Handspring Puppet Company is a multiple award-winning puppetry and design leader in international theatre. FABRICATE, their forthcoming exhibition at the AVA Gallery, is a survey of key productions that demonstrate the exhilarating and sweeping breadth of their work.
The exhibition includes work from a large selection of their theatrical productions including the runaway hit War Horse, the two path-finding theatrical collaborations with William Kentridge, Faustus in Africa and Woyzeck on the Highveld, Ouroboros, The Chimp Project and Tall Horse. These will be exhibited together with documentation of studio experiments, sketches, drawings, music and interviews, theatrical appearances, seminars and talks, film screenings and master-classes.
This exhibition was first conceived by Alicia Adams for the Kennedy Center in Washington to reveal some of the processes of puppet conception.
For the AVA’s manifestation Marilyn Martin (one of South Africa’s leading curatorial professionals), Janni Younge and Adrian Kohler rework this collection to trace, specifically, how these puppets, as commonplace material counterparts, have so effectively been transfigured into animated and believable ‘sentient’ characters.
Handspring co-founder Adrian Kohler encourages viewers to regard these well-travelled figures as fundamentally different from sculpture.
Though apparently ‘dead’ they are now in fact beings with past ‘lives’ and have become, in the collective imagination, ‘living’ objects. These figures have pleaded, shouted, sung, reasoned and stamped and flicked their ears through a repertoire of over 20 years of theatre, and the exhibition at AVA Gallery is the final celebration of the Handspring Puppet Company’s supreme achievements.
FABRICATE is a project of the World Design Capital Cape Town 2014 (WDC653), and generously funded by Rand Merchant Bank and the National Arts Festival.
WHAT: FABRICATE: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION OF HANDSPRING PUPPET COMPANY
WHERE: AVA GALLERY, 35 CHURCH STREET, CAPE TOWN
WHEN: Public opening: 4 November 2014. Closes: 22 January 2015
INFO: +27 (0)21 424 7436 or +27 (0)722 588 310; E info@ava.co.za.
