Suomen Unima ry:n lehti - Unima.nu

20
Nukketeatteri 2/2010
Some QUOTES from
NEVILLE TRANTER
These quotes are from Neville Tranter Q & A session which was taking place in Nukketeatteritalo Mundo, Turku
16.9.2010. Evening was hosted by Anna-Ivanova Brashinskaya.
Neville Tranter worked in Finland while
he was directing 3D. Photos from Q&A
ewening from Nukketeatteritalo Mundo.
(Roman Chauzov)
Early years
- I studied four years (in drama school) to be
an actor and I learned from method acting
system. In my third or fourth year of my studies
I had an elderly couple who came to perform
a puppet show in my drama-class. For all
of us it was very first time ever to see alive
puppet show. It was a children show with very
traditional wooden puppets (Billbar Puppet
Theatre). I had to help them to build up the
set and break it down and when I saw the
show I say ”that, that’s what I want to do with
my life”. So I asked them and they were looking
for a trainee, so they got money from the
government to teach me and I trained with
them two years.
So I learned how to carve wood, how to carve
puppets out from the wood, I learned to do
voices also. This time I worked with voices on
tape because they were elderly couple and
they used professional actors to put all voices
on the tape and they mix those with all
sound effects.
They were against professional puppeteers
when this man retired he was a photographer
in a local newspaper and his hobby had always
been making a puppets. His wife came
originally from Vienna, so she was the one
who really inspired him to make whole plays
with the puppets, and she found the actors.
They became a professional puppeteers when
they were 65. So they started a new career. I
did it a four or five years and then that was it.
At that time I knew that I want to be a puppeteer.
We did shows for children and I developed
my first solo piece with marionettes and
that was for adults, and I knew then that THIS
is what I REALLY want to do.
So I moved to Melbourne which was 2000 kilometers
away from where I was studying
and then we begin the Stuffed Puppet theatre
with an actor and a musician. We decided
to do short piece; a cabaree, because we
wanted to do it really fast. We decided I’ll
make the puppets and we work together to
make the scenes. Then we decided; okay, we
put a show together and the musician he had
(which was his brother) and I had a band so
we had live music right from the beginning.
And when we did the publicity we said: okay
we gonna do political sketches, we experimented
with songs satirical text and we noticed;
okay we are not going to get any publicity
for this because the journalists don’t know
anything about adult puppetry. So what we
did was we advertised as x-rated puppetry.
X-rated meaning its even worse: it’s pornographic.
And we got all the journalists come. And we
had striptease acts and exhibitionist..
And it was actually very innocent it really
wasn’t so pornographic. Then a man who saw
the show invited to us to perform in his theatre
restaurant together with a cabaree group
and they were ‘’the first act ‘’and the puppets
‘’the second act’’. But this group had been
in Amsterdam a year before, a great success,
and in Amsterdam was a festival called The
Festival of Fools, it was the biggest street
theatre alternative festival in the world. I did
not know that. We were invited to Amsterdam
with the whole show with the puppets,
cabaree and another friend who was a magician.
We had one big Australian show. We came
there and we had to work three months.
we even lived in hotel for two months at the
cost of the festival.
I wanted to work only for adults and I had
a great response from the audiences in Holland
to the puppets, they react wonderfully
to the puppets. I thought that I have to start
somewhere, so I staied in Holland. But also
from practical reasons: I didn’t have to travel
to find an adult audience. In Holland you have
also whole Europe. In Australia that was a
problem and I don’t wanna spend all my life
performing short pieces in nightclubs. I really
wanted to make a whole play with puppets,
that was my dream.
My first piece was “Studies in Fantasy”. Which
was also once again all solo pieces in the
booth and outside the booth. In 1981 I performed
in Charleville for the very first time.
It was my first international festival and in
those days it was very badly organized festival.
Every puppeteer had to pay their own
festival pass to see shows, but in the festival
there were thousands of puppeteers. First time
of my life I saw people really fighting with
their tickets. I thought that “they are really
fighting to see a puppets..WOW!”. I was very
nervous because I was performing at the end
of the week and everybody in the audience