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Transforming Beetles
Transforming Beetles
by
Alistair Maxwell
Transforming Beetles is an exam piece by the second-year students of Osijek’s Academy of Arts and Culture. To begin there is a brief preamble in both Croatian and English thanking us all for coming and explaining a bit about the process. Suddenly, the lights go out and the room fills with the noises of the rainforest. Fresh raindrops dripping from leaves, beetles clicking, vines rustling. As the eerie blue lights come up we see that the stage is filled with around a dozen students, who are creating this entire soundscape themselves.
What follows is a captivating, albeit plotless, meander through the dense jungles as we follow the students, performing as various creatures going about their day-to-day business. There’s even musical accompaniment by one student, who hops seamlessly between keyboard, bass guitar and thumb piano.
All of the animals in Transforming Beetles are puppets made from other puppets. By combining the discarded remains of classic wooden mannequin puppets, the students have been able to turn the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam into a full I-Spy book of creepie-crawlies. What is recognisable as the leg of a standard wooden human puppet is now the fang of an enormous spider. What was once a simple carved wooden head is now a huge deadly scorpion stinger.
One particularly innovative moment comes in the creation of the dragonfly where the rods of the puppet were used, not to support the puppet but as an integral part of the insect anatomy. The two rods pointing together form the sharp wings of the immense dragonfly.
There are firefly segments that, at first, are beautiful and evoke the feeling of the natural world. But when they are revisited again and again, they begin to feel more akin to lights being randomly flung around the room.
Transforming Beetles excels at the big set-piece moments: the spider crawling the wall; the scorpion locked in battle. But interest begins to wane in the less clear transformative moments. Throughout the show animals morph into other animals but at no point do the transformations into animals look as interesting or as skilled as the animals themselves. There are moments of pure joy watching the component parts click together, and the creature designs really are clever and intricate. But the bits in between lack the visual dynamism to be compelling. When the creatures lose their shape, they don’t look like they are between evolutions – they look like the discarded bits of other puppets. This twinned with moments and movements being repeated too often makes Transforming Beetles seem less like a show and more of a showcase of handmade puppets and puppetry skills.
But even as a showcase, the students are still able to demonstrate considerable talent. They are able to transform broken odds-and-ends into the mightiest, tiniest and scariest members of the animal kingdoms. With skill and imagination these puppeteers are able to show that in the same way all life can start with particles, all puppetry can come from spare parts. All it takes is the skill and imagination to put them together. And these students have ample.
