High-Wire Acts Attack

When I first stated reading this chapter on High Wire Acts, I thought it was going to be about certain puppets with wire attached to them. I thought "high-wire" to be more of a breed of puppet than what I came to find out it really was. Blumenthal explains what high-wire is after talking about the double vision that theaters give to the audience.

 "While film can lock onto the imagination and virtually transport the audience, spectators at live theaters never quite forget where they are, however much they buy into the fabricate world on stage.....In puppet theater, this so called 'willing suspension of disbelief'' becomes a high-wire act as the gap between normal reality and state truth becomes a chasm."

When i started reading on something that caught my attention was Senor Wences and his "sidekick" Johnny. Johnny is a puppet made from Senor Wences' Hand.



It says he used to construct Johnny in front of the Audience at each performance.

I found a clip on you-tube of one of his performances. He was a guest on the Muppet's. From this clip i realized that he is a lot like Jeff Dunham in his performance. Its very comical and i fell in love with Johnny right away as do most people im sure of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AaIDmiFXmo


From what i understand about the term "hard-wire", what makes Johnny a hard-wire act is the amount of unavailability that Johnny is indeed a puppet. Just from looking at Johnny and knowing that he is just made up from a hand, you wouldn't imagine believing he can convince you that he is real. Senor Wences does a remarkable job creating Johnny making him become real to the audience making it a hard-wire performance.

"Face" The Breed of The "Hand" Puppet

When I started to read about the Show Breeds of puppets, the first page in chapter two caught my attention immediately. The first puppet mentioned was the Hand or "glove" puppet. There are different variations of hand puppets I learned, but the overall idea is that the puppet physically attaches to a source of life, a puppeteer.

Blumenthal explains the different areas of the body that "hand" puppets are controlled by. The typical notion is that hand puppets are controlled through the puppeteers hand. The fingers control the head and arms of the puppet. Puppet characters can also live on the fingers of the actors. Another variation of the hand puppet is the Mitten Head. This is where my brain started to create a web.

Mitted Heads come about when a manipulator's thumb animates the character's lower jaw while the other four fingers make a malleable face. This statement brought me back to my middle school days. I began to think about how I used to draw a face on my finger, using my thumb as the mouth, I would create a character I controlled with my hand. I related that memory with the information I had just read. I believe that when I drew that character on my finger, I had in a sense created a puppet.

As I read on, I came across a greater realization that really made me think about what a puppet really is and just how many classifications and breeds there are.  Blumenthal states, "puppets have lived on nearly every part of the human body. Sergei Obraztsov used his elbow for a baby's heard." (p 39) My memory took me back again to when I was younger and playing with my friends. We used to draw eyes on our chins, lay upside down, cover the rest of our faces, and used our mouths as the rest of the character's face. The picture below displays this game we used to play.



Since I realized that this variation of puppets could technically be used on any part of the body, I began to consider if this "face puppet" would indeed be considered a puppet. Or is it a mask? If this silly game we played really is a puppet, then what breed would it be classified under?

I still go back and forth as to whether this character I used to create is a mask or a puppet.