“Can we make it fast enough to be really frightening to this boy and to the audience?” “On this show, the big need is the tiger has to be really scary,” Caldwell said. Celia Mei Ruben, Nikki Calonge and Rowan Magee as Black and White Adi Dixit as Pi Sathya Sridharan as Mamaji and the company of "Life of Pi." (Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade) The teen's fellow castaway and frenemy is a deadly Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. There are goats, zebras, vicious hyenas - and the beast Pi spends months with on a small boat at sea. “So I can get really detailed, beautiful and emotional movement out of her.”Ī team of eight puppeteers lift, crouch, glide and trot other large zoo animals to life. “I can touch your face with the same gentility and expressiveness that I can with a human hand,” he explained. “And being an orangutan leaping from tree to tree, she really needs that flexibility to allow her to really do the things she does,” Caldwell said, “to be able to jump and leap.” In action, OJ's legs and hands become extensions of the puppeteers'. She's highly stylized, like a sculpture, but also engineered with handles, internal rods and bungee cords that mimic ligaments. Onstage, six hands hold various body parts to animate OJ's bright orange figure.
Mahira Kakkar as Amma, Adi Dixit as Pi, and Salma Shaw, Betsy Rosen, Nikki Calonge, Rowan Magee, Celia Mei Rubin as Orange Juice along with the company of "Life of Pi." (Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade) “We're not using strings or mechanical things, there are no motors in her, it's all hands-on,” Caldwell said. This type of puppetry is inspired by a traditional Japanese form known as Bunraku. Her name is Orange Juice - OJ for short - and it takes three coordinated people to manipulate the gangly orangutan's head, torso and limbs. “She's life-size - so she's almost five foot tall when she's stood up,” he said with the primate sitting by his side, “which means she's quite a lot to manage.” On a December morning, “Life of Pi” co-puppet designer and movement director Finn Caldwell introduced me to the mother orangutan and explained how she works. Up close, you can see how these creations are more complicated than Jim Henson's Kermit the Frog or Miss Piggy. Now, a menagerie of puppets star in this wild story's stage adaptation at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, and a small army of artists is bringing them to life for the play's U.S. It's about Pi, a teenager from India, who recounts being stranded on a lifeboat with animals from his family's zoo. If you've ever read Yann Martel's best-selling novel “Life of Pi” - or seen Ang Lee's trippy, CGI-drenched Academy Award-winning film - you know the tale is filled with fantastical creatures.
0 kommentar(er)
