Insights into paradox of disability
ANDSPRING Puppet Company will begin Gipca’s first Great Texts/big Questions lecture for 2012 on February 23.
Award-winning puppeteers Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones share their ideas on micromovements and how central breath is to the life of an object, preceded by a short performance, I Love You When You are Breathing.
With special reference to Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, they will divulge details of their influences and the influence they have had in return.
Grandin is a highfunctioning autistic who has written extensively, with great insight, into the way animals and autistic people think.
She explains how the malfunctioning forebrain of animals and autistic people can be advantageous, leading to a kind of “extreme perception”. (Claire Danes won a Golden Globe last year for her performance as the eponymous character in the made-for-tv film Temple Grandin).
Kohler and Jones will talk about the influence of Grandin’s book on their work.
HThey will end with a visual presentation about the significance of animal characters in a theatrical context, with reference to the National Theatre of Great Britain’s War Horse production, for which they created the horses.
Handspring Puppet Company started off by touring schools in the early 1980s, but then Kohler and Jones moved to Joburg to work in children’s television.
They returned to Cape Town in the late 1990s and shifted their focus to the portrayal of animals – dogs, a crocodile ( Ubu and the Truth Commission), giraffes ( Tall Horse) and, more recently, horses with War Horse.
The play successfully transferred from the West End to Broadway, has just hit Canada and has recently been turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.
Most recently, Jones and Kohler formed the Handspring Trust, a not-for-profit NGO that works with youth in the Barrydale/smitsville area which will soon collaborate with projects in Masiphumelele and Vrygrond.
The Handspring talk takes place at the Hiddingh Hall, University of Cape Town Hiddingh Campus on Orange Street in Cape Town at 5.30pm on February 23 . Entrance is free, refreshments will be served from 5pm and no booking is necessary. Call 021 480 7156 for more details.
Other speakers who will be featured as part of the Gipca Great Text Lecture Series include:
March 1: Crime novelist Margie Orford.
March 22: Newspaper columnist, academic and director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, Steven Friedman.
April 12: Daya Reddy, odirector of the Centre for Research in Computational and Applied Mechanics; at UCT.
April 19: South African constitutional law scholar and holder of Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance at UCT, Pierre de Vos.
May 3: Poet, head of Hebrew, School of Languages and Literature, UCT, Dr Azila Reisenberger.
May 10: Prof Duncan Brown, Dean in the Faculty of the Arts at UWC.
May 15: Composer/musician Neo Muyanga.