothpick, that he could not savour his own work until he died.

Backed up with an eruditious study of the diverse biographies of Jarry, a firm grasp of his oeuvre, and a general understanding of ‘pataphysics, the college of ‘pataphysics, its publications and its underground followings - in cyberspace, eternity, or nowhere - Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes will create a unique performance that guarantees to make everyone redefine their personal definition of ‘pataphysics and the saint who put it in its place.

The Armature of the Absolute

by Patrick Sims

SYNOPSIS

“…it is acceptable only after the poet’s death- maybe a hundred years later- when the astringent explosives of the poets heart have had time to calm down. For as long as he is alive, they are too powerful…” Antonin Artaud

The Armature of the Absolute is a depiction of the triumph of a single individual consciousness over a “trespassing orgy of the collective unconscious.” It is a work about the attempt to preserve oneself from sickened everyday life through the proliferation of imagined universes, masks and invented postures. From his youth onward, Alfred Jarry was occupied with the documenting and mapping of his own ontogenesis, which is the study of an organism from its most embryonic to its most evolved of forms. Throughout his writings and manifestations, Jarry illustrated and modified his unrelenting process as a series of spiraling recursive stages, that generated at all levels, a literature and drama that highlight a tension between the opposing barely-stable, assumed realities and willfully-created, supplementary universes. His non-stop expansion between himself and the herd, this yardstick which constituted personal freedom, was a perpetual individuation- that is, life itself- which allowed for him a transformation of the everyday into a veritable theatre of metamorphosis.

The Armature of the Absolute proposes a hypothetical charting of Jarry’s ontogenesis that commences after his death. The fertilized egg from which we begin this study is the entire legendary domain of Jarry folklore- literary, dramatic, biographical, critical and pataphysical. The embryo that will be traced throughout various stages of development is a personality and its creations that have literally survived mundane death. It is a tale of a man that has avoided expiration by associating himself so strongly with his creations, yet all the while informing the milieu, or what it is not, but from what it has emerged.

Act 1 introduces the coprophilic, autochtonous murderer, Ubu- the golem who stared Jarry in the eye everyday after giving his master fame and had vampirically taken over Jarry’s public life. He returns in the classic Ubic tradition in a battle between clean and unclean forces, this time constipated and stooping even lower. He is accompanied by his three henchmen and a mummified Artaud. Ubu reveals his mastery of the material world and explains the reasons for his 100 years of constipation.

Act 2 In Jarry’s private life, it is the character Dr. Faustroll, the other face of the Jarry-Janus, who through telepathic postcards provides an account of companionship and comraderie in moments of hermitage and time travel. Accompanied by his baboon and writ-carrying bailiff, Faustroll travels to the ends of Eternity in order to send his last Postcard to Jarry.

Act 3 The Fixed-Pin Passion, depicts a marriage of Jarry with his bicycle and of a primordially infinite series of falls that he overcomes by replacing the fantasy with even more fantasy. Told through arcane bicycle culture terminology, it is a tale about something flying off and completing the cycle.

Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes was founded in 2004. Their first work, Shellachrymellaecum (2005), was an electronic opera about the inaudible and the unspeakable that won two prizes (best dramatical content and best plastic art) at the Lleida International Puppet Festival. They went on to tour at the Prague International Festival of Puppet Art, Dresden’s Societasteater, in Marseille at the L’Embobineuse and Gardennes School of Circus Arts, and Footsbarn Travelling Theatre’s 35th anniversary celebration.
The next work was The Vestibular Folds, a tale about the engraving and destruction of a metaphysical gramophone record, which was created in 2006 and premiered at the Festival Neo, Institute de Teatre of Catalunia, then at the Institute of Contemporary Art for the London Mime Festival, and finally at Festival Printemps des Comediens in Montpellier.

The universe created by Buchinger’s Boot is like a chamber of wonders- where one extraordinary object or being replaces another, each time more singular than before. This transient world contains all significant things and rarities created by both nature and man, where nothing human is alien. Particularly present are marionettes and sets made from bones, woods, metals, plants, insects, bacteria, animals and their artificial copies (stuffed, preserved, anthropomorphisized, mechanized)…tools, foreign instruments, all that enlighten, please and horrify the eye. Such a collection points to a terror of classification where possibilities and combinations spiral into chaos, and the idea of enclosing nature in a closet becomes a parable for fragile interpretations, being and its foetuses.

Buchinger’s Boot unique blend of puppetry techniques along with their organic, circuit-bending soundtracks and beautifully disturbing images, have resonated in its audiences throughout Europe, often leaving them moved, shocked, bewildered and enthralled.

THE VESTIBULAR FOLDS - 2006

Episode I. Tetema

Takes place in the schizophrenic zone called Tetema, a Mars-like ferruginous landscape inhabited by rhizomatic beings unaware of the disasters that ensue or of the larval vampires and quacks that feed on the blood of the body outstretched in its slumber. Tetema is a zone that has existed ever since man first scratched his head, not to squash a flea, but to release the itch of reflective thought. Our tragic hero is a boxing sweet potato named Juba Greencorn who ploughs his share under the wrong stars.

Episode II. Hilum

Hilum, takes place inside a derelict nursery at the threshold of becoming. Hilum implies the scar of the seed from where it attaches to the funicular, ie. A bellybutton (umbilical cord), is also the point from which things come and go; a trifle. The terror of Prima Materia, the residues from which we were hurled, and unrealized potentiality paint this portrait of “Women’s work and child’s play,” as described in the Alchemical Opus, where there is nothing to do at this stage of the process but to pass the time.

Episode III. West Orange

The Lightning Autopsy takes place in West Orange in 1889 inside the laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison (inventor of the incandescent lamp, phonograph and electric chair). Present is Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, the mourning mother of a famous magician, mind reader, and anti-spiritist who was murdered by Edison. In that year, Edison had been busying himself trying to discredit AC current by electrocuting all of the neighbourhood pets, including her cataleptic son (a rabbit). The bereaved mother uses all of Edison’s inventions to call up all the forces of hell to seek revenge on “that hillbilly inventor!”

CAST

Tetema

Wolf of the Metals
Juba Greencorn- A boxing sweet potato
Xipe Totec- The last turnip in Tetema
Sir Isaac Newton- Inventor of Gravity and other advancements in optics and light theory and so on, in this case, a tapped tree of man’s will
The milkmaid
Her cow
Reverend Ezekiel Elijah Giles- Moonshiner
Dr. Leo Mermex- An ant-lion, Flea Circus Ringmaster
Ms. Atkinson- Pig-faced lady, dental patient
Knuckleluck- a leprechaun

Hilum

Abraham-an ancient of ancients
Tad-a twin
Poppy-a twin
Oedipus- a fish
Jupiter-angelic fisherman
Eeko-a sick bat
Ceph- a hydrocephalic kid (when too much water enters your head and makes your skull expand)
Early- “birdboy”

West Orange

Hannah- my great, great-grandmother
Mr. Punch
Lacrissa- a crocodile
Filamenti- the filament from Thomas Edison’s first incandescent lamp
Eleanor Fletcher Bishop- ex-opera star, spiritist, psychic medium, bereaved mother of Washington Irving Bishop.
Harley Muzzy- a monkey
Clementine Genesiouillepasfoux- a diagnosed schizophrenic
Lucifero
Maldoror- fisherman who sought to see which is the deeper, the human heart or the depths of the sea
A Jellyfish
Washington Irving Bishop- famous anti-spiritist, magician, and mind-reader. A rival of Houdini and allegedly murdered by Thomas Alva Edison.

London performances 26-28th January – Institute of Contemporary Arts

Inside the ICA, the show we saw had the exquisite specific cruelty and beauty of what some extremely imaginative Edwardian children might dream up in a puppet theatre they got for Christmas. The gigantic, headless presences of the puppeteers lumbered carefully about the stage, all in formal, black Victorian children's clothes, manipulating tiny, exquisitely grotesque insectoid or skeletoid marionettes in three tiny acts. These embraced such strange visionary flights as blighted deserts heaving with rhizomes and circus performers, a fearful nursery where every newborn is a freak (shades of great-great-grandmother Hannah's barrenness), and a scientist's lab where newly invented electricity hums and flickers, and ancient records play, cracked in half.

Two worlds collided in the implied narrative: the peculiar miniature fantasy land and the uncomfortable purposefulness of the massive puppeteer-children playing God in their specific, disturbed way.

Brilliant, lingering image-making.

Daily Telegraph 31/01/2007 – Ismene Brown