What happens when heroes fall from grace
Combining the best of German puppet theatre with the best from Africa
SAVE the Pedestals, a unique, international, artistic collaboration between the Baxter Theatre Centre, Handspring Puppet Company and Halle Puppet Theatre, makes its African debut at the Baxter Flipside, for four performances only. From March 28-30, at 8pm, this follows its hugely successful world premiere in Halle, Germany, last year.
The acclaimed South African creative team behind the production have combined their collective skills to bring to life the narrative, which is based on writer Ivan Vladislavic’s short story, under the direction of choreographer and director Robin Orlyn and featuring puppets by the Tony Award-winning Handspring Puppet Company, led by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones.
The cast of five is made up of puppeteers Mmakgosi Tsogang Kgabi (Botswana and South Africa), Lambert Mousseka Ntumba (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Franziska Rattay, Ivana Sajevic, and Nico Parisius (Halle Puppet Theatre company). Torsten Mass is responsible for the idea, concept and co-ordination, dramaturgy and play development is by Francesca Spinazzi and Andreas Hillger, with German translation by Thomas Brückner.
The iconoclastic work, featuring Handspring’s giant colourful puppets, is filled with slapstick humour, as it pokes fun at heroes that have fallen from grace. It follows the adventures of two Struggle comrades, Comrade A and Ma Z, who find themselves in a world of public monuments that are past their sell-by dates.
They wander around Joburg, sharing their dreams as they contemplate the half-life and the disappearance of historical monuments. Ma Z’s journey is grounded in and motivated by dreams where monuments recur – in her sleep, she sees a glass pedestal in which, like bones in a casket, are the names of the children of the statue.
Comrade A imagines that at midnight the statues climb down from their pedestals in search of better prospects.
The work is described as a poeticpolitical discourse that encompasses both the fall of Saddam Hussein’s and South African monuments (such as Cecil John Rhodes at UCT), as well as the rise of Lenin monuments.
The title is derived from a saying by Polish writer and poet Stanislaw Lec: “When destroying monuments, save the pedestals.”
“The idea behind this production of Save the Pedestals is to bring together the best German puppet theatre with the best puppet theatre from African countries,” says Mass.
“Vladislavic’s story, at its heart, is about how we deal with monuments that have been left behind by political change and we are, therefore, resigned to confiscate them, and they end up being nothing more than rubbish heaps of concrete.”
Renowned author and writer, Vladislavic has long been concerned with the life and death of statues and memorials, going back to stories like We Came to the Monument (1989) and Propaganda by Monuments (1996).
His latest book, The Distance, was launched earlier this year, to great success.
In 2011, with late South African photographer David Goldblatt, he received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book.
His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and Yale University’s WindhamCampbell Prize for fiction. He is a distinguished professor in the creative writing department at Wits University.
South African-born, Berlinbased Orlin has been lauded for her choreography and contribution to the arts by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009, who made her a Knight of the French National Order of Merit.
Their many awards include the Naledi Executive Directors Award for the international hit production Warhorse, a Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for Best Puppetry Design for Ouroboros, Best Design at the Toronto Theatre Critics Circle Awards, a DORA Award for outstanding costume design, puppet design, fabrication and direction to Kohler with Jones.
The Halle Puppet Theatre, under the artistic directorship of Christoph Werner, is the only ensemble of its kind in German-speaking countries which performs shows predominantly aimed at adult audiences.
Save the Pedestals