Puppets

Divine Comédie, Simon Côté-Lapointe (2014)

June 12, 2015 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Divine Comédie is an experimental film released in 2014, featuring music and video imagery by Simon Côté-Lapointe. The artist himself describes the film as follows: “This adaptation of Dante Divine Comédie is a oniric musical trip without words, a thrilling experimental mix of animation, video art and imagination combining 2D and 3D animation, video art and puppetry as well as electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic music.”

The trailer and two versions of the film (both the full-length film and a shorter version) are available to watch on YouTube.

For more information on the film and its creators, see the website here.

Contributed by Simon Côté-Lapointe, Université de Montréal

Lee Breuer, La Divina Caricatura (2013)

January 12, 2014 By Gretchen Williams '14

“She has floppy ears, eyes of exquisite sadness and an operatic tendency toward ecstasy, anguish and other big emotions. Leave her alone in a thunderstorm, and she may fall into despair. She is a dog named Rose, and her Dear John letter to the man she loved is the battered heart of Lee Breuer’s dark, joyous and utterly splendid musical fantasia La Divina Caricatura, Part 1, The Shaggy Dog, at La MaMa, in a co-presentation with St. Ann’s Warehouse. An East Village tale told in a subway, it’s a doomed cross-species romance inspired by The Divine Comedy, but Mr. Breuer uses Dante more as catalyst than template. The strongest classical link is to Japanese theater’s Bunraku.” –Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times, December 19, 2013

Niki Ulehla, The Inferno (2011, 2013)

August 29, 2013 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

During a 2011 residency at Recology SF, San Francisco puppeteer Niki Ulehla began a multiple-phase project to dramatize Dante’s Inferno with her handmade puppets. The first performance, featuring puppets crafted out of discarded materials from the Recology Public Disposal Area, staged the first seven cantos of the poem.

This performance was followed by a second, at the Sanchez Art Center (Pacifica) in February-March 2013, in which a new set of puppets embark on the second part of the journey, Cantos 8-17. Sanchez Art Center describes the second performance as follows: “[Ulehla] combines traditional carved wooden marionettes with found object based ‘toys’ to create the characters inhabiting the hell described by Dante. [. . .] The performance will begin with the two travelers, Dante and Virgil, crossing the river Styx. They will pass through the fifth circle of Anger, the sixth of the Heretics and the seventh of Violence. This portion of their journey will end riding away on Geryon, the beast of Fraud.” —Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica, CA

Video of both performances can be seen here.

Meghan Healey, “Subterraneo: A Cruel Puppet’s Guide to Underground Living” (2010)

September 18, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“…The piece is a puppet mash-up of Dante’s Inferno and real-life subway stories gathered by Ms. Healey and a half-dozen student volunteers at Queens College, where she is an assistant professor of costume and scenic design.
Plans call for Homeless Bob to guide the Commutrix — an earnest rider not unlike Ms. Healey — through the subway the way Virgil led Dante through the nine circles of hell, from Limbo to Betrayal. Along the route, they will be serenaded in Spanish by the Undead Mariachi Trio and watch beggars like Legless Joe bewail their afflictions to tug on the heartstrings and purse strings of weary commuters.
Depending on the scenes, to be written by Ms. Healey and several collaborating playwrights, Homeless Bob will be funny, friendly or furious. ‘I think of him as a modern-day New York Virgil, if Virgil was homeless in New York,’ Ms. Healey, 34, said. ‘He’s not as benevolent. He’s angry.'” [. . .] –David Gonzalez, The New York Times, September 17, 2010

“Enchanted Stories: Chinese Shadow Theater in Shaanxi” at the China Institute in NYC

February 9, 2008 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“. . .One popular genre consists of scenarios of hell. An entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to a play called ‘The Twice-Visited Netherworld,’ a sort of Dante’s Inferno in which a scholar receives a special tour of the torturous ‘Yellow Springs’ described in Chinese folk religion. One startlingly vivid set piece shows a skeletal figure being boiled in oil (the punishment for blackmail and slander); in another, pierced and bloody bodies languish on Knife Mountain (home to those who have killed people or animals). As the legend of Emperor Wu of Han suggests, shadow theater has always had a powerful connection to the afterlife.” [. . .] –Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times, February 8, 2008

How to Cite