Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Gross Kenneth
Author:Gross, Kenneth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226309606
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
This play of doubles, human and artificial, Cuticchio has expanded in a later work, L’urlo del mostro (The howl of the monster), based on the Odyssey. Here Cuticchio at one moment invades the stage as the giant Polyphemus, tearing apart and devouring the companions of Odysseus. In another scene he plays Odysseus himself, encountering the ghosts of puppets in the underworld, seeking his identity there among lost comrades and dead family members. Of one skeletal wooden figure he asks, in Sicilian, “Chi pupu eri?” (What puppet were you?). Another puppet turns out to be a monstrous image of Cuticchio’s father, dubbed Demogorgon, an ancient god of the underworld, who gives Odysseus-Mimmo characteristically paternalistic advice about performing. In a haunting fashion, the quest of Odysseus echoes that of the puparo.
Cuticchio knows his Cervantes. In 2007, in Palermo, I saw him perform a moving version of the traditional Sicilian cunto, or oral tale, on a very nontraditional subject, “The Last Duel of Don Quixote,” which became a story about the dying madman’s duel with his dying imagination of knighthood. The very physicality of the performance, with its urgent wielding of a wooden sword and dreamlike pulse of voice, implicated the storyteller in the hallucination. In the scene of destruction in La visita guidata, however, what I felt was less Don Quixote attacking the puppets than the mad King Lear, exiled, isolated, and raging, shouting at the wind and rain that assaults him, asking the elements to do his bidding; he asks them to play a part in his own imagined puppet drama of revenge against the daughters who have exiled him, even as the elements repeat those daughters’ violence against their father. (“Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to’t?”). And yet still as in Cervantes, Cuticchio’s violence against the puppets invested them with an intenser and stranger life, made the work and impulse to violence stranger as well, more hallucinatory. The tearing apart of the puppet read as a desperate attempt to reanimate a tradition in which Cuticchio is a master. When we talked, he said with chilling directness that the tradition of the Opera dei Pupi is after all dead, a diminished relic of itself played for tourists rather than a popular audience—although the traditional shows that I saw Cuticchio and his family perform were full of the most immediate and startling life (he moves these heavy puppets with remarkable delicacy), and the audience full of locals and children. In La visita guidata, however, the destruction was a way to show the puppets his love, and at the same time an act of mourning, and yet again an exorcism of shame and rage, an expression of the puparo’s frustration with his inheritance. There was a complicated kind of dramatic conspiracy here, a curious trickery, a vision of the puparo’s complicity, at once sly and inescapable, with the conflicts, the betrayals and entrapments, that wounded him. Apropos of such complicity, and of both the
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