(photo credit: Herman Helle)
Provocative Puppetry
Concentration KAMP on Camera
by Jason Booker
A piece with thousands of puppets sounds accessible, right?
Imagine though that they are each only eight centimetres tall. For the audience, the best way to view these puppets with smears and holes for faces – expressive but frozen – is actually not to sit next to them or even to look directly at them.
Instead look up.
This world of miniatures sprawls across one of the deepest stages possible at the Enwave Theatre but is surrounded by white sheets. Using a series of hand-held webcams and camcorders, the puppeteers project the lives of these anonymous yet adorable puppets onto the back wall so that the audience can watch the minute details of this show. Really, to watch those same minute details of the characters’ lives as KAMP captures the gruesome details of a day in the life of Auschwitz, the notorious World War II concentration camp.
