A Book About the Theater

by Brander Matthews

Incidental to the heroic dramas which the puppets play are interludes of ballet-dancing like those which are intercalated, more or less adroitly, into the grand opera performed by full-grown men and women. The Italians are born pantomimists, and they are accomplished dancers. Therefore, there is no reason for surprise that human pantomime and human dancing are imitated in the marionette theaters. There is reason for surprise, however, that Story did not perceive clearly the advantages possessed by the dancing puppets over the dancers of more solid flesh and blood. He found something comic in the pantomime of the puppets, "whose every motion is effected by wires, who imitate the gestures of despair with hands that cannot shut, and, with a wooden gravity of countenance, throw their bodies into terrible contortions to make up for the lack of expression in the face." In mere pantomime it is probable that the puppets would labor under a serious disability, for if a performer cannot use his voice, he needs facial expression to assist the gestures by which only can he then convey his meaning to the other performers and to the spectators. Perhaps it is not too much to assert that the puppet-show is not the proper place for pantomime.

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We need not wonder that Story admitted their dancing to be superior to their pantomime. Yet he failed to appreciate the true cause of this superiority, and he was inclined to comment upon the dancing of the burattini in a somewhat satiric fashion. He tells us how the principal dancer suddenly appears, "knocks her wooden knees together, and jerking her head about, salutes the audience with a smile quite as artificial as we could see in the best trained of her fleshly rivals." But this artificial smile must have been fixed and permanent on the features of this diminutive dancer—or else the Roman-American essayist merely imagined its presence. "Then, with a masterly ease, after describing air-circles with her toes far higher than her head and poising herself in impossible positions, she bounds or rather flies forward with superhuman lightness, performs feats of choreography to awaken envy in Cerito and drive Elssler to despair, and, poising on her pointed toe that disdains to touch the floor, turns never-ending pirouettes on nothing at all, till at last, throwing both her wooden hands forward, she suddenly comes to a swift stop to receive your applause."

This description is unsympathetic, and it induces the surmise that the operator of the burattini at the performance described was not a master of his art and did not know how to profit by the possibilities of that art. Yet one of Story's phrases serves to explain why the suspended puppet is superbly qualified to excel in ballet-dancing; that phrase is the one which credits the dancing doll with "supernatural lightness." A skilful operator of the wires which bestow life and movement and grace, is able to imitate easily and exquisitely the most difficult feats of the human dancer. If he is sufficiently adroit he robs his suspended figure of all awkwardness, and he dowers her with a floating ethereality surpassing that attainable by any living performer. Now, this floating ethereality is precisely the quality which gives us most pleasure when we are spectators at the performance of a really fine ballet. It is the supreme art of the great dancer to soar lightly aloft, seeming to spurn the stage and to abide in the air. Only very rarely is this illusion possible to the merely human dancer; and when achieved it is but fleeting. Yet this illusion is absolutely within the control of the manipulator of the puppet-dancers. He can make them execute feats of levitation, achievable only by the most marvelously gifted and by the most arduously trained of human dancers.

Of course, the skilful performer must carefully avoid swinging his tiny figures aimlessly thru the air. He must limit the feats that he permits them to accomplish to those which can be actually accomplished by human beings, altho he can do easily what the human beings can achieve only with more or less obvious effort, and he can impart a volatile elasticity a little beyond the power of any human being however favored by Terpsichore. When 'Salome' was, for a season, the sensation of the hour, it was produced by Holden's marionettes; and it afforded a delightful spectacle long to be remembered by all who had the felicity of beholding it. Whatever of vulgarity or of grossness there might be in the play itself, or in the Dance of the Seven Veils, was purged away by the single fact that all the performers were puppets. So dexterous was the manipulation of the unseen operator who controlled the wires and strings which gave life to the seductive Salome as she circled around the stage in most bewitching fashion, and so precise and accurate was the imitation of a human dancer, that the receptive spectator could not but feel that here at last the play of doubtful propriety had found its only fit stage and its only proper performer. The memory of that exhibition is a perennial pleasure to all who possess it. A thing of beauty it was; and it abides in remembrance as a joy forever. It revealed the art of the puppet-show at its summit. And the art itself was eternally justified by that one performance of the highest technical skill and of the utmost delicacy of taste.

If the most marvelous exploits of terpsichorean art, almost inexecutable by the human toes and the human legs of living dancers, are capable of reproduction by puppets skilfully manipulated by the puller of the wires and strings whereby the little figures are suspended, so also are the dexterous feats of the juggler. One of the specialties of the sole surviving puppet-show of this sort in the Champs-Elysées is the performance of a juggler who tosses aloft and catches in turn a number of glittering balls. The delicate balancing of the tight-rope walker, with her frequent pirouettes on her toes, and with her surprising summersets, is also one of the exhibitions in which the puppet can defy the rivalry of any living executant, however skilful in the art. At the circus we feel that the tightrope dancer might fall, whereas at the puppet-show we know with certainty that any fatal mishap is impossible. In Holden's marionette program the miniature mimicry of humanity was carried to the utmost edge of the possible; and no item on his bill of fare was more delectable than the series of scenes in which the traditional Clown and Pantaloon played tricks on the traditional Policeman, and in which they joined forces in belaboring an inoffensive donkey. As the unfortunate quadruped was also a puppet, there was no painful strain on our sympathy.

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