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Report: France

F-words and dirty talk as puppet theatre goes behind ventriloquists' scene

Leading stage director Gisèle Vienne’s latest show is on tour. The Ventriloquists' Convention was a surprise for some at the International Puppet Theatre Festival, in Charleville-Mézières.

The Ventriloquists Convention.
The Ventriloquists Convention. © Falk Wenzel
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The star of the convention, Nils, creates a stir when he enters with his dummy, who’s dressed just like him. His eight fellow-ventriloquists are eager to meet their peer who has apparently made it big time. He does nothing to discourage them.

Their worship of the falsely modest Nils is just an illusion. The faux glitz fades rapidly as the ventriloquists, or their faithful or treacherous puppets, begin to drop their masks.
One after the other, each distinct character spills the beans about their relationships with their puppets and each other.

Gisèle Vienne's and cowriter Denis Cooper’s excessive show-biz style, comes from a real Ventriloquists' Convention, held in Kentucky, in the south of the US.

Vienne, a trained puppeteer herself, took a bold step in presenting this work at the International Puppet Theatre Festival.

Holding up a distorted mirror to puppet-theatre professionals to raise questions about what goes on behind the scenes. Some, those who applauded the show, could well be asking the same questions as Vienne.

“It’s almost an excuse to use a ventriloquists’ convention to be able to create this very surrealist conversation which allows in a very realistic way to unfold different layers of languages," she says. "When I talk to you there is this voice that you hear from me but there is also what I think at the same time, consciously, unconsciously.”

The first night of the two shows in Charleville-Mézières, eastern France, was full. However, perhaps due to the liberal sprinkling of F-words and dirty talk (kicked off by Nils’ own, grey-suited look-alike dummy, Lutz), some left before the end. Others with small children realised too late that this two-hour evening-show was actually aimed at adolescents and adults.

Vienne has no qualms about that.

“People laughed a lot tonight because there is also humour," she commented. "It’s also talking about people who want to be funny. Ventriloquy today is an art of comedy and as everyone knows when you go into the kitchen of comedians it’s not always funny.”

The actors are mostly real-life puppeteers, not ventriloquists, from the Puppentheater from Halle in Germany. They are joined by French actor Jonathan Capdevielle, who plays a sad and very blond ventriloquist. Soon they will perform to different audiences in different settings, at the Paris Autumn Festival in early October and then at the Théâtre des Amandiers, in a Paris suburb in November. The effect of the puppet-artists-meeting within a puppet-artists’-meeting will be missed.

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