Let’s Hope He’ll Be Back

It was a late-night show in a sweaty venue, every seat taken, and in one of those unrewarding gestures to which we Canadians are prone I opted for the back row because I’m tall and I didn’t want to block other peoples’ sight lines. The chairs were uncomfortable and narrow, so we couldn’t avoid contact with our neighbors, and the bulky guy beside had the habit emitting strange little hooty grunts whenever the artist on stage did something brilliant, and almost everything was brilliant so there were a lot of hooty grunts. 

Did I rise above these distractions and allow myself to be carried away by the performance? Sadly, no—and the show was far and away the highlight of this year’s international puppet festival in Saguenay:Vida, by the Zaragoza-based Spanish performer, Javier Aranda. It was fabulous: a technical tour de force that was funny and tender and deeply moving. I’ve never seen such wonderful puppetry—yet admire it as I did, I just wanted to get out.

Javier Aranda is a solo performer who creates characters out of his own hands. They emerge magically from a single box, which he places on a table with great humility at the beginning of a show. In the case of Vida, which is his mother’s life story, the box is her sewing kit. With just a few scraps of cloth and a couple of wigs and false noses, his two hands become living creatures with distinct personalities. There’s background music and sometimes his puppets utter a few inarticulate vocals or a single word like “wow”. Yet with so little in the way of props and spectacle, they come fully alive to confront the two huge realities of human life: love and death. 

Here’s a four-minute teaser that captures the intimate comedy of Vida, and shows how delicate, and yet final, Aranda can be in allowing his puppet to feel loss. He plays so delicately with the relationship between puppet and puppeteer: the momentary pause, when he brings the mother to life, by joining his own two hands; the existential moment when the male puppet, facing the death of his partner, looks up into Aranda’s face as if to say, “Can’t you do something? Can’t you bring her back?” And the puppeteer says “no.” And he moves so easily from the fun of the puppet discovering that he has a nice big cock, to such moments of loss.

There’s an earlier and equally brilliant show called Parias(Spanish for “outcasts”)—a hour long collection of four little plays. Each is wonderful in its precision, and in this performance we see him breathe life into a puppet: another of the elemental rituals of the puppet artist. Real puppetry is always about life and love and death, and that’s what reveals here. In the same vein, great puppeteers explore the relationship between the human and puppet—and Aranda gives us an amazing sequence where a femme fatalepuppet, as part of her chanson, kisses him on the mouth, a long, fully erotic kiss. I think that’s incredibly brave.

Vida has already been a hit at several festivals, and Aranda will perform at the biggest of all, in Charleville-Mezieres, this September. This was his first appearance in Canada. Let’s hope he’ll be back.