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A little too much!

Of Australia's Barking Spider Visual Theatre's puppet show "Little Legs"

PHOTO K. N. MURALIDHARAN

FINDING FAITH The puppeteers and the hero

Half the story was staged, half the hero (literally, a pair of little wooden legs) was seen. The rest was left to imagination.

Using a finger puppet, Penelope Bartlau and Jacob Boehme of Barking Spider Visual Theatre Inc. (Australia) told the story of Little Legs, who loses faith, finds love and regains faith. The puppet show held recently at the Museum Theatre was organised by Prakriti Foundation, in association with Ishara Puppets and Teamworkfilms, New Delhi, as part of its Tree of Life festival.

Out of the cardboard boxes strewn across the stage emerged the sets — little meadows, rooms — where the story was played out. Little Legs, the hero, emerged out of a green egg, and "into the world", happy. He loves life, enjoys walking in the flowery meadows (a sheet pulled out from one of the boxes), until he is stung by a big bee. He is then bullied by another boy, a "whole" puppet with a body and a head and ten times his size. Hurt and unsure of his worth, Little Legs, carried away on a snowflake (a silver cut out) to an ice floor (a cardboard box covered with a silver sheet), sees himself in a mirror that floats in. Unable to accept himself, he chooses the fast life.

Cardboard boxes were transformed into a loud party zone with little, colourful signs that read "Bigger, better". The wild time ends, and once alone, Little Legs finds solace in drugs or meditation (however you choose to interpret the translucent plastic sheet that rose above the puppet). Penelope opens a silvery grey umbrella, with strips cut out from the cover to make it look like a spider's web. Little Legs first lured into the comfort promised by the spider, later escapes from the sticky web.

He ventures on and rests one day in a pile of purple, velvety feathers. He wakes up to find another pair of Little Legs, who has a voice, a squeak that comes with jumping. He or she helps the hero finds his voice (or squeak) too, by loosening his soles. "The second pair could be the hero finally finding himself or finding love," says Penelope, the writer and director. And Little Legs finally finds home.

Pulling out colourful glittering props out of the drab, brown coloured boxes worked well to keep the story from being lost in the vastness of the stage. But Little Legs failed to inspire empathy in the viewers, mostly because he lacked "life". "A pair of legs becomes `alive' when it makes decisions or reacts," says Penelope. Like when Little Legs reaches the end of the precipice (the cardboard box's edge) and does not keep walking, he hesitates and stops. Since the story requires Little Legs to be timid and less of a decision maker, perhaps more reactions would have helped animate him.

On whether children will be able to grasp the story, Penelope says, "They do not intellectualise things, so they will get the story, though some details may escape them."

ASHA S MENON

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