In Hänsel und Gretel, the Brussels opera house presents a real Christmas classic. Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 Märchenspiel, based on the well-known Brothers Grimm fairy tale, is given a magical dimension in this production thanks to the amazing shadow theatre of the Manual Cinema puppeteers.
This version of Hänsel und Gretel owes much to De Munt/La Monnaie’s Children’s Chorus, under Denis Menier; it also features the Munt/Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lothar Koenigs, and the singers Dietrich Henschel, Natascha Petrinsky, Gaëlle Arquez, Talia Or, Ilse Eerens, and Georg Nigl – a baritone who was recently acclaimed as singer of the year by the German specialist magazine Opernwelt.
A key role in this production is played by Manual Cinema, an innovative performance collective, design studio, and film production company from Chicago. Founding member Sarah Fornace, one of its puppeteers, who will also perform as Gretel in the live action, gives us some insight into Manual Cinema’s magical artistic world.
You guys haven’t been around that long, but success came quickly and one project has followed another at a rapid rate.
Sarah Fornace: The company was founded in 2010, but we have only been working full-time for six months to a year now. Five of us are full-time artistic directors [Fornace, Drew Dir, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter – MB] and then we have a number of puppeteers and musicians with whom we work on various projects. We do a lot of commissions and work for hire, as well as our own live shows, which we create and stage internally and then send out on tour. We work simultaneously on three to four projects at any given time.
Is there any reason you can point to why puppeteers get together so easily in Chicago?
Fornace: The great thing about Chicago is that it has a great and vibrant puppetry, object, and physical theatre scene. It can be hard to make a living out of it, but there are a lot of young people doing this kind of work because there is space for it, more than in New York for instance. The city is supportive and there are a lot of outdoor spaces, warehouses, and store fronts available so you can do puppet performances virtually anywhere.
And then there is the well-known Redmoon Theater, a big spectacle company that was founded by Blair Thomas, who later set up his own company and hired Julia and me as puppeteers. Julia then had the idea of making our own first show, Lula Del Ray. We made that with just one overhead projector for a puppet festival and then took it wherever they would have us, in bars, at film festivals, etc. And from there we moved on from project to project until we had a company. Half of us have a background in theatre, visual arts, and writing. Kyle and Ben have a music, sound design, and composition background. They actually played in a band when Julia asked them if she could use some samples of their work for the first show. But instead they asked to compose a whole score for us.
Is the use of old-school overhead projectors the distinctive feature of Manual Cinema?
Fornace: There are other companies that use them, but we are the only company that I know of that focuses on them and uses them exclusively. And we use them cinematographically. When we make our feature-length shows, but also even when we are doing site-specific work like installations, we try to use the language of cinema. On the projectors we work with a mix of transparency paper and scale paper puppets, and we combine that with live actors operating behind the screens. Even when we make movies and videos, with which you can achieve a higher level of complexity, we still try to mimic depth and camera movement by moving the flat paper, and not by moving the camera. The exciting thing is that we discover new ways of working as we go along.
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