Patrick takes flight
The puppet had to fly, and be big enough to be ridden by a person, but Patrick Martel was up for the challenge, writes
Jack van Beynen.
As a 3-year-old in Quebec, Canada, Patrick Martel’s favourite toys were his puppets. He made them with the help of his parents, his father carving the heads and his mother sewing their clothes.
Martel still makes puppets, and has been making them since he graduated from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal in 1993. But the puppets he makes these days are a far cry from those his parents helped with.
Martel is the puppet designer for Cirque de Soleil’s Avatar-themed show Toruk: The First Flight, which is coming to New Zealand in September.
He’s in charge of creating the fantastic beasts that populate the lush jungles of Pandora, the fictional planet created by James Cameron for his groundbreaking 2009 film.
It is the biggest project Martel, who has done plenty of theatre work, has ever undertaken – both in terms of workload and the scale of the puppets.
He has crafted a menagerie of alien creatures that range from the tiny woodsprites to the huge flying Toruk of the show’s title.
Some of the creatures come straight from the film, but Martel was given license to come up with some himself – with oversight from the team behind the film.
‘‘It was good to have them come and help because that was the only way for us to really make sure that everything would blend really nicely.
‘‘But they were still super openminded about it, which was super nice for me because I didn’t feel like they were making me do things, I just felt that they were just making sure that everything was on form and in line with what had already been designed.’’
To research, he watched the film over and over, watching the way the animals moved, for the ‘‘one or two traits that told the story of the character.’’ Adding to the Avatar universe, he says, was a ‘‘privilege’’.
All told, Martel’s work on Toruk ran to more than 15 puppets. Their names give you an idea of the kind of exotic beasts he created: Six viperwolves, three austrapedes, one turtapede, three direhorses, two sets of woodsprites, more than 20 shadow puppets for a ritual scene, and, of course, the toruk.
The toruk is a huge dragon-like winged beast that Pandora’s blueskinned native Na’vi people ride in the Avatar film.
That’s all very well for the 3D animators at Weta Workshop, but Martel had to make a life-size version that could not only believably fly, but be ridden by an actor.
Martel says it was the puppet he felt the most pressure from, especially once he was told it was the show’s title character.
The puppet he created requires all six of the show’s puppeteers to operate.
It’s what Martel calls a ‘‘reverse string marionette’’. Suspended from the ceiling, the puppet is controlled by strings pulled by puppeteers from the ground below.
Although it’s a very modern design, Martel says that like all puppetry it’s based on tradition.
‘‘Puppetry is a very traditional form, it come from a very traditional art form. We can reinvent and reinvent, but when we look at the basis of puppetry, it comes down to those traditional art forms...
‘‘When I designed the toruk, the idea that this was going to become a reverse string marionette, I had to look at how a traditional marionette is strung and how we can kind of translate this language into a language where the strings are not going up but going down, and the object is much larger.’’
Although the initial plan was to have one of the performers test the toruk’s first flight, in the end Martel had the honour. He says he’ll remember the moment for the rest of his life.
‘‘High above the stage, so you see everyone, and you’re sitting on this giant puppet. It’s pretty crazy, you don’t forget.’’
‘‘It’s not a 3D drawing, it’s a real object, it has these real qualities of how it moves, and the main gravitational points, and how easily you can actually manipulate it by actually sitting on it and just moving a bit up there.
‘‘You can feel all that puppet move beneath you, and you feel like you have power over that creature, which is exactly what the character is doing when he’s riding the toruk. He’s feeling like there’s a connection between him and the puppet.’’
Cirque de Soleil is better known for acrobatics than puppetry, but it has used puppets in performances in the past. Toruk, though, is different.
‘‘Toruk is a show where Cirque has tried to do things they don’t normally do: the fact that it tells a story, the fact that there is puppetry,’’ Martel says.
‘‘I was pretty excited to be the guy who brings puppets to Cirque, you know? For me that was super exciting.’’
will play Christchurch’s Horncastle Arena from September 1 to 10 and Auckland’s Spark Arena from September 15 to 24.
Toruk: The First Flight