Performance collective Manual Cinema (and all of their luggage) will arrive at Purchase later this month, to share their production of Frankenstein with us on Sunday, October 20. In anticipation, we reached out to Drew Dir, Co-Artistic Director, Frankenstein Lead Deviser, Puppet Designer, and Mad Scientist, to ask him a few questions about what makes this production such a must-see experience.
What you do is so unique. Can you tell us briefly about your technique, which you call “cinematic shadow puppetry”?
Manual Cinema performances attempt to marry a very old form of storytelling (shadow puppetry) with a relatively new form (cinema) — what that means in practice is that we try to do everything that a film can do in the way of cuts, montages, closeups, camera angle, etc. but using lo-fi means created live in front of the audience. In our case, we’re using old-school overhead projectors, hundreds of paper shadow puppets, and actors in silhouette to create a kind of live, animated film.
How did this all come about? Was there something specific that inspired you to try to create theatrical experiences in this way?
We are not the first puppeteers to use overhead projectors and shadow puppets in this way; we were directly inspired by some pretty amazing artists who discovered that old-school overhead projectors could be used like this. When we named our company Manual Cinema, that became a kind of guiding artistic mission — how can we create cinematic experiences by hand, using handmade materials in front of an audience?
The show you are bringing to Purchase is your rendition of a familiar story, that of Frankenstein. What is it about this story that attracted you? What makes it a good fit for your methods?
I love all the old Universal monster movies from the 1930s, so I’ve always been interested in the title. But it was going back and reading the novel and learning about Mary Shelley’s biography that got us interested in adapting it. The novel is structured in this really interesting way — a gothic romance — where it’s told in parts from different points of view, like frames. We got excited about using different visual media to represent the different points of view in the story, so our production itself is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of different methods and techniques patched together. That includes the really interesting and somewhat tragic life of Mary Shelley. We learned that just before writing Frankenstein, she had given birth to and lost a child, and we became interested in how childbirth and death haunt the story, and some of those scenes from her biography are woven throughout our production.
I understand you’ll be doing a workshop for our campus community the day before the performance. What will attendees do and learn?
Attendees will learn a bit about our company history, and very quickly we’ll get everyone on their feet and teach them how to perform a Manual Cinema show using shadow puppets and overhead projectors. The workshop will culminate in everyone getting to make their own shadow puppet short performance!
One last question. Our General Manager mentioned that you travel with 44 (!) bags of luggage. Can you tell us what is in all those bags?
Hundreds of puppets, props, overhead projectors, 19th-century costumes, camera gear, percussion instruments, projection screens, sound equipment — we travel with a true mad scientist’s laboratory!
You can experience Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein at The Purchase PAC on Sunday, October 20, at 7pm.
Tickets are available online, on The Purchase PAC website.
Pictured: Manual Cinema, Frankenstein. Photo (c) Michael Brosilow
