Toronto, Canada February 2, 2004

To call Ronnie Burkett simply a puppeteer is to devalue him. It would be like calling Keats a writer, Glenn Gould a pianist, or Charlie Chaplin a humorist. Of course, he is a puppeteer—an indisputably great one—but he is an artist through and through. He makes you forget the clichés of his craft—the strings and materials, the children’s fantasy figures, the pretence of the manipulator’s "invisibility"—by his unique symbiosis with his created colleagues. His marionettes, head-rig figures (Aunty Sari, the Hindu cow, for instance), and hand puppets are not for children; nor are his stories that become long elaborations, sometimes in deft verse, of morbid, sordid, grotesquely turbulent experiences. You often laugh at his wit, but you are bound to be touched by his delicacy and depth, just as you are dazzled by his virtuosity. Unlike a majority of Canadian artists, Burkett is internationally famous not just in Canada. His visits to New York, London, Melbourne, and Vienna generate considerable buzz, and his accolades and awards are handsomely justified.

 Provenance is his new work. It runs for approximately two hours, without intermission, but it will have you so entranced that you won’t care about your bladder or buttocks. Your eyes, ears, mind, and heart will be enchanted by its expressive dynamism, subtlety, and poetic power. The set and props are Burkett’s exquisite creation, and the show, wonderfully lit by Bill Williams and perfectly equipped with sound and music by Cathy Nosaty, marks a first-rate convergence of allied crafts. Provenance is a rich story, sometimes dense with small details and textures, but it remains well focused on its main themes. Burkett is often guilty of over-writing or over-extending his material, but every character and situation, every bit of text coheres within a wide structure that allows him to explore questions of beauty and ownership. The title is a word that denotes the history of ownership, and everyone in this fiction either pursues or is pursued by beauty. One of the radical issues is who owns beauty and what are the prices of such ownership.

To tell his story, Burkett uses a very plain-Jane Canadian art history major, Pity Beane, who is researching the "back" story of an intriguing painting of an angelic boy (who is violently raped by a soldier). This painting has had a history of being sold and stolen. Now it hangs in a Viennese brothel run by Leda, a faded, strawberry-haired tart on the verge of madness who was once a famous chanteuse and show-girl in Paris. The brothel boasts a colourful collection of whores who are presented with naughty winks, sly drollery, and gut-busting humour. They include a heavily porcine one who appears to have come out of a George Grosz cartoon, a poignantly comic ballerina, a carnal blonde, and a black jazz baby from New York (a sort of Josephine Baker wannabe). These women have obviously been objects of one form of desire or another, so they know the price of sex and beauty. But the men—especially Dooley, the world-weary but debonair husband of Leda, and old Herschel—also know something about trophy sex objects and frustrated desire. Everyone seems to have sold his or her soul—even Plato, the roller-skating monkey, who is part of the entertainment.

It is a distinct pleasure to see how Burkett manipulates all these figures with consummate ease and versatility. Half the pleasure is in the distinctive movements for each character. What a thrill it is to witness a figure executing ballet choreography or Leda doing a Viennese waltz! What a stunning thrill it is to see Pity slump her shoulders in one scene or ice-skate with joyous buoyancy in another! The other half of pleasure lies in Burkett’s vocal ventriloquism where he speaks in the characters’ voices. In fact, Provenance is the first case in Burkett’s oeuvre where voice is such a major element. Serving as narrator, he opens the piece with a directive to follow his voice, and, indeed, even as his hands stand in for theirs or his torso and feet serve as props or supports for the figures, he seems to meld his own voice with the rich assortment of theirs. When the puppets are led into their cabinets, their voices continue to use his mouth as their conduit, but what is actually happening is that his genius is interacting with their expressive potential.

Another marvel of the show is that the story, rife with riffs on sex and satire on pompous aesthetics and academics, absorbs serious ethical, political, and metaphysical questions without diminishing its own appeal as a spirited inquiry into beauty. Paradoxically, while the scale of the puppets appears to shrink the world, the text enlarges it by magnifying the characters’ obsessions and failings. Burkett’s brilliant deployment of monologues and his nuanced script allow him to manipulate different episodes and rhythms to spectacular effect. Best of all, his miniature people provoke emotions, and when was the last time you were moved to genuine feelings of pity or horror or tenderness by a cast of puppets while having your intellect exercised?

Provenance is the work of a genius.

Top:Ronnie Burkett cradling Leda

Left:Pity Beane

Right:Leda and Dooley

Photo Credit: Trudie Lee

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