Stage Talk with Rick Koster
Where every show has something to say.
REFLECTIONS OF A PROFESSIONAL DINOSAUR
The dinosaur sitting across from me did not seem menacing in the way Jeff Goldblum was shredded in the original Jurassic Park.
Truth told, though, she’s not a real dinosaur.
I was speaking with Alice Bravery, a professional puppeteer in town as part of the British cast of “Dinosaur World Live,” the family-embracing production taking place in the Garde at 11 a.m. Saturday.
Bravery is one of several puppeteers whose talent, grace and paleontologically adept performances will bring a variety of dinosaurs to (larger than) life fashion for the event — and it’s fun to figure out which demographic is more amazed, mom and dad or the kiddos?
Bravery, a cheery and gracious person who was about to take the Garde stage for a dress rehearsal, was kind enough to answer a few questions about her career and Dinosaur World Live. No reporters were mauled in the conduction of this interview.
The Garde: As a kid, did you make and play with a sock puppet?
Alice: Yeah, yeah, I did! I think like a lot of children, I was quite into crafting, and I remember in Grade 7 making a sock puppet at school for drama class. They asked us to make puppets and do a story, and I made a shark sock puppet because we kind of recreating Finding Nemo. I had to do an Australian accent, and it was really terrible.
Garde: Did puppetry resonate with you at that moment? Is that when you knew what you wanted to do?
Alice: To be honest, my earliest recollections of puppetry that resonated were probably more watching shows on TV. And also, my grandma and grandpa had some Pelham puppets, which are marionette puppets. And so we used to do little puppet shows for my grandparents when we were kids.
But there was no point during all of that that I thought that I could grow up to become a puppeteer. It was just a fun means of telling stories. I didn’t know that you could do that as a career. That wasn’t something that I realized until much, much later when there was a resurgence of shows like “The Lion King” on bigger stages. Shows like that had such a massive impact, I think, on the industry and changed a lot of people’s perspectives of what puppetry could be. And it was at that point that I thought, “That’s really cool. I’d like to do that.”
Garde: I think maybe a lot of folks have no idea of what a broad field the art of puppetry is. Does that make sense?
Alice: When I say that I’m a puppeteer, I get one of two gestures. People either kind of open and close their hands like little mouths and you know they’re thinking of Muppets. Or people kind of lift their hands and make claws and kind of bob them up and down to suggest string puppets like Pinocchio.
That’s the frame of reference for puppets, but actually there are so many types. I teach puppetry to children, but also adults and we have a non-exhaustive list of different forms of poetry and there’s well over 30 different kinds.
Garde: How do you guys portray life-size dinosaurs, and which one are you?
Alice: We’re using multi-operator puppets, which as it suggests takes lots of people to operate one dinosaur, and for this show they’re all quite stylistically different. So, in this show, all of the puppeteers do all of the parts on all of the dinosaurs. None of us have only one part that we play; and we do each dinosaur in rotation.
Garde: One thing to remember is that you performing as well as just putting on a dinosaur suit and clumping around. I assume you have to get in character for when it’s T Rex as opposed to a herbivorous creature.
Alice: (Laughs) Oh, yeah, definitely. I think there’s a certain mentality to it all because, obviously, during the show, we’re switching up from one to the next. Sometimes you have to really think, “Okay, I’m part of T-Rex,” because next I go off stage and come back as something completely different. And, as I said, there are more than one of us for each dinosaur, so we all have to focus on the personality of the animal.
Garde: Do you have kids in the audience who get emotional and want to take you home as a pet?
Alice: Absolutely. I think dinosaurs are such a universal thing, right? People are fascinated by them, and rightly so, because it’s an incredible concept, really, to think about something so ancient and so impressive and so big. I still think it’s really cool to think about that.
I think that the children are so captivated by these creatures they’ve heard about, and now they’re seeing these living, breathing animals, and they’ fall in love with them and want to take them home. From our perspective, we see in the kids a full range of emotions from awe to fear to adoration. There are quite a lot of really cute interactive moments in the show where children are invited to come up — to actually participate and help to kind of caretake the dinosaurs — and it’s always interesting because by now we’ve seen a full spectrum of behaviors that kids do, but they still surprise us at times.
There’s kind of like a curiosity there but also a bit of a reverence, and they get so excited and, at the end when they do get to say goodbye, it’s lovely. They get to have their photos taken and you can just see how excited they are to have their own one-on-one with the dinosaur.
Garde: One of the special aspects of a production like this is how it draws in mom and dad, as well. It’s not just one of those, “We’ll take the kids and it’ll kill a few hours” things. The parents enjoy it, too.
Alice: I think the best children’s theater always accomplishes both. Ultimately, the kids are there because the grown-ups decided that it would be a good idea and therefore mom and dad probably won’t enjoy it. But they’re paying for tickets, too, and we appreciate that, so we want to keep the parents happy as much as we want to keep the kids happy. And I think there’s really cool when we see the grown-ups in the audience surprised by how much they’re invested in the show. And that’s fine because one of the things we’ve learned in the show is that a lot of grownups are just big kids anyway.
Garde: Yes!. I mean, you’re a dinosaur, right?
Alice: Exactly!