Ann & David Powell: Puppetmongers

Since Ann Powell and David Powell founded Puppetmongers in 1974, the company has become internationally recognized as a leader and innovator in the field of puppetry. So far we have created a dozen new plays for both young and general audiences, which have earned us and our collaborators a mass of awards.

Puppetmongers continues to develop new work on their own and also in collaboration with others, and hosts an annual conference called Fresh Ideas in Puppetry for established and emerging artists to share their passion and expertise in puppetry. This year, the Fresh Ideas in Puppetry day is May 27th, at Aki Studios.

In 1996, we started The Toronto School of Puppetry to share our creative approach and provide a collaborative learning space for the puppetry community, and for multi-disciplinary artists interested in expanding their theatrical palette. We also work with students from elementary school up to the post-graduate level.

www.puppetmongers.com
www.torontoschoolofpuppetry.com

Transcript

Welcome to episode 125 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

You know, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, I would like to remind you again that subscribing is the best way to make sure that you never miss an episode of Stageworthy, and subscribing is easy. Just go to Apple Podcasts or Google Music and search for Stageworthy and click on the subscribe button. You know, you can also find links to this show at Google and Apple on the Stageworthy website, and that’ll take you right to the place where you can click on that subscribe button.

And that’ll make sure that you will never miss an episode of Stageworthy, because it’ll come right to your phone. If you want to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guests are Anne and David Powell, founders of the internationally renowned Puppet Mongers, as well as the Toronto School of Puppetry, which presents the Fresh Ideas in Puppetry Day on Sunday, May 27th, as well as the two-week Puppetry Intensive in June.

And you can find details at torontoschoolofpuppetry.com. How long has Puppet Mongers been in existence? Forty-two years. Forty-two years. So how did you… Was it 42? It’s from 1970… Oh, 43.

We’re into our 43rd year now. It’s 1974, December 1971. That I’ve been trying to figure out recently, because we graduated from the art school in 72.

That was a year before you, two years before you. When did you graduate? 69. No, you were not 72.

I went there in 69. 77, 1, 72, 73, I graduated. 74, I finished.

Okay. 75, you finished. All right.

Yeah. There you go. So when… We’re brother and sister, so we do that a lot.

Okay. Well, that’s… You got it. Yeah.

That… Well, I mean, my brother and sister, they probably would have been a little more bickering. Yeah. We do that too.

Like, why me? Hidden undercurrents, perhaps. Sure. So you’re in your 43rd year.

Yes. So you said that you went to the art school. What art school did you go to? Ontario College of Art.

Ontario College of Art. And… When it was simply OCA. When it was OCA, before it was like… Everything else.

… art and design and everything. Yes. We had art and design.

No, no. It was OCA. Oh, it’s part of the name.

Yes. Then art and design, then university. College of… University of… Anyway.

And whatever it is now, because now it’s a university. Yes. I don’t know why I put air quotes around that.

I’m sorry, artists. I’m sorry, artists. I’m terrible.

What… What were you studying at OCA? Ah. I went there because I was really interested in illustration. Okay.

But… And I did some of that, but I was really interested in whatever else was going on in the college. I got working in the basement and, you know, the wood shop and the plastic shop and… Okay. … everything.

Yeah. And I went there because… I got to McGill to go into architecture the year before. And it was in Quebec.

And they were doing CEGEP for the first year. And CEGEP was attached to the university. And it meant that I was in the same building as the engineering, which you had to do before you could get to architecture.

And I looked at what the architecture department was doing. I didn’t like it at all. So I looked at what Ann was doing and thought, that looks better.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So I came a year after Ann to the OAC.

Okay. And intending just to do generally things. That was the year that Roy Ascot came in as the president and broke down all the different student departments.

You could be… Before that, if you were in sculpture, you could not go and cut a piece of wood. Oh, really? Oh, no. If you were drawing and painting, forget it.

That’s all you’re doing. Anyway, so he came and broke down those departments very nicely. And I came in and became a generalist.

And by the end of that year, the school had given us a room because they really liked the puppet stuff we were doing. So how did you start doing puppets? Oh, that’s… I go back to my childhood. Okay.

I like to say our parents made the mistake of giving me a string puppet for Christmas one year when I was eight. And we both thought, oh, there was a call. And we both spent our Christmas money on another puppet each.

This particular company that was making them, Pelham puppets, really good puppets for kids to use. And we started collecting more birthdays and stuff as we’d asked for. And then we couldn’t get the characters we wanted.

So we started making our own eventually as teenagers. Dad always made us a stage, a table wherever we lived. We moved a lot.

We were in the army. So it was just always an interest. But then for post-secondary education, neither of us thought, well, let’s go and learn about puppetry.

We thought, oh, now we have to be grown up. What are we going to do as adults now? And so we followed other interests. But then we just came back to it anyway.

There’s all this wonderful woodcutting equipment. And during our time at the OCA, we did do a lot of marionette stuff because that’s where we came from. And then in one of the rooms they’d given us, we had a long string with all these marionettes, like 50-odd marionettes hanging on it.

And the string broke. One end. One end.

And the puppets became one continuous tangle all with each other. And we managed to rescue a few from it. And many of them, we just cut the strings off.

And it was around about then we thought, why do we have these strings in the way? We could just hold the dummies and manipulate them. So we have not really done marionettes ever since. So you’ve been doing puppetry with things that don’t necessarily need a string, where you can actually see the hand of the… Well, we’re on stage with our puppets every show, and it’s so much easier.

If something goes wrong, you’re right there. Right, right, right. There’s a number of other things.

Quite often we have kids after a show say, how did that particular character go across to there? And I say, well, I walked them. And they say, no, you were over there. What we’re almost acting like is that we’re a follow spot.

A human follow spot, without a follow spot. But it’s bringing the attention to the puppet. And this is a technique of you’re there when you want the audience to be there, to be seen, and then you can disappear with the puppets because you want the audience to focus on the puppet.

The focus goes to the puppet. And is this stuff that you learned yourselves, or did somebody teach you this? No, we just sort of figured it out, oddly enough. When we were first doing it back then in the 70s, a lot of puppeteers and people were saying, well, that’s not puppetry.

We didn’t see the puppeteers. It was very new for a lot of people. I think it was probably more happening in Europe, but we didn’t know what was happening there.

So it was just a chance that we just found a better way for us to be performing. It was on stage with what we had. I’ve seen more of that sort of thing recently.

Oh, Lord. Sorry. That’s all right.

That’s all right. Ingrid Hansen’s Snafu Dance with Little Orange Man. She does a lot of found puppetry, so you can always see her.

Eric with Eldridge Theatre, his puppets, except if they’re specifically historic, a lot of them he does, he’s right there on stage. So there’s a lot more of that. Yes, there is.

And so you guys were sort of, if not pioneering because it was happening in Europe, as far as you knew, you were pioneering. Yeah, we hadn’t seen a lot of that here. It just felt comfortable to us to do that.

Here’s a funny pioneering thing. One of the shows we built back in the 70s was a circus of performing building bricks. The idea came from hanging around with some friends one night, and one was a puppeteer from the States, and we started complaining about shows we’d seen at festivals where someone’s got a marionette of a skater and is skating backwards.

Well, yeah, of course, it’s a pendulum. That’s all they’re doing. The audience are going, ooh.

Anyway, the idea, you can have a brick on those strings, was a nice idea. And what else could bricks do? We spent the night having a laughing laugh about bricks doing circus acts. And then a few months later, we’d forgotten about it, and we got a postcard from a friend who’d gone back to California, and it says, my brick circus opens next week, where’s yours? So we built a brick circus that went on.

Steve Hansen was his name. He did his show maybe a couple of times. It was rather bulky, but we made one little touring show.

We’ve taken it all over the place. You still do it. Yes.

Anyway, so what I was going to say was something to do with, oh yes, we took it to the big public festival in France, and there was a company from Israel, and a company from Spain performing with kitchen gadgets, and there was a company from France also using kitchen stuff, but in a very different way. And we had our bricks, and it was the first time really that object theatre was- So again, that was something happening in Europe that we were totally unaware of, but we just sort of picked up something in the air. Yes, and so object theatre is now something you can get a master’s degree in in Belgium.

I mean, Ingrid will teach you a course in- Which she’s taught right here at the School of Poetry. So I mean, it’s funny how these things just sort of sit in the ether, and then you just sort of give them out in different places. Yes.

I always loved that theory called the 100th monkey, which they said is totally false, but supposedly in Japan, they were observing the activities of those snow monkeys who really like yams. And the investigative people were burying them in the beach for the monkeys, and the monkeys would have to spend a lot of time trying to get the sand off them. It was really unpleasant eating the sandy thing.

And then one morning, one of the little monkeys picked up his thing, and before he got washed, he thought about going for a swim, and he walked in sort of forgotten, holding his thing. He got washed in the sea, got a little salt. He thought it was great.

He showed his mother, and then the kids all learned about it and showed their parents. So that was happening in that community. And the 100th monkey of it was that round about when 100 monkeys in that community did it, all the communities across Japan were doing it.

But anyway, it’s actually a folklore later. But it’s a wonderful story. Sure.

It’s a great story. It does seem to be how things happen. It does.

It does. I was working with a company called Keystone Theatre, and we did a place in the style of silent film. And we found out that, I mean, we were the only ones in Canada doing it, but there was another company that was also obsessed with silent film in the States.

And I’m sure there’s somebody in Israel who’s also done something similar. Sure. Japan.

We actually got to see some incredible physical theatre from Japan that was obviously influenced by silent film. So it’s all out there. So when you guys were, I mean, you were starting to do the puppets without the strings, and people were sort of like, I don’t know if objecting to that as puppetry was the right word, but… There are still people who object to that.

That’s not really a puppet show. I can see you. But when we first took that show to a festival of puppeteers in America, the first show that we built with this style, a lot of people came back to see it the second time we had to book it because they thought that we were improvising and it wasn’t actually a script.

Also because at that time a lot of puppetry was done in a very sort of melodramatic, Shakespearean kind of way, a lot of what ended up festivals. And we were very sort of casual, brother-sister-ish sort of stuff going on. They thought we were just making up as we went along, as David says.

And then they came back the second time, it was exactly the same. Movement for movement, word for word. They couldn’t believe it.

It was a totally new style to them. When we took the Bricks Circus to a similar festival, in those days they used to have a panel discussion every morning about the shows that had been on the day before. Anyway, and there was people in the panel saying, but it’s not puppetry about the Bricks.

And a very famous American marionette artist said, I don’t care if it’s puppets or not. It was damn amusing. Well, what’s interesting is, I mean, the people who are saying, well, it’s not puppetry, did they… Does it matter? Did they watch the whole show? And are they just like seeing, oh, these people hold the puppets and they haven’t seen it? Because like you mentioned, when you show it to the kids, they’re like, but you didn’t get that guy from over there.

You’re over there because they don’t see you anymore. That’s right. That’s right.

No, I find when people say that kind of stuff to us, they’re deciding for us what’s puppetry or not. That’s really cool. Where did you study? Well, more than just where did you study, like who are you? To be pronouncing this.

This is really cheesy. Well, I mean, I’ve heard of people who are like, well, I don’t know if that’s theatre. We used to get a couple of people who would be like, they’d say the keys on theatre stuff and since we don’t talk, they’d be like, well, do you say the play if there’s no dialogue? That’s right.

I don’t know. Did you like it? Did you enjoy it? Yeah. So when you guys started doing this, I mean, so you exclusively do stuff yourself.

You have strings. You’re always seen. Always seen.

There’s one show. Well, we went and performed in Iran back in the mid seventies. And when we came back, we built a show about what we’d seen using an old folk tale.

And to make it, to suit that, we went for a style actually based on a Sicilian type of marionette that has metal rods at the head and strings for the hands, et cetera. But we still perform on stage with them, which is not the tradition. You’ve got very short rods and we’re walking around with them.

Other than that, it’s always been a hands-on thing. But what was your question? I’d forgotten already. It doesn’t even matter.

When you were, are you, do you set up? Do you have a set? Do you have a table? Every show is a very different setup. Basically, we sort of start with a story. Okay.

What’s the best puppetry to tell this story? Huge variety. I built a solo show. There’s now a duo.

It’s a big doll’s house. It’s quite shallow. The front is two sliding doors at the front of the facade of the house.

You can open one or both or whatever. And there’s four floors and little tiny puppets about seven inches tall. So there’s an up, there’s down, there’s no back on it.

So you can sort of see me, but I disappear when I want to disappear. I’m the housekeeper. I can be in the scene.

Sometimes it’s huge face sticks. Yes. Yes.

Yes, your majesty. And so these little people running up and down the stairs and out of the rooms. That’s the show we’re going to be doing at Christmas holiday, winter holiday at Tarragon Theatre for family audiences.

It’s many, many years we’ve been doing shows there. As Dave said, the Iranian based story, which we perform on a carpet. So they’re floor based.

Most things we’ve found floor is not so good because sight lines are tricky in many places. Sure. So most other shows are sort of tabletop height.

And it’s also that, you know, we’re still doing shows we built in our relative use. So every time we get actually to rehearse it, oh, this requires bending or kneeling down and getting up quickly. Oh, yeah.

Is there, do you have puppets that are favorites of yours or shows that are favorites of yours? You know, I often ask that. I always find I might have a puppet I like, but it’s all about what the audience is responding to. And then that becomes a really fun one to do because you’re getting the response from the audience.

The audience is such a big part of performing. You know, that really is this triangle for puppeteers. So I know you were asking about different types of puppets.

Other shows, we’ve done three shows, I think it is so far, that were for adult audiences, not like Naughty Naughty, but Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, for instance. Sure. And for that one, you know, the Victorian cartoon style where the head is huge, a little tiny body? Yes.

You like happy families? Yes. Yes, yes. We went for that idea.

The puppets have human-sized heads, and they’re little glove puppets with legs and stuff, so they’re bigger than a glove puppet. But the human-sized head was because for several characters, we had a mask that was the same face, or half mask, that we could wear so we could become the same character. Sometimes there were some scenes when it was better for us to play them than for that.

And that becomes easier for the audience to sort of accept because at least you’ve got the same scale. Sure. The body might not be, but it’s very recognizable.

That’s that character. And it was very Victorian-looking. Yes, sure.

We worked with a third performer, Anand Rajaram. Yes. He’s a really great actor, came in.

He’s a fabulous puppeteer, too. And that was a fun one. Yes, every show was very good.

And for that one, the set was two doorways with windows up above and laundry line in between, filling a whole stage. It was a very theatrical piece. Well, the laundry, it wasn’t laundry.

It was a shadow screen. Yeah, that’s right. Viewers all had one from the door.

Yeah, so every show looks very, very different. So when did you start teaching puppetry? Well, we’ve been teaching in the schools almost since the beginning, since the early 70s. Every now and then, we get a gig at a university or something.

But then in the mid-90s, we suddenly realized, look, there’s our company, and there was Lampoon Puppet theatre, which started a few years before us. And Frog Prince started a few years before that, but they quit or moved out of the country or something. And where are the other companies? We’ve been around since the 70s, and this is the 90s.

Where are the young companies here? And there weren’t any. And we thought, well, maybe we should offer some classes and see if it was interesting. And it came from that, really.

And started the School of Puppetry. Wow. So initially, I think pretty well, we were teaching the classes ourselves.

But over the years, we’ve invited other puppeteers whose work we really like and respect. If they would like to come in and teach something too, things that we don’t know enough about. Well, there’s so many different things in the air.

Of course, different ideas, different attitudes, so what we really don’t have never got into is the Muppet-style puppets. And so there’s a number of people here who are really good at teaching how to use those and how to bring them alive. I mean, generally, being a child of the 70s and growing up with the Muppets, both on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, I have a real fondness for puppets, especially the Henson-style Muppet.

But generally, the magic of puppetry, the way that things come alive, things that are not alive seem alive. The illusion of thought, it’s often called. Yes, yeah.

Yes, that’s a different one. There’s another one is the… God, my brain’s just lost. What’s it? Come back to you.

ML. Suppression of… No, something about disbelief. Suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief. That’s for the audience’s part, yes. The illusion of thought is for the audience.

They know it’s a person holding something, but they remove that disbelief and believe in it. Oh, sure. I’ve seen video of people faced with Muppets and the puppeteer right there and never look at the puppeteer.

That’s right, yes. They always just look at the Muppet itself, which is like a real magical thing. And the other interesting thing about puppets is they’re very often made specifically to be a particular character.

They’re not actors learning lines and taking on a role. Sure. So when you go, you’re not saying, oh, I’ve seen that guy in a movie.

Oh, you know, he’s playing the same part or whatever, or she. And in fact, somebody pointed out when you go to theatre, often there’s a lot of artifice in terms of the costumes and the set. Sure.

But then there are humans. With the puppets, it’s all artifice. Sure, yeah.

But the works, it takes you in so much faster. Oh, sure. Into your imagination and suspending disbelief.

Yeah. We met a man in… when we were in the Festival of Europe one time who said, I used to always go to theatre, but you know, gravity makes it always pretty much the same visually. And then he started looking at puppetry and you never have any idea what you’re going to see.

This setup could be so different and they don’t have to deal with gravity the same way. I mean, gravity is a huge part of puppetry, but the puppets can look like they’re flying and floating or whatever. Sure, and she’ll scale.

There’s so much you can do in a small space. Then it’ll walk on the floor. Do you guys, do you build all of your puppets here? Yeah.

Yeah, for instance. Mind you, the show we were just doing, actually, just in Stratford, a lot of the puppets are kitchen implements. They’re things with stuffed toys we picked up at Value Village.

So we’re animating a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. It’s for, you know, four to 10 year olds and their families.

So it’s really, I mean, it’s a really fun show and it’s very silly and it’s really fun working with all that stuff. But it’s also really encourages kids. You know what? You can go home and do a show with anything.

Animate anything around the house. Just avoid the sharp knives. Yeah.

When you’re developing something like that, where you’re animating everyday objects and things that you find in the store, are you, while you’re working on the show or before you even started, are you walking around, like, just picking up everything and seeing what you can do with it? Or do you know what you need before you find it? To some extent, there’s play. There is play time, definitely. Well, often, actually, even when we’re first developing a show, we won’t, first of all, think about what the puppets are and build something.

We’ll work with anything that’s around the room to stand in for something. It’s almost like we’re working on the staging before we go to the puppets. Oh, okay.

And in the other part, we don’t start with the script. We storyboard our ideas many times as things change. There’s one over there on the wall.

The script is the last thing that gets written down in rehearsal or bits and pieces as we go along as we try to find it out. Because again, it’s part of, the puppets are built to be the characters they are and then we have to get to know them. Kind of how they’re going to express themselves.

How are they going to get themselves through the story? Yeah. So they sort of help us find their language. So when you’re developing your story, what does come first? Finding the story.

Okay. Deciding what to do with it. So the story comes first always.

Yes, yes, yes. And then everything gets turned around that. What do we want to do with it? Do we want to change it at all? So the one on the wall there is How to the Baskervilles.

Okay. It’s the one we’re working on. It takes us two or three years to build a show.

In fact, in Quebec, there’s a lot of puppeteers and they sponsored a study that came to the conclusion that puppetry takes twice as long as regular theatre to create. Because you are building the characters and you’re trying them out and then you’re going back to make adjustments to make them work better. You’re redeveloping.

You’re rebuilding new ones because those didn’t quite work for that scene. It just takes a long time. It’s not like we spent two, three years solidly.

That’s what we’re doing. It’s like this really useful is to do a bit of work, go away, do something entirely different in the back of your brain and get a reptile that’s still working on it and come back and you got all these other new ideas. Yeah.

So we’ve been mucking around with all sorts of thoughts for this one and what we’ve come up with, I’m going to play with in a week or so, is a mini cam built into Dr. Watson. So we have a miniature show and a projection. Whatever Dr. Watson can see is up on the wall.

Wow. Because that’s the way the book’s written. Yes, because we’re little puppets.

How can you really get the effect of the more? We have a little tabletop with a blanket and lumpy bits, but up there, from his point of view, it’s the more. You can see it down inside it. It’s going to be fun playing with that one.

That’s where we’re at at the moment. Who knows where it’ll go from here? When you guys were starting out developing puppets and storytelling and things like that, did you always start from story or did you start from puppet? I think we’ve always started from story. The only one that wouldn’t have been a story was the circus.

Yes, right, yeah. And one time we were at Young People’s Theatre, they wanted a slightly longer show and so we developed a little bit of a backstage of what was going on between the characters backstage, the romances and the jealousies. It didn’t work.

Didn’t need it. Did you find out that it didn’t need it while performing it or did you know before you? Basically, well, we sort of had a hunch. We had a sense that it wasn’t going to work, you know, ahead of time.

So I think, yeah, it wasn’t a scenario. Yeah, so we didn’t do it for very long. Back to basics.

So, I mean, you’re working with all kinds of, like, different kinds of puppets for every show. Yeah. All of which started initially with the string puppet that you got when you were children.

Kids, yeah. Yeah. And is there a type, is there a kind of puppet that you have yet to tackle that you want? We never really got into the puppets.

I’ve taken the workshops, I’ve been on it here a couple of times and I’m not very good at it. I don’t like doing mouth sync. That’s really a lot of hard work.

And that becomes the focus. Oh, are they doing it well or not? Rather than the story that’s being told. Closest we’ve got is hand puppets.

We’ve used in the one show that David mentioned, the adult show. And they were often actually, we had sticks on stands so we could actually line them up, put them on stands and have them all lined up so they become tabletop puppets. And then you could put your hand into this or take the mask and go.

They changed a lot during the show. Done a little bit with shadow work. Do a lot of workshops on shadow because there was an amazing show came through here some years back.

It was at the Children’s Festival. It was from, it was Sunjata. And the story from Mali and it was performed by Malinese people but had been- With a French company.

A French company. It sort of worked in Mali with these people telling their classic story. And it was done with these halogen sourced light bulbs which are so different from your usual shadow puppet light bulb that it was just stunning.

The effects they could do. So we’ve been playing with that and we’ve put that type of shadow work into a couple of shows now. For instance, we did a show about piracy in China in the early 1800s and there was a scene we wanted to show.

We’d be showing it from the pirate’s side. We want to say, well, they’re not really that nice to the population. And so we wanted to show some nasty things happening.

So what we did was we set up where we came out facing away from the audience and projected on the back wall above them. So where the wall back at the stage. So they could see two little old folks sitting on the floor with these little cardboard cutouts and a lamp.

And at the same time, they were seeing the images, these horrible stuff, these huge images on the wall. So you could, it sort of gave it a grounding. Sure.

Yeah. What is it about the halogen lamp that’s so different? Okay. It’s sort of like having a sun in your hand.

Okay. The shadow, your hand and the sun and your shadow of your hand is on the ground. It’s still there.

So with the halogen lamp, with a regular lamp, you have to have the puppet right up against the cloth of the screen. If it comes off, it goes out of focus. So here you take it off the screen.

It just gets bigger the nearer the lamp it goes. Oh, okay. So you can play with scale and you can do overlaps and layers and all sorts of functions.

From scene to scene, almost in a filmic kind of way. In the hard times, we actually had a setup backstage where there was some mechanical things the way we could switch and the technician would turn the light on back then and we would have projections of things like a circus going on that was actually a mechanical circus being projected while we were up front doing other things. Yeah.

So there’s all sorts of things. Oh, and we did a Scots ballad one time, Ballad of Tam Lin and 12 foot semicircular sort of scrim behind us and behind it, we’d set up some big, big cutout shadow puppets and behind that, the helium lamps on like there’s pendulums and there was a moment during the show where Anne runs around the backstage and swings them all. They’re not on yet.

It comes out front and then we’re doing stuff up front. The lights get turned on by the stage manager and suddenly the whole back screen is all these huge shadows, all crisscrossing and all moving because the lights weren’t swinging. Oh.

So it’s this amazing horseman, crazy demon horseman all over the back. Great effect. So we like them.

Yeah. So, I mean, when was it that you started playing with those? Like how long ago? When was that? Oh my goodness. Back in the midst of time.

Yeah. Whichever children’s festival that comes. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe 15 years ago or so. At least.

At least, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know.

A while. A while. Yes, let’s say a while.

When you guys are teaching puppetry, you teach to both adults and children. The school of puppetry is adults. And well… Children, we go into the schools.

You go into the schools. Yeah. How… What is the difference between the way that adults approach puppetry and the way the children approach puppetry? In some ways, very similar.

And I find it really fun actually teaching teachers because they think they’re going to come in with their notebooks and take notes. But because just basically we’re going to run the classes, though it’s full of grade six or eight kids or something, they’re going to do stuff. They’re going to do exactly what the kids would do in the classroom and have a lot of fun doing it.

And they do. Because they bring different skills, you know, more mature skills to it. I mean, another difference, of course, when we go into the school, you have a whole class.

So you have to be very organized, something that a lot of people can be doing at the same time. Whereas here, we might have six people or something. Our classes tend to be quite small.

Yeah. And that’s good. And so adults… Are adults more resistant to some of the things? Do they like… They’ve chosen to be here.

Yes, true, that’s true, that’s true. As opposed to school kids. But school kids, you come in and say, we’re doing puppets and they go, Woo! Yeah, no problem there.

Is it hard to keep school kids under control? Not really, no. Okay. Don’t run with the scissors, Johnny.

Keep your hands out of the hot glue. Are you making puppets with them? Or you do puppets? No, the kids are making puppets from their own shows together. Mostly what we’re interested in when we go to school is that the kids will actually be producing shows.

Making puppets is… What do you do? Put them in the window? I don’t know. Make a show. That’s what puppets are for.

So we keep taking some really simple stuff. For the schools, we’ve developed a number of workshops where the puppets are very simple. So they can have the time in the classroom to actually put the shows together.

And also with simple materials that they could go home and make puppets themselves. Yeah, that’s always a good idea. Without it being a big problem.

Encouraging them to do that. Do both children and adults have the same preconceived notion about what puppetry is? Hmm, that’s an interesting question. When we’re performing, we find it’s fine.

Not so much anymore, but certainly it’s more the adults of this isn’t puppetry. The kids are fine. Somebody’s telling their story, great.

But it’s the adults who are more particular about that. But in workshops, I don’t know if there’s any big difference. Yeah, you seem to attract people who simply are wanting to explore more or some specific aspect or want to know more about puppetry.

It’s not just people who are interested in puppetry. We have dancers, filmmakers. People who just want to learn about some other uses.

Other presentation methods. Mentor their own artistic practices. Have you found that there’s been resistance to the idea of puppetry as art from the arts world at large? Or is it more… Well, there’s been a resurgence recently anyway with some of the big shows.

War Horse and Cute Eric. So there’s more of an awareness of how puppetry can be integrated into things. On the other hand, talking to somebody, a friend of ours who makes puppets quite often in a theatre, and they’re called props.

They’re not seen as actors in the show. You’re making the actors. Yes, yes.

And that’s then reflected often in the manipulation because nobody thinks to bring in somebody to train manipulation. No. I’ve had to use these props.

Right. And it’s obvious. That’s a problem.

It is a problem. I know of someone who’s felt like their work isn’t respected because it’s just dolly wiggling. Oh, yes.

There’s a company in Calgary called the Dolly Wigglers. No! That’s amazing. Oh, it’s a cabaret, sorry.

The Dolly Wigglers Cabaret. That is amazing. I guess she got told off once.

I mean, puppet mongers came because I had a friend and I was endlessly talking about puppetry ideas. And one time he said, shut up, you puppet monger. Oh, thank you.

What was that? Had you not had a name until that point? We did. We were called the Bubonic Players. Oh.

We thought we’d be infectious. Didn’t catch on. Didn’t get infectious.

I mean, puppet mongers is a more attractive name. So in terms of the resistance, have you found critically that people are accepting of it? Well, it’s very interesting. The same critics who will see our performances for family audiences love what we do.

Lovely, warm, glowing reviews. And then they’ll come and see our adult stuff and they’ll write so differently about our adult shows. Really? Yes.

I don’t know what they’re expecting. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

I’m thinking of some of the reviews of some of the adult shows we’ve done. More severe for adults. Obviously.

On the other hand, I know that the shows, the family shows we’re doing are often shows we’re really familiar with. Sure. So they just go so smoothly.

Because we’ve taught and taught and taught before the premier. Because you can do a family show in the schools or wherever. Whereas an adult show, you know, you rehearse, you rehearse, you’re ready, you’re in the theatre.

That’s it. Yeah. And that’s what they’re seeing.

Do they, I mean, do those not run as often? Is there a system for those? They’re usually a one-time run. We’ve never been able to figure out any kind of a further touring. Much as we’d like to.

Yes. Well, I guess that, I mean, that is the stigma about puppets, is I think people think children. Yes.

But we always build shows to entertain ourselves. And then we find out what audience it works for. We find we are unable to make shows for little, little kids.

There are people who are brilliant at it. Oh, we’ve seen some fabulous ones. I mean, one show came to the Children’s Festival one time, and it was a cupboard with little doors that open and things.

And in one of them, there was two little, you know, the sand castles you make with a bucket. Two very simple ones of those. And some water dripped on it, and you watched them get washed away.

That was the whole scene. With little rubber shoes sitting beside them. Anyway, it was absolutely beautiful.

The kids are totally mesmerized. We’ve never thought of how to do that sort of a show. That was part of the show.

It made sense in the story. Those little bits of the story. Just a scene by scene by scene in this cupboard.

Yeah, it was good. And we’ve seen others that have been very effective too. Yeah.

But it’s interesting that the reaction, critically, is so different. It’s not that they don’t like our older films. I’m not sure.

Some haven’t. Some haven’t. Oh, I mean, the funniest one was some guy who wrote about our fake English accents.

Right. When we go to England, they say, where in America did you come from? Yes, of course they do. You’ve been here since, what was it? The 60s, somewhat.

68, we moved here. With the adult shows, and you’re working them over two years, three years to get them there. And then you’re in the theatre performing them.

What do you learn the first time an audience sees that show? What works and what doesn’t. Yeah. It’s not that you go away and change the whole lot, but you know, you know what maybe needs a little tweaking or whatever.

Yeah, a little tweaking. I don’t really know. But that’s the same with any show, whoever the audience is.

Do you have the time to tweak it at that point? Then it’s not usually mechanical tweaking that’s required. It’s staging of, you know… Performance, scripting. Scripting.

And that’s the nice thing about not having started with the script, that the script has been part of the organic growth. It’s very easy to revisit it and do changes. Sort of a tricky thing for us in hard times was Dickens.

It had to be Dickens language. Straight from the book. Our other shows had all been organically… The puppets basically came up and told us what they wanted to say.

Was that actually difficult to do? Because since you’re used to having the puppets tell you what they want to say, did you find puppets saying things they didn’t necessarily want to say? No, I think we managed to control them. But they were certainly having to learn lines which they hadn’t done before. So they weren’t quite allowed to be themselves on stage.

There’s a wonderful story from… It’s actually from legal records from 1600s. A puppeteer was taken before a judge because a punch puppet had said some uncouth things of some form. And the punchman’s defense was, I can’t control what he’s saying.

And the judge said, yeah, I understand. No charge. Nice, nice.

Is part of what you’ve done researching the history of puppetry as well? We’ve done a lot of research. We have quite a collection of puppets from around the world. Partly from our travels or sometimes right here in town.

We’ll find a store and they’ve no idea what they’ve got. Yeah, right, 25 bucks and it’s something really lovely. Oh, yeah.

So it’s really cool. One of the best stories for that used to be a Chinese antique store in Yorkville. And it had some dolls that I’m looking at.

The Chinese dolls from early 1900s. And I’m looking at them and I noticed they have a little ring on their wrist. On each wrist.

And in the middle of the back, there’s a little tube in the middle of the back. And I thought, that’s for some controls. And then it reminded me that down in Chinatown and Spadina, I had seen some more recently made dolls that were very similar proportions and shapes.

So I went and had a look and they had them too. And so I bought them and did some research and found out a type of puppetry that had developed in China in about 1900 and died by the… No, it was 1850, 1950. That’s right, a hundred year span.

There are still a few people doing it, but it had been very popular in that time. The puppets of horizontal rods. So there’s a rod into the middle of the back and then rods from each arm going straight back.

The theatre was a little booth with bamboo screening arranged so you could see through, the performer could see through onto the stage and the rods came in from the sides or the backs. And they did a type of opera. Anyway, so that was something we discovered.

And then we used some of that idea when we did the show about Chinese piracy. Get some horizontal puppets, rod puppets. When you found out, did you… See, this is why the guy said, shut up, you puppet monger.

Well, no, I’m fascinated. Because when you’re finding that, like how are you learning this style that’s basically been dead? Oh, there’s some research. We’ve got quite a library of puppetry books here too, and you can also go online.

Yeah, or you contact someone who knows a lot about that stuff. We know people. There’s people you know in the puppet world.

Oh yeah, the puppet mafia. The puppet mafia. That’s not a name for a theatre company, I don’t know what it is.

And they don’t do any puppets? No, no, nothing. They just get paid by puppeteers. As you were saying, you’ve explored a whole lot of different styles of puppetry.

You don’t particularly have a favorite. Is there… I can’t even remember if I’ve asked this. I’m just so lost in this conversation.

No, no, no, it’s fine. I’m enjoying it. There’s stuff that you haven’t had a chance to work with yet? I don’t think we’d go at it that way of, well, what kind of puppetry should we try next? Again, go back to, we start with the story.

What’s the puppetry that is going to suit the story? Is it a style or a mix of styles for different parts of the story? What’s going to tell the story for the audience, to the audience? And do you start researching at that point, or do you get a feel for what it might be? It’s all a bit of this, bit of that, bit of that, but yeah, just as it goes along. I often have weird mechanical ideas when I’m half awake in the morning. So one time I had this idea that I came in and made little things about a foot tall that work in a strange way and stand up on their own.

It was mostly that they walk in different ways. And then we were, some years later, Armari Schaeffer had written an opera and he wanted to have, I don’t know, 15 characters and four manipulators to be puppets doing it. And they had to be five foot tall or so, the puppets, to be seen because he does big audiences.

And so this thing I came up with, the foot tall, we then played with that idea and came up with how to make a similar idea, but bigger figures. And so it was an invention, and we’ve never used it since or before. But it suited that particular setting.

It really worked there. The thing of research, it’s not just puppetry research when we’re working on the show. It’s historical research, it’s all kinds of stuff.

We have a show called Tear the Paths, which is two Russian folk tales, which we set in medieval Russia. And a lot of our research was about the humor, about life, folk sayings, all kinds of stuff, to the point that when we were performing, we have once or twice had Russian people in the audience who come up afterwards speaking in Russian to us. Because it’s so good understanding.

It’s not that all our research goes in the show, but there’s this sort of depth to it. Well, there’s all the things that you need to know to understand the characters, right? Yes, and the life they’re living, how they live, yeah, absolutely. How they relate to each other, the whole bit.

Yeah. As a brother and sister team, a lot of people feel that, you know, I love my brother, I love my sister, but I could not work with them. Yeah, I know, yeah.

So what is your, what have you learned about working together that keeps you able to keep working together? We live on opposite sides of town. We have a studio halfway between the two. Okay.

We socialize quite a bit with families and stuff. In fact, sometimes we find we’re really loggerheads about something, completely opposite point of view. Go overnight, come back the other day, we’ve switched.

No, no, I see you. No, now we’re arguing for the other side. The third day is when we see each other at the point.

Right. So have you never had like a contentious relationship together? My brother and I could get along. My sister and I could not.

Interesting. Isn’t that interesting? There’s times when we become more and more annoyed with each other and then we usually work it out or just let it go. It’s often worse when we’re tired, you know, we’re just too busy and too darn tired, we need a break.

Do you, when that starts to happen, do you just separate and go and do your own thing in different places or do you? Well, luckily we do a lot of our own things anyway. David is doing the Gamelan through the TDSB, the world music program, for instance. And, you know, I do school workshops and stuff and yeah.

So at least we’re doing that as well. So you’re not all like competing with each other. No, no, no, five days a week in here.

Lost in here every day. I do find any sort of computer work, laptop thinking, stuff like that, I do. If it’s stuff I can do by myself, I’ll do it at home.

David likes working here, but I find that we’re both here. We distract each other. but you know, tea time, or whatever.

And we’re telling each other stories, or come look at this movie, you know, whatever, yeah. Do you have a workshop at home? Or do you have like a kitchen table? Well, I do have an office, but my living room, I hate being on the lap, on the computer, so I have my TV on, watching junk while I work. But when you were building that big doll’s house, you did, did you do it in your home? Oh, I worked in various different places, different people’s basements, until we, yeah.

And it was stacked in my bathroom for a while. And we’ve had many studios all across the center of town, being followed by condos. Usually they get confiscated.

We’ve just renewed the lease on this one for a few years, so we should be okay. So hopefully this one doesn’t get, I mean, you’ve got the condos across like not all cells here. Oh yeah, but there’s also a railway track right at the back of the building, which makes it less attractive.

That is less attractive, so maybe you’ll stay here for a while. And the owner, unless he sells, is not really interested in that. Okay, well, that’s good.

Touch wood. Yeah. Yeah.

And so you had like various different spaces. What do you look for in a space when you find it? With this building, in fact, there was a difference in that almost all the spaces did not have windows. And we thought, we need windows.

Yeah, that’s very important. So the Finding One came up. And then the landlord was really nice to put in a sink for us.

Nice. Which wasn’t here. You have a very nice hardware floor.

Is that fake? No, this is linoleum. Okay. This here is concrete.

Okay. And we’re right over the loading base, which are open all the time. Okay.

So in the winter, that gets very, very cold and moist. Oh. And it freezes sometimes.

We had to put ice on it in the winter. Oh, really? When people are breathing. Yeah.

Really hard to work in here. So we went and talked to the landlord and said, we’re a charity. Do you want to donate to us putting in an insulated floor? Yes, he did it.

Good man. So what it is, actually, you can buy these big chipboard squares, which have a molded plastic underneath. Okay.

Usually used in people’s basements. And you lock them all together and then put linoleum on top. Well, all right.

That’s a huge difference. Yeah. Great place.

Well, that’s good. You can use it in the winter. Yes, exactly.

Which is good. Yes, we have people who like renting the space and they wouldn’t do it in the winter because it’s cold. Well, of course.

But I mean, it looks like a good rehearsal floor. It’s a lovely floor. Yes.

Yes, I thought this was nicer than some of the fake tile looks. Yeah. Well, this feels warmer.

This feels like warmer. It’s wood. It’s wood.

Yeah. Plastic wood. Here’s the seam.

It makes it feel warm because it looks like wood. Yeah. It’s an illusion.

So you’re working on this Hound of the Baskervilles? Yes. This thing. And how long has it been? Two years? Oh, no.

Well, very vague conversations. We’ve had maybe two times where we’ve had a week or two weeks to actually play with ideas. And then the last one was last fall sometime.

And we’ve got another session, a week or two coming up soon, but it keeps filling in with other things we have to do. So we had to try and make sure that we still got time in there. Do you have a deadline for the show? Or is it still? No.

That’s the nice thing. We don’t give ourselves a time it has to be finished by. So we just delve into it and just take it, and then it’s towards the end, you start thinking, okay, I guess we’ve got to have a date.

Is there a point at which you find that adding a date is helpful? Like saying, okay, so our date to be done is this, and then it’s sort of- Well, as the show comes together, you get more of an idea of where it should be. And so that actually does become a deadline because, yeah, we’ve got to get into the theatre or whatever. But- It’s usually frantic towards the end anyway, regardless.

Oh, always. Yeah. Do you start to feel that the show is ready? Like, is it just sort of like an organic feeling that I think we’re starting to get towards where the show- That’s interesting because, for instance, with the show we did about the Chinese piracy, and we did a run at the Tarragon Extra Space, and it was towards the end of the show that it started, okay, now it’s time to feel something.

You know, wish we could go first, but you never can. There you go. Okay, so, because this is audio, we’re gonna- There you go.

This is a little thing that says the creative process. Number one, this is awesome. Number two, this is tricky.

Number three, this is shit. Number four, I am shit. Number five, this might be okay.

And number six, this is awesome. What I find interesting about this is we all go through this. I think for people who dabble in artistry of some kind, they get stuck at number four.

Yeah. They hit, they go through this is shit to I am shit, and then they never push past it. Yeah.

And it takes a certain amount of artistic fortitude to keep, I mean, this really, I’ve gone, I think every show I’ve ever worked on, we go through this. Many times. We call it, I refer to it as the wall, okay? I really hit the wall on this show where nothing is working.

I hate everything, and when you keep going until suddenly the wall breaks down, you’re like, ah, ah, it’s being something. But it is interesting that, like, having it put that way, I really appreciate that because- I love a copy of that, it’s gonna go on my wall. We’re trying to spread it around.

No, because that’s- It’s reassuring, though. It is reassuring. We’re not the only ones.

Absolutely, because, like I said, so many times when you hit that point where you just, you hit the this is shit, and you either stop there, or I am shit, and you stop there, and it just becomes, how do you move forward from that? This is a reminder, it’s gonna be okay. Absolutely, absolutely, and that you have to do that. It gives you a timeline.

Yeah, did you guys, I mean, when did you sort of realize that that’s just the way it is? Well, that particular set of tests came up somewhere on the internet. Just about a year ago, yeah. But I mean, it’s reassuring, but I mean, as artists who’ve been doing this for, you’re in your 43 year of this, at some point you must have come to the realization that it’s going to be okay, even when you feel like it’s not.

Interesting, I find that as we get older and more experienced at what we do, we become more aware of this isn’t going well. I think when you’re youthful, that’s great, it’s gonna be great, and you just sort of go along with it, and you just have fun with it. That’s how I experience it, anyway.

No, it’s interesting because there’s. Our printer is not decorating right now. That’s all right, it’s, you know, there’s something ethereal about the way that it’s going.

Yeah, it’s very good. It’s interesting, the whole, like when you said it, like you, when you first show it to an audience, you realize if it’s working, or if it’s going to work. It’s so reassuring to hear that, because I’ve done so many things that I’ve created or been involved in creating.

Yeah. And that first performance is just the first few moments of starting it, and like when you get to the, this is where the first, like we think the first laugh should be. You’re just like.

Is it gonna happen? Biting your fingernails. Is it gonna happen? And then it does, and you start to think, okay, we’re gonna be okay. Yeah.

Everything’s gonna be fine. It’s so reassuring to hear that that’s, that happens with you as well. Of course, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We made a mistake once, just a couple of days before our show opened, of doing a sort of a workshop-y performance, inviting friends to give us feedback. And the feedback was so conflicting that we were really confused by the time the show opened.

Should we be changing all this shit, or was it okay? Well, I mean, workshops and talkbacks are so difficult. Everybody wants to design your show for you. We love doing it with kids.

Oh, well, kids will see things that you never thought of. Oh, the last question, the best question ever, what other planets have you performed this on? That was at the Brick Brothers. That’s when we were doing the Brick Brothers Circus.

Yeah. Brilliant. They’ve never invited us, I’m sorry.

But the, I’ve lost my train of thought. Sorry, that’s what I was asking. Talking about opening shows in front of audiences, workshopping shows, talkbacks, all that stuff.

Workshops, you’ve got to keep- And talkbacks. Yeah, talkbacks especially. Like I’ve found, I’ve done two kinds.

I’ve done the kind where we have a facilitator who asks specific questions, we know what we think we want to know, and we just stick to those questions. And the open, well, what did you think? And I really dislike the open, well, what did you think? Yeah. It’s dangerous.

Because you’ve got some assholes out there. Well, not just assholes, but because what three people in a room, given the opportunity to give their opinion- Yeah, it could be conflicting ideas. It will be conflicting because what it comes down to is, well, if I was writing this, I would do this.

Not how did I feel about this or how did I react to it? Which means that, like for me, the ones that are helpful are the ones where we just, we know what we want to know and that’s all we ask. Absolutely. Yep.

Yep, we did a written version of that after Hot Times, didn’t we? We had all these little notes of people. Oh, that was the, Pastor Moriah did one there. Oh, okay.

Evenings. We had questions there. Yeah, people could write down their responses, questions and suggestions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen some production, like some festivals that have a little questionnaire. What do you want to say about this show? And it’s always like a really open-ended question like that.

I don’t know if I ever want to see that feedback because I don’t know if it’s helpful. Because what I need to know, I probably learned from the audience reaction. Yeah, live.

Yes. That’s why we don’t like doing film and TV. Oh, of course, because there’s no- Well, if there is, they have to film it again because the cameraman laughs.

That’s no good. Yeah. No, that’s really difficult.

Obviously, those of us who perform in front of an audience get something out of it that we don’t get in front of a camera. Yeah. Have you done in front of a camera? We’ve done some bits.

Yeah, we actually were the- Puppetry department. Puppetry department for a movie, Mr. McGorim’s Wonder Emporium. Oh, fuck yes, of course.

Yeah. Dustin Kaufman and- Yeah, so we got to call in a bunch of friends to work puppets and we got to help them build things and adjust things and work with the set. It was amazing work to do.

Well, that was a Terry Gilliam. No, unfortunately it wasn’t. What’s his name? Oh, no.

He’s a writer and I think that may be the only movie he’s done. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right now, people who are listening to this podcast are shouting out- Oh, is this live? No, no, no, but when they hear it, they’re gonna be shouting out who it is and I can’t think of- Excellent.

It’s probably in one of our resumes somewhere in the door. He was a very nice guy. No, no, no, I was thinking of the Terry Gilliam film where he actually died.

That’s something else. Yes, yes. Yes.

So, is there, you’ve got… So, you just came back from Stratford. Yes. You’re working on the Hound of the Baskervilles.

You’ve got the School of Puppetry. Yes, we’ve got an annual one-day festival event thing coming up. Conference festival thing.

Fresh Ideas in Puppetry Day. And when is that? May 27th. May 27th.

And it’s at the Aki Studio at the- Daniel Spector. Daniel Spector, yeah. Lovely little studio.

Who’s coming to that? Well, we put out a call for people to propose and what it’s to do with the daytime is people talking about or show and telling about works in progress, ideas they’ve got. Ideas they’ve got. Fresh ideas.

Okay. And in the evening is a series of short performance pieces of people’s shows that they are working on or are very fresh or very new. The short segments.

It just sounds amazing. So, it’s an opportunity for people trying something out with puppetry, whether they are in the puppetry community or just touching on the puppetry stuff, to put something in front of an audience or to talk about ideas, get some feedback. Yeah, and there’s a lot of discussion.

It’s really exciting. A good part of the day is people out in the lobby chatting. Oh, that’s probably why we like that space.

Is there just open time for that? Well, we allow 15 minutes between everything during the day. So, people can talk. Yeah.

That’s a scary thing. Sometimes, if a conversation really starts going, 15 minutes is not enough. I know.

Well, because there’s stuff happening. This is the next show, go outside. Take it outside, Paul.

That’s the problem, right? It’s like, what do I want to, like this conversation is really good, but also there’s this thing over here. Yeah, but George and I, well, some people just stay out there and talk. If it’s a nice thing, that’s okay.

Well, I mean, if you’re both getting something out of it, you might as well. I do, yeah. So, that’s happening.

What else is coming up for you guys? We’ve got, in June, we have a two-week intensive we do here in the studio. The first week is sort of a general, all sorts of basic puppetry stuff. So, short half-day workshops, kind of.

Yeah, and we bring in people to do specialist stuff, like the sound playing with puppets or- Choreography. Choreography and stuff. So, we bring in different people to do that sort of stuff.

And the second week is building on that. We choose something for a show development, and we spend the week developing, just workshopping a piece. This is a very condensed process.

Yeah, showing how we process it. And at the end of the second week, then there’s a very short show-and-tell. They can invite friends over.

Very nice. Yep, and the fun thing of it is, last year we had someone come up from Mexico. This time we’ve got someone from South Africa, and- We had somebody one year from the Azores.

Yes, yes. Come all over. Wow.

That’s great. It’s a small group, six people maybe. Small space.

Small space. I mean, after a certain point, too many people can’t get anything done. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Too many brains again. Too many brains, yeah.

I think, too, the way we like to teach is one-on-one. A lot of it is one-on-one. It’s not, we’re standing here, and now you do this, and now you do that, giving direction.

Yeah, yeah. It’s very organic, the way the show is developed. It’s sort of something about what are they wanting to learn? How can we help them move forward in what they’re doing? Yeah, so the development.

We find some story or something we like, and then it’s totally organic within the group of how it develops and what it’s gonna be. Yeah, and we’re not the directors. And is everybody working together on it? Yes, of course.

Yeah, yeah. And then we usually bring in a director to work with us that week also. Yeah.

And we’ll see what it’ll be like. Because it’s always good to have an outside eye. Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, too. It’s been fun. Yeah.

This has been a Homebody Productions production.