The team from Bow & Dagger return to The Blue Room in May with a new play that focuses on stories of immigration and classic Italian fairy tales.
The story begins in Italy in during World War II. Here we find the fierce and brave Antoinetta, a known communist, with two small boys, who has to flee to Australia to safety. Her husband Sante, a gentle storyteller, stays to fight against Europe’s rising fascist regimes.
Arriving, in Australia, Antoinetta and her sons are imprisoned alongside thousands of other ‘enemies’. Across the distance of war, Sante and Antoinetta are united by the stories they tell their boys.
To tell this epic story the creative team have turned to shadow puppetry. Clare Testoni, the writer, co-director and performer of the work chats to us about her love of puppetry and why she wanted to bring this very personal story to the stage.
When did you first develop your love of puppetry?
Like most kids I loved Seseme Street and The Muppets (I was obsessed with Bert and Ernie as a child), but it was seeing Richard Bradshaw do a performance of shadow puppets that really lit my imagination.
Years later when I was starting out as a performer and studying performance art I came back to puppets. All the stories I wanted to tell were too big for theatre, they needed casts of ten, castles, magic, and suddenly working with puppets all my Cecil B. Demille dreams were possible.
A lot of my work uses folklore and fairy tales, and these kind of stories just always seemed to fit with puppets, and shadow puppets in particular. I also collect folktales, and I have a podcast called Singing Bones which explores the history of fairy tales.
Two years ago I got to train with Richard Bradshaw at Spare Parts and that was a dream come true. He’s pretty much the biggest deal in shadow puppetry in the world and he and his wife are just the nicest people ever.
You recently completed your training in Shadow Puppetry at the International Shadow Puppetry Theatre in Bamburg, Germany. What’s the most challenging aspect of this form of puppetry?
Finding a dark room. Honestly I find shadows easy to work with, freeing, a never ending palate of possibilities. I’m only limited by the strength of my torch and my imagination. The big challenge is often explaining to people how light works, why you can’t do your show outside during the day.
I love teaching shadow puppetry to kids, its a wonderful mix of science and art, I love making light bend and kaleidoscopes, casting rainbows, but the amount of times I’ve turned up to teach and the only dark place is a cupboard…too many.
In Germany I was able to play with lights at a whole other level. We worked with lasers, with 3D shadows, with technology, it was very freeing to get out of the traditional puppetry mindset and explore the possibilities. It’s really the puppetry of light, not shadow, and light is so magical!
I mean the classes were all in German the first week, so that was challenging.
How did the story and ideas for this production come to you?
It was really two stories I wanted to tell. I come from a family of storytellers and I wanted to tell their story. The story of my family coming to Australia from Italy and being interned is a very personal one. My grandfather was ten when he was put in a detention centre in 1940 in Victoria after a short stay in inhuman conditions at a colonial gaol in Queensland.
I also wanted to tell the stories my family told me, Italian fairy tales. So the play is framed by the collection of Italian fairytales from the 16th century called Il Pentamarone or The Tale of Tales. We’ve used these traditional stories to talk about migration, detention, and the oppression of the fascist regime in Italy.
To me that’s why we tell stories, to get at a truth. So I wanted to use these safe ideas fairy tales, Italians in Australia, to talk about more challenging topics, such as children in detention, being an enemy in your home country, and the refugee crisis.
What makes shadow puppetry the right creative choice for this production?
Shadows are a very emotional medium. They give you enough information to tell a story, but they don’t give you a face, they don’t give you a level of detail that you get in actors theatre or in a marionette. And in that space the shadow gives you I find it’s easier to imagine, to fill the gaps, to imagine yourself and build the world. So for the story they seemed to fit.
It’s not didactic, I’m not hitting you over the head with the messages. There is more room for the audience to build their own narratives, to project their own thoughts into the shadows.
The 1940’s was also a great age for cinema and shadow puppets are really a kind of live cinema. There is a screen, they move, we use film language a lot to talk about the “shots” of the puppets and the shadows. So for me I wanted the shadow world to look like film noir, like Casablanca, The Big Sleep, we wanted the tension and the atmosphere of those films.
I’m a big fan of the golden age of cinema and shadows are a big part of the noir style. There is a kind of layering of meaning with it too, film is another way we choose to tell stories, and record history, so using film language reclaims the medium of the period in history we’re talking about, the 30’s and 40’s.
The show is based on real life stories of immigration, what can today’s audience learn from these accounts?
For me it just seems shocking that anyone can be okay with putting terrified and traumatised refugees in detention, especially children.
My family have dealt with the scars of detention for two generations. It leaves a mark. I think what is most disturbing about the stories of internment during the world wars is how similar they are to the detention centres now.
Self harm, violence, depression, and PTSD was happening in these camps seventy years ago. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone today that agrees with the internment of civilian Italians, Germans, and Japanese. I think it would be hard to find someone who wouldn’t be outraged to hear about the internment of Jewish refugees with fascist antisemites. Yet our government is committing similar acts now.
I’m a storyteller so I’m biased, but I really believe that is you don’t tell stories from history it’s bound to repeat. It is repeating.
We’re a country of migrants and displaced people, it’s crazy to me that we have so little sympathy for the refugees in The Middle East and Africa. It’s a fear of difference that is going to look so cruel and reprehensible in history’s rear view mirror.
What’s uplifting to me is seeing my family heal from these scars, is the way they use stories to control their own narrative of their experiences, that they built a new life for themselves. And that they passed that on to me.
Tales of Tales is at The Blue Room from 22nd May 2018, bookings can be made via the theatre.
Graeme Watson
