Look, no strings: Basil Twist III’s new puppetry show Dogugaeshi at the Barbican

Master puppeteer Basil Twist III created a world of billowing silks and abstract shapes for Kate Bush’s comeback last year — anything can be brought to life, he tells Lyndsey Winship, as he opens his new show at the Barbican
Reinventing puppetry: Basil Twist III / Picture: N Goldstein
N Goldstein
Lyndsey Winship13 January 2015

If you were lucky enough to see Kate Bush’s comeback shows at Hammersmith last summer, then you’ve seen the work of Basil Twist III. If you saw Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet The Winter’s Tale at the Royal Opera House, you’ve seen Twist’s work too. In both shows the American puppeteer revealed his mastery of using giant silks to create rippling backdrops, seascapes, floods and otherworldly effects. And New York-based Twist just can’t stay away from London. He’s back later this month but this time with a much quieter and more intimate show of his own, reviving an obscure Japanese theatrical technique, dogugaeshi.

According to The New Yorker, “no theatre artist in New York is showing more poetic force or technical skill than the puppeteer Basil Twist”. It’s fair to say the brilliantly named 45-year-old is a major talent. His work is not just about the manipulation of marionettes, more about designing spaces filled with rich sensory stimulation. “I feel I’m not so much a storyteller as an experience-maker,” he says.

He has worked on an eclectic range of projects, from a Flaming Lips musical to a cabaret spectacle with drag diva Joey Arias. In 2013 Twist was commissioned to create his own version of The Rite of Spring, a “ballet without dancers”, featuring billowing silks, smoke and projections visualising Stravinsky’s score.

It was this show that caught the attention of Kate Bush and led her to call up Twist. “I knew who she was but I didn’t have any of her albums,” he says. “I had no idea it was going to be such a big deal.” It was, needless to say, a big deal. Not just for Bush’s fans but for Twist himself. “It was a beautiful adventure,” says Twist, and he learned a lot from the singer. “I’m inspired by how she works with people and trusts her intuition. She is considerate but she knows what she wants; she’s fierce but she’s gentle. She’s very, very lovely. I’m a huge fan now.”

Twist’s passion for puppetry goes back to his childhood in San Francisco. “When I was a kid I didn’t want a teddy bear or a robot, I wanted a puppet,” he says, “because you could make a puppet come to life.”

It runs in the family. His mother was an amateur puppeteer and his grandfather was a big-band leader who used puppets of famous American jazz stars in his act. Twist’s grandfather died before he was born but, when he was 10, his grandmother passed down the set of carved wooden puppets, “and that sort of sealed the deal”.

Hidden beauty: Basil Twist III's new show, which is animated by sliding screens and magical creatures / Picture: Richard Termine
Richard Termine

After training at puppetry school in France, Twist began to create his own work, moving away from characters towards abstraction, something he thought was original until he came across the inspiration for his latest piece.

“In 2000 I made a show, Symphonie Fantastique, which was an underwater puppet show with lots of weird shapes and bubbles,” he says. “I thought I was so cool and breaking new ground with my abstract puppetry.” Then, by chance at a French puppet festival, he saw a film clip of the centuries-old Japanese technique dogugaeshi, which involves painted screens sliding open and closed to reveal different images. “I didn’t know what it was,” says Twist. “I thought: ‘Whoa, there were people in Japan 150 years ago doing abstract puppetry’. I became curious,” he says. “Or obsessed.”

Twist went to Japan, where he explored museum collections and in a basement vault discovered the actual screens he had seen in the film clip, as well as a beautiful nine-tailed fox puppet that he fell in love with and has recreated for his show. He then collaborated with Japanese shamisen (three-stringed lute) player Yumiko Tanaka to make a show “about a tradition and my experience of it, and my attempt to give it a rebirth”.

How much excitement can you create from sliding screen doors, I ask. “Yes, well, it’s just a door opening,” Twist smiles. “But a door opening is actually incredibly exciting,” he says. “To have the experience of these beautiful paintings in front of you which slide to reveal something else and how that pulls you in. It’s kind of meditative,” he says. “It’s a moment of escape and reverence for something beautiful. I want the audience to appreciate this art form — a rare, strange thing that is hardly practised any more.”

Aside from the nine-tailed fox, the “puppets” in the show Dogugaeshi are the screens themselves, operated by Twist and three unseen puppeteers. It’s an idea audiences might find it hard to get their heads around.

Twist thinks that in the West puppetry mostly means the Muppets and Sesame Street and that people don’t always realise what the art form can be. “Jim Henson is a huge hero of mine but his style of puppetry has dominated our perceptions so much,” he says. And yet Twist also thinks being for ever on the fringes might not be such a bad thing.

“In a way, puppetry benefits from being a marginalised art form,” he says, “because it’s always coming out of left field and people are surprised by it, surprised that it could be so exquisite, that puppets could be so powerful.

“To see something coming to life that is not alive, that you know is not alive, is an existential experience. Puppetry gets pooh-poohed as something for children but it’s a very ancient form and has very sacred roots. Fundamentally it’s dealing with the frontier between life and death. There’s nothing more profound.”

Basil Twist III’s Dogugaeshi is at The Pit, Barbican, EC2, January 28-30, as part of the London International Mime Festival (mimelondon.com)

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