Puppet Slam Network Interview

I was recently interviewed by the Puppet Slam Network, an organization that supports a community of puppet slam organizers and performers around the world. The Seattle puppet slam I help produce, The Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam, has received two grants from the PSN.

Here is the interview, which was posted on the PSN’s blog.

Nick Hubbard and the Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam #Seattle

Nick Hubbard is a performance and visual artist currently based in Seattle. His work springs from the intersection of shadow theater and other art forms including puppetry, music, poetry, and actor’s theater. He has been performing short-form puppetry since 2008, at venues like On the Boards, Theatre-Off-Jackson, and the Frye Art Museum. He is a co-founder of the Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam, a puppetry festival organizer, and the President of the Board of Trustees of the Puppeteers of America.

Photo by Greta Wilson, 2011

Marsian: How long have you been performing at Puppet Slams? 
Nick Hubbard: It hasn’t been very long for me at official puppet slams. My first slam experience was in 2011, and I was wearing a suit, a bow-tie, and a fedora. I was performing a piece that’s built out of a suitcase, where I’m a bit of a traveling salesman, I had found a poem that I would transform into an object theater of shadows for the audience. I was under a bit of duress, because I couldn’t get my light to turn on. It came together in the end.M: What slams have you performed at?
NH: A total of four events that were technically slams, all in the epic setting of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle and Portland). Prior to that, I had performed short-form puppetry around Seattle, mostly in collaboration with a storyteller named Wes Andrews.M: What is the weirdest show you have seen?
NH: In Olympia, WA, I saw a bare-chested guy perform a ballet of strength with a six by one foot square wooden column he’d fashioned himself. It was somewhere between The Passion of Christ and the opening sequence of the recent Les Miserables.M: What inspired you to start hosting a puppet slam? 
NH: Witnessing the National Puppet Slam at the 2011 National Puppetry Festival in Atlanta, GA, motivated a group of us from Seattle to make something happen in our city. We wanted to promote the same caliber of bold, experimental work from West Coast puppeteers.

M: Are you part of a slam circuit?
NH: Portland and Vancouver, BC, are both holding slams now. I’d say we are starting to develop a circuit — with San Francisco and Los Angeles as distant links on the Southern end. Rather than being unique from the others around, I think we all share a common energy and, with that in mind, have been seeking ways to share acts and support each other’s events.

M: Tell us about a fabulous failure and what you’ve learned from it.
NH: I once had to do a show in a space that didn’t give us much tech beforehand, and I wasn’t able to verify that I’d have complete darkness. My piece required complete darkness, and so once I started, it was clear the audience wouldn’t be able to see anything. I had to pull the plug, essentially, and I came out of it feeling that great. I learned both the need to have something flexible for slam pieces (or be very clear about what my tech requirements are), and also that you and the audience can come out OK if you just relax and laugh a bit.

M: Why are Puppet Slams important to you? 
NH: I think slams are shaking up the conventions of puppetry, in particular around who can make work. They are making the form more accessible to interested people who want an opportunity to test out their own ideas somewhere besides their garage, but may not be at a university or other venue that’s open to broad experimentation. Slams are generating energy and connecting puppeteers across state and international boundaries.

M: What inspires you to create a puppet slam piece?
NH: I’m especially inspired by works of literature that feel too short to expand into a larger show, but contain enough in them that they are worth adapting. Poems seem to often fit in this category, and so do picture books.

M: Who are some other artists you are inspired by?
NH: I’m impressed with the savvy of Carole D’Agostino, especially the way she released three parts of her “Hoarding Show” through various slam appearances. It was a smart way to get feedback on the development of the show and generate interest in the larger work.

M: Where can people contact you to perform?
NH: info@dark-materials.com

M: Where do you see the Puppet Slam Network in 5 years? 
NH: I see the Puppet Slam Network as a place where many burgeoning puppeteers find their footing. I see it as a hub for touring artists who are, through the slam community and with the support of the PSN, able to compliment and promote larger projects. I see growing audience for puppetry thanks to the PSN; I think people will develop their taste for the art from slams and this will make them more open to all of puppetry’s manifestations.

M: Any advice for up and coming slam artists?
NH: Be bold and be invested — try new things, let yourself make mistakes, and take the time to develop your pieces with rehearsals and reiterations of puppets.

A Double-Edged Word

I want the audience who experiences a piece of mine to be given wonder.

This has often reflected my hope for the work to expand, sweep away, captivate, thrill.  These have all held a wholesome connotation in my mind–a safe and comforting connotation, like watching the stars on a clear night.  Even in that toothless example, though, there are tremors to unsettle the spirit, and I want these in my work too.

When you find yourself out in a place dark enough for stars to shine bright, isolation is a part of the scene.  There are risks that come with remove, and the wildness in the wilderness is no mere trope.  On top of the physical risks, there is the way something wondrous grasps at your heart.  It reminds you–or alerts you–of your smallness in the universe.  It calls to primal knowings inside you, etched by evolution and all but inaccessible to rational memory.  To say you experience wonder is to acknowledge that a quickening heart-rate and shudders along your bones can mean more than one thing on the spectrum of emotions.  They can have multiple meanings, and have them simultaneously.

 

Is there another term that is fraught with such a reach of qualities, from those that lift you up to those that stop your breath?  Is there one that is explained by so many double-edged words, word like “thrill” that can conjure up lovers or murderers?

If making art is a striving to express truths you encounter as a walker in these woods of daily life, then what I’ve encountered are wondrous aspects and the secret answers my creative hand reaches for are wrapped in the borders of the world, places that have as much unknown as they do familiar.

Creative Restraint

How does it feel to be in the Work (the work of making, living out the creative process)?

Is there a point at which I go and do not pause in critique or trembling?  Is that the point when questions drop away? 

Below the questions, below the cold rocks of restraint, the wealth of dark pregnant space goes on and on into myself, past myself, flowing to the edge where there is a blend between me as the me I know and me as the inherited me. It’s from here that I must step forward and make.

Here are my signs of No Creative Restraint:

• Creating in small ways everyday.
• Having a broad definition of art & making.
• A balance of modes of expression–none is paramount.
• Having spaces where any act involves the honoring of the creative impulse.
• Finding the distinction between guidance and dominance.
• Making decisions during process without inhibiting process or progress.
• Progressing despite–and in certain moments abandonment of–understanding.
• Staying in touch with my own sense of next steps, inspirations, visions of new/next directions.
• If “Yes” and “No” both move my process forward
• I can accept and inhabit what I’m doing without comparison to what I’ve done.
• It’s hard to predict what’s next, and I’m still excited to move forward.
• Stress and anxiety are overrun by problems and purpose.
• I have simultaneous understanding and uncertainty.

Behold the shadow on my heart…

Behold the shadow on my heart
As though in silver I were drest
Seeming amid the warmth of noon
Dull from communion with the moon.

Dull from the fierceness of the glow
Which midnight and moonlight show
As though all night I burned with fire
Whose flames at sight of dawn expire.

And so I wear the shadowy grey
Of ashes in the brilliant day
And wait for darkness and the night
To show my own effulgent light.

-Josephine Young Case

http://www.skidmore.edu/centennial/case.htm

You, Darkness

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

 

But the darkness pulls in everything:

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them!–

powers and people–

 

and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

 

I have faith in nights.

 

— Rainer Maria Rilke —

 

Du Dunkelheit, aus der irch stamee,

ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme,

welche die Welt begrenzt,

indem sie glänzt

für irgend einen Kreis,

aus dem heraus kein Wesen von ihr weiss.

Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich;

Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich,

wie sie’s errafft,

Menschen und Mächte–

Und es kann sein: eine grosse Kraft

rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft.

Ich glaube an Nächte.

Sweet Darkness

A poem for the beginning of this blog.

SWEET DARKNESS

When you eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize it own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

– DAVID WHYTE –

Via My Inner Edge.