Our project was as medieval and
as mystical as you could hope for: create
a puppet show. Of all the absurdities in
the world, making a puppet show seemed the
most beautiful to us. Puppetry is a humble
vocation [,] but one that is nonetheless
ancient and profound. Its profundity rests
in its humility: submission to the wood,
to the form of things, the shape of a
face, the smell of turpentine, the
sawdust, the strange little souls that
somehow glimmer in a nose or an eyebrow
under your chisel . Theres religion in a
puppet. There [are] first principles, in a
way. There [are] sorrows and joys wind
that blows between us and the world. Its
all there to see if you want.
Alberta
Views, July/August 2003
CITY TROUT
The original members of the Old
Trout Puppet Workshop share a studio they
call Fort Trout. Fort Trout is located in an
industrial area in the Southeast quadrant of
Calgary, Alberta. Businesses surrounding
Fort Trout include Flesher Marble and
Granite, Mars Blinds and Shutters, a
Sherwin-Williams Commercial Paint Store, 1st
place Auto, Carstar Chinook, and their
closest neighbours, with whom they share a
gravel parking lot, Lucky Granite Ltd.
A white building with the hand-painted Old
Trout Puppet Workshop sign is surrounded by
a half-dozen large, orange shipping
containers and a couple of old RVs. The
containers store most of the sets and
puppets from touring shows. A garage door
opens to the front of the studio, where
heavy construction involved with the
creation of puppet shows is done.
The rest of the interior works as a hybrid
collaborative and storage space. There are a
couple of large worktables. There is space
to construct or operate larger puppets or
set pieces. There are metal shelving units
containing a disorganized mix of various
puppets severed heads; ocean backdrops;
prosthetic arms, legs and genitalia. There
is a beautiful dark wooden storage cabinet
that the Trouts hope will one day lead a
double life as a stage-piece.
Judd Palmer, Peter Balkwill, and Steve
Pityu Kenderes are, for their part in the
setting, the kind of bearded,
rough-around-the edges guys who have never
looked out of place in an industrial stretch
by the railroad tracks. Winners of the
Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished
Artists Award, they are craftsmen of an
arcane niche. Their studio is a place where
the province of Alberta is both built and
maintained, insomuch as you believe the arts
to be as essential as paved roads or curtain
rods.
The current Fort Trout is certainly a more
functional space than Pityus first home in
Calgary, an early, unofficial Trout studio.
Fort Trout is also more habitable than a
previous incarnation of the studio, set in
the Hudsons Bay warehouse, where dust would
fall from the rafters as they hammered away
at their craft.
The dream space outlined on the website
(apprentices will be slumbering in
hammocks cooks will be chopping beautiful
things people will be drawing and carving
and pondering) is a larger, idealized
version of the first place where they
gathered together. At a farm on in the
Alberta foothills, they named themselves
after a legendary fish that lived at the
bottom of a beloved swimming hole (Judd),
and decided to pursue puppetry as a
full-time vocation.
It has been almost twenty years since these
ambitious, hard-partying magpies gathered
together as friends disheartened with the
directions their individual lives appeared
to be taking; and with some of the colder
realities of what is sometimes vaguely
referred to as adulthood. Having
experimented with puppet theatre for years,
it was at least clear to them that it was
puppetry that gave them a sense of joy and
purpose. And in the foothills of Alberta
they decided they wanted that joy and
purpose to be central to their lives.
DISEMMINATING TROUT
Since 1999, Calgarys Old Trout Puppet
Workshop have toured across the world with a
series of unique shows that push the limits
of what a puppet is, and what a puppet is
capable of communicating.
In seventeen years they have produced eight
full shows: The Unlikely Birth of
Istvan,The Tooth Fairy,Beowulf,
The Last Supper of Antonin Carême, Pinnochio,
Famous Puppet Death Scenes (probably
their most well-known work), The Erotic
Anguish of Don Juan, and, most
recently, Ignorance. Beginning in
the summer of 2017, they will tour their new
play, Underland, a surrealist image
circus and behind-the-veil look at a
troupe performing a version of Lewis
Carrolls Alice in Wonderland.
They have industrial packing crates worth of
side-projects as well. They have produced a
short Christmas film, From Naughty to
Nice, in collaboration with the National
Film Board. Their work was featured in a
2008 music video for Feists Honey Honey.
They recently designed the set for The
National Arts Centres recent production of
Twelfth Night, and the Vancouver
Operas current production of Hansel and
Gretel. They collaborate on theatre
productions with Western Canadian companies
such as Victorias Puente Theatre Company,
as well as Trout-inspired outfits like
Torontos Clunk Puppet Lab. The Agnostic
Mountain Gospel Choir is a Tom Waits
inspired howling band that counts both Judd
and Pete as members. Judds written as
series of childrens books, three of which
have been nominated for The Governor
Generals Award. Pete and Bob Davis (the
Trouts general manager) now curate The
International Festival of Animated Objects,
an organization with which the company has
had a long relationship as participants.
Under the umbrella of the Canadian Academy
of Mask and Puppetry (CAMP), Pete has an
extensive teaching career at places such as
the University of Calgary and The Banff
Centre, as well offering individual
workshops in Calgary and around the world.
Pityu is a practicing painter and sculptor.
Add to all of this the mens dreams both
as a collective and individuals for future
Old Trout presences in film, television, a
large artistic commune in the woods.
TECHNICAL TROUT
The Trouts trademark puppet is one that
requires the puppeteer to insert their head
into its torso. The puppeteer peers out the
puppets stomach, chest or neck. The
puppeteers hands connect near the wrists of
the puppet, allowing the puppeteer a full
range of motion with the puppets arms.
They sit upon the head and come instantly
alive, says Pete, and are capable of many
things. Both arms are free to work.
The puppets legs, if it has legs, will
sometimes rest decoratively on the
puppeteers shoulders. But its the
puppeteers own bounding and leaping,
sometimes from behind a barrier, more often
out in full view of the audience, that
becomes the way the puppet will move around
the stage.
Back inside of the puppets ribcage, the
mechanics are such that when the puppeteer
turns his head, the puppets head will turn.
This kind of technology, Pityu explains, is
quite typical of head puppets. One signature
structural contribution the Trouts have made
to this style of puppet is a chinstrap
enabling the puppeteers own mouth movements
to dictate the mouth movements of the
puppet. The same rods affixed to the
chinstrap will attach to the eyebrows
of the puppet, giving it an added layer of
expression.
Sometimes the puppeteers own voice,
speaking from within the puppets chest,
will act as the voice of the puppet. Often,
as in Pinocchio, the puppet will
communicate in an unintelligible gibberish,
in howls, cries, and whimpers; in
exaggerated tones rather than articulated
speech. This kind of communication works
well in dialogue with an actor on stage,
such as in Don Juan, or in tandem with an
omniscient narrator, such as the one
employed in Ignorance. In such
configurations, the otherness of the puppet
is highlighted through nonsense, and the
function of these actors and narrators will
in part become that of the puppets
translator.
Pityu has been giving me an informal tour of
the puppets. He talks about the difference
in materials, from lightweight polystyrene
to the more traditional wood. Wood has
become more prohibitive as the shows get
larger, he says, theres more weight. Its
harder to travel. The Trouts Pinocchio
puppet is laid out in front of us like a
patient on a metal table. Pityu picks the
puppet up and places it over his head, in
order to illustrate the head puppets full
range of motions.
For a collective so concerned with being at
the service of the puppet (Pete), these
head puppets, in their design, provide ample
opportunity for the puppeteers to humble
themselves before their masters. The
puppeteer, in such a configuration, is
essentially masked.
Mask work really [comes] into it, Pete
will tell me, and the physical application
[is] great. The puppeteer, often clad in a
background fading pair of grey full-body
underwear (the Trouts signature costume),
is meant to be no more than the mound of
gravel or body of water beneath the living
form. Judd will later talk about the general
philosophy of their puppetry as being about
such direct physical contactthe performer
connected directly to the object, without
separation by strings or clever mechanisms.
As I watch Pityu other images come to mind:
the puppeteer as something of the packhorse,
carrying its exuberant rider wherever the
story goes. The puppeteer as the father or
mother with its child on it shoulders (The
child Abigail, the central character of the
Tooth Fairy, is cleverly played by an
unmasked adult woman. Her costume
incorporates smaller arms, synthetic legs,
and a childs dress to make her appear as
part head puppet, part human).
Whatever the image conjures for an attendee
of an Old Trout show, it is altogether
different, Judd suggests, from the image of
the traditional, God-like puppeteer who
works the strings of the marionette from
above.
ORBITING TROUT
Thr Trouts draw from an enormous range of
influences across an historical tradition of
puppetry. Sometimes these influences are
conscious. Sometimes the similarities are a
happy accident.
One of the Trouts major influences is the
long and rich Japanese tradition of puppetry
called bunraku, where at least three people
are required to operate a single puppet.
Eva, one of Don Juans mistresses in The
Erotic Anguish of Don Juan, is one
such bunraku-inspired puppet. Performed by
the requisite three puppeteers, the parts of
her body that have been highlighted by the
puppet makers arms, face, chest, legs
acquire a lithe, spectacular, and comic
range of motion as she performs a seductive
dance onstage. The puppets powers of
seduction are enhanced by the proximity of
the puppeteers who shadow her. One puppeteer
is charged with her head and the left arm,
another with her right arm (the arm with
which she eventually pins Don Juan to the
ground). The first two puppeteers appear to
display an all-consuming concern for the
functioning of these parts, a concern which,
in the context of the play, borders on
desire. The third puppeteer acts as Evas
legs and chest. Evas breasts are affixed to
this puppeteers forehead. Evas legs, more
or less an elaborately healed pair of
crutches, are controlled by the puppeteers
arms.
The demeanor of intense concern, used for
most all performances, is cultivated. As
Pityu explains, their own focus is meant to
draw the attention away from the puppeteer
and towards the puppets themselves. But its
easy to see that this demeanor is also in
the service of a kind of comedy through
contrasts, played for laughs against the
often times out-sized or exaggerated
emotional life of the puppet.
The Old Trout aesthetic also has roots in
the puppet theatre of Prague and the rest of
the Czech Republic. Early on, Judd travelled
to the Czech Republic with then-collaborator
Xstine Cook one of the founders of
Albertas Green Fools Company for the
specific purpose of immersing themselves in
the countrys puppet theatre (a history that
goes back to the Middle Ages).
There have been group research trips to
Mexico, a country that also has a vibrant
history of puppet theatre. There have been
tours through a number of parts of Western
and Eastern Europe, and many of these tours
have included a research element.
The Trouts have a healthy respect for the
contemporary puppet theatre community.
Prominent puppet theatre companies in the
Western Hemisphere include Portugals
Marionetas do Porto, as well as the
politically active Bread & Puppet
theatre, which emerged in New York as part
of an anti-war movement, and is now is based
out of Vermont. The most famous puppet
theatre company in the world right now is
probably South Africas Handspring, who have
been touring internationally for thirty
years, and employ a staff of twenty in Cape
Town.
War Horse, an adaptation of a novel by
Michael Morpungo put on by Britains
National Theatre, features Handsprings
extraordinarily life-like,
three-person-operated horse puppets. These
puppets even use nostril breath and ear
movements to make the horses come even more
alive. Joey, the protagonists horse , might
be the most famous individual puppet in
theatre (though Elmo and other television
puppets will, like famous movie actors,
always outshine their live theatre
counterparts in terms of fame, fortune, and
notoriety).
Pete, admiring of the technical invention of
the Handspring horse, made sure I did too.
Yet he also stressed that the Old Trouts are
still devotees of small-scale, on-the-farm
aesthetic. In plays such as The Tooth
Fairy, and The Erotic Anguish of
Don Juan, there has been an attempt to
explore large-scale puppets.
And yet Pete expressed a concern that
puppetry that tries for too grand a scale,
such that some of the puppets popularized in
plays such War Horse, risk betraying the
potential intimacy of the puppet/audience
experience. The puppets in these kinds of
experiments often run the risk of turning
into stage props.
PONDERING TROUT
What makes a successful puppet, a puppet
that is more than mere stage prop? Because
the Old Trouts are three separate
individuals with three strong personalities,
a consensus on what their ideal puppet is
will, like their performances, always be
open to change and evolution. Pete stresses
the fallibility and intimacy of the
puppets. A successful puppet, for him, fully
inhabits a certain expression and sense of
character: There are certain puppets that
you care about instantly they seem alive
the minute someone touches them.
As a professionally trained actor whose
research interests and expertise include the
Tadashi Suzuki acting technique and other
applications concerned with the actors
bodily presence, Pete is perhaps the most
concerned with the puppets breath, its
manipulation, its focus, its fixed point -
the four key points you want to hit when
animating a puppet according to a video
promoting his Puppetry Intensive at the
Banff Centre for the Arts. This concern for
the bodily presence of the puppet plays a
role right from the point of construction,
where Pete is, according to his cohorts, the
most likely to obsess over the making of a
particular puppet, to toil over getting the
intended expression of the puppet just
right.
Judd speaks to the potential the puppet has
to shift emotions, to do drastic and
surprising things. He describes the
successful puppet for him as having, a
certain kind of wistfulness, an unspoken
sorrow of some kind, expressed in the tilt
of an eyebrow or the edge of the mouth,
[something that] makes us feel a softness
towards it.
Expanding on Petes idea of fallibility,
Judd goes on to describe a successful puppet
as also communicating an unease or
unpredictability, one rooted in its specific
character but also in the idea, he says,
[that] on some ancient, fundamental level,
a puppet is a monster. Not, like, a dragon
or griffin or something grand; a hobgoblin,
maybe but monstrous nonetheless.
My favourite puppets, Judd says, have
that quality of having a secret.
Pityu applies the paint to all of the
puppets when they are finished, and is
often, according to him, the one who
somehow ends up making the first puppet for
every new show. Pityu sees the successful
puppet as being able to shrink scale and
change time. Like Pete, he is enamored by
the puppets possibility as a tool for
eliciting empathy. He also sees some of the
unforeseen attributes that the puppets
acquire during their making, the kinds of
secrets that Judd talks about, as playing an
essential role to the overall feel and
action of the play. These unforeseen
attributes, he says, will often change the
direction of the entire performance. This
ability to change the direction of the
performance is another kind of agency the
puppets acquire during the creation of an
Old Trout play.
Petes emotional connection with the puppets
is evident on stage. Watch him act as the
shaking hand of a despairing puppet in
Ignorance a puppet who crawls out to
his window ledge and makes the frightening
leap. To watch Judd manipulate and narrate
through Tweak, the connective tissue of Famous
Puppet Death Scenes, is to experience
the glee of allowing a piece of carved wood
to wax passionately on lifes brief and
beautiful fires.
Pityu, who feels that as an actor on stage
he has a puppets tendency to mug, is
probably the most mountain-man looking of
the Old Trout bunch. As such, he is often
employed (quite happily) as a kind of
extension or important aspect of a
particular puppet, the one whose own burly,
bug-eyed physical characteristics make him
best suited to enter the material orbit of
the objects on stage.
Playing the devil in The Erotic Anguish
of Don Juan, Pityu was clad in in a
fur hat and accessories, riding a tricycle
with a giant, snorting bulls head affixed
to the handlebars. In their earliest feature
as an official collective, The Unlikely
Birth of Istvan, Judd describes how the
company had Pityu, between a pair of wooden
legs, literally birthed onto the stage.
MORTAL TROUT
All three men agree that the Trouts ideas
about puppetry were in harmony is 2006s Famous
Puppet Death Scenes (FPDS). It is
comprised of a sequence of short scenes from
made-up famous puppet plays. In each scene
a different puppet meets its untimely
demise.
The jump-off point for this play was a scene
in their version of Pinocchio, which
drew from the pre-Disneyfied, original 1883
script by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi.
A scene from this version had Pinocchio bash
a cricket to death with a hammer, and the
Trouts played this scene up with a gory
glee. While all three of the puppeteers had
mentioned this particular scene and its
influence on the creation of FPDS to me
separately, theres an article by Clea Wren,
for the publication American Theatre, which
has the most illustrative quote about how
the audience reaction to this particular
scene in Pinocchio had given the
Trouts the idea for a full-length play
focusing specifically on puppet deaths.
At first they were shocked, Judd recalls.
There was an intake of breath; and they
laughed; and then it actually started to
seem terribly sad; and then tragic; and then
this great existential hole opened in the
theatre, and everybody fell through it and
came out the other end, feeling happy!
The quick-cut format of Famous Puppet
Death Scenes, on the heels of the more
drawn-out narratives of Pinocchio
and Beowulf, brought back,
according to Pete, a lot of the sense of
spontaneity and collaboration of the
companys original endeavors. There were
more than three puppeteers working on FPDS,
and Pete, Judd and Pityu all agree that the
ease with which individuals were able to
invest in particular scenes and in
individual ideas created a bedrock where
everyone felt integral to the plays
creation, and that it was a collective joy
to stitch these various macabre, faux-famous
performances together.
The opening sequence of Famous Puppet
Death Scenes, taken from the renowned
play The Feverish Heart by Nordo
Frot, opens with dramatic opera music. A
bald hand puppet in a pale grey suit enters
the stage, observes the audience just as a
large fist appears over his head. The fist
crushes his balloon-like skull a mere
seconds later. Its a ridiculous and
hilarious moment. With that initial audience
laugh out of the way, the narrator, a
half-naked, old puppet named Tweak, gives us
a moment to recover, before yanking the
mortal strings.
For the next hour then troupe mix punchline
comedy with true horror and sadness, each
puppet fulfilling its duty to die with
unique tonal and technical attributes; the
combination giving the audience not just a
broad sampling of mortal ends, but also a
broad sampling of the possible ways a puppet
might be alive to us.
In The Cruel Sea, by Thorvik
Skarsbarg (Hour 14), the curtain opens to a
mustachioed puppet, looking part postal
worker, part soldier. He is stone still
inside of a wallpapered room. There is a
broken window, a dusting of snow on the
sill. Then a hand appears through the broken
glass. It is alive for a second, only to
rest on the sill for the remainder of the
scene, a hint that some kind of massacre has
occurred outside. For a while the only thing
moving is an old woman in a shawl, who
appears a few times in the window over the
course of the two-minute scene. Its as if
shes just going about her day outside,
trying to ignore whatever horrors have
recently occurred. Meanwhile, the man
indoors remains fixed where he is. We can
see there are thin sticks protruding from
various points on his head, face, arms and
torso. As time stretches on, and the room
grows darker, and the woman continues to
circle the perimeter, the sticks begin to
pull sections of the man away from his face
and body first the skin off his ear, then
the skin off his cheek, then a section of
his hat He is already dead, and what we are
seeing is the process of decomposing, from
painted figure to, by the end of the scene,
a far less detailed, but still visibly
human, block of wood. The old woman
continues to circle. Curtain. No laughter,
but much applause.
As if it couldnt get any darker, the next
puppet death scene features an over-sized
book wheeled out on a cart. The puppeteer is
Judd, silent and serious in his funeral
suit. The title of the book Judd displays
before the audience is Never Say it
Again, by L.M. Snuck. Tipped onto its
side, the book is unlocked and shown to
contain, as its pages, a number of large
canvases. Each canvas depicts a farmhouse
from a distance. Each turning page brings us
a closer view of the house. Judd
occasionally leans in to hear what we soon
learn (though already sense) to be screams.
But Judd shuts the book and wheels it away
before we get right up to the door.
COLLABORATIVE TROUT
The Trouts all collaborate on the initial
ideas for their plays what to perform, how
to stage it, how theyd like to evolve and
expand their repertoires as puppeteers. Each
play will evolve according to the look of
the puppets and the conversations that ensue
between the three during the construction of
the characters and the set. As Pityu
describes it, theyre often building the
show at the same time [they] are learning
[their] roles.
Judd is the primary writer. When I asked him
about some of the personal stories behind
the plays, he ennumerates broad themes based
on dynamics within the group. The
Unlikely Birth of Istvan is, according
to him, an ode to our birth as a
company to disparate elements coming
together. The Last Supper of Antonin
Carême is a play where an imbalance
between us, or an uncertainty about how to
collaborate arose. We were no longer so
sure, he says of the play, but also perhaps
of the collective, about how to join the
different elements together. Pinocchio
grapples with their ideas of childishness. Ignorance,
he offers, is a play about middle age.
Judd explains that both The Last Supper and
Beowulf grapple with the idea of
pride. This pride, whether manifest as
individuals toward the collective, or as a
collective against the business-as-usual
world, has, I sensed, been tempered by time,
and by the degree of success that has
allowed them to survive for so many years as
puppeteers.
Pete describes the odd vibrancy of the
collective as being rooted more in their
roles as friends than as puppeteers. Over
the course of my conversations with all
three Trouts, there were plenty of hints
about times where the three had argued, held
grudges, or been burdened by an enormous
amount of doubt. But at no time did I sense
anything resembling bitterness between them.
And at no time during individual talks did
any of them lay claim to having been any
more central to the success of the company
than the others. Yes, Pityu might be the one
who makes the each plays first puppet, and
unifies them all in some way with his
paintbrush in the end. Yes, Pete might be
the most skilled as a puppeteer and as an
actor, the one who first asked more
technical, practical theatre questions
like Do we have a director? Do we
have a stage manager? during their initial
experiments, and the one with the teaching
skills best suited to spreading the gospel
of Old Trout puppetry. Yes, Judd might be
the one whose skills and storytelling
abilities establish the narrative arc of
each play, spearhead their ventures into
film, and in a large way write the myth of
the company as a whole. But all three of
them have a profound understanding, not just
of what the other men bring to the table,
but of how both their skills and their
personalities complement one another; how
the mix is, in fact, essential to their
survival. All three of them spoke
nostalgically about some variation of what
Pete called moments of pure collaboration,
and appear driven to continue their artistic
pursuits in part with the idea that, with
each new project, the possibility exists
that the three of them might reunite in that
alchemical place once again.
They also encourage one anothers artistic
interests outside of the company. Some of
this comes from an understanding of the
various elements that go into puppetry
sculpture, acting, choreography, physical
theatre, blah blah blah (from Meet the Old
Trouts, an online interview with Kirsten
Brown, Woolly Mammoths Literary Director.)
But its also, more generally, a question of
happiness, and of how to stay engaged with
the world. During a skype conversation from
his home in Victoria, Judd says, quite
succinctly, that they all know that no one
art form will bring ecstasy, salvation, and
a salary.
FLEDGLING TROUT
Located in Kananaskis country,
just a short drive outside of Calgary,
Camp Chief Hector emphasizes community and
value based education, outdoor challenge,
fun, individual growth, environmental
stewardship, leadership development and
service excellence
from the official website for YMCAs Camp
Chief Hector
Wed take the kids into the tepee, Pete
recalls on a local television interview on
Avenue Calgary in 2010, get them settled
down. Judd would play his harmonica for
them. Then wed tell them some sort of fatal
mountain climbing story about dudes trapped
in glaciers. By all accounts this was also
a time where the group partied, experimented
with drugs, played music, shared stories
established the kind of camaraderie that
anyone whos worked in the wilderness for
the long stretches with the same crew
planting trees, running rafting tours,
guiding kids will know.
We saw ourselves as oddballs, Judd says
over breakfast at 24hr Blackfoot Truckstop
Diner, a sixty-year-old Calgary time capsule
near Fort Trout. We did puppet shows for
the kids [at Camp Chief Hector], too. A lot
of elaborate, and we see now deeply
offensive initiation ritual-type things
involving red paint and loincloths. But also
some broad, abstract things: we had Pityu in
diapers at one point, playing a character we
just called Humanity.
Judd would get a job with Parks Canada a
year or so later, at an Interpretive
Programming Centre. Part of the program
involved designing educational puppets and
scale models. He saw an opportunity to
gather Pete, Pityu and the others to work
with more elaborate materials.
We had a lot of freedom to create at The
Interpretive Centre, Pete explained to me,
so it was an obvious move.
Pete is convinced that the Old Trouts were
fated to join each other. He makes some
strong points, including his part-time job
he once had as a driver for Judds
grandfathers wife. This was ten years
before the Trouts had formed and a couple of
years before they all met at Chief Hector.
It was a job that had actually brought him
to the Palmer family ranch on more than one
occasion.
The group maintained their friendship
through the early nineties, while at various
stages of completing university degrees. The
group also travelled around the world a
great deal as individuals. As Judd says,
there was a certain search for
enlightenment going on among the future
members of the collective.
One of the experiences Judd cited as
integral to the Old Trouts history was a
play he put on at the University of Toronto
around 1994. Hed been granted $200 by the
Trinity College Dramatic Society to put on a
play hed written about the former Czech
dictator Klement Gottwald and his widow,
Petra. It was revealed during this
conversation that a mutual friend of ours,
poet and mathematician Hugh Thomas, was cast
as Petra after the woman Judd had originally
asked refused. I followed up with Hugh, to
get a non-Trout perspective about the
experience:
I think he had encountered a news item
about Gottwalds head having been embalmed
and saved by his widow, says Hugh over an
email. Eventually she was unable to buy
food for the dog, who had was driven by
hunger to consume some of the embalmed head
of his former master, which killed him.
This became the germ of the plot, Hugh
says, whose dramatis personae consisted of
Gottwalds head, Gottwalds body, the dog,
and Gottwalds wife.
Judd recalls having to pass the play off as
the work of an imaginary Czech absurdist
playwright called Blednu Cestovani in
order to convince the Trinity College
Dramatic Society that it was worth
performing.
According to Judd, Blednu Cestovani means
something like to grow pale by travelling.
The show was a success, and was later picked
up by a one-act-play festival in Calgary.
Back on home turf, Judd collaborated on the
set design for the play with Pityu. As the
legend goes, they had to pass off Judd to
the festival as the visiting Blednu
Cestovani, replete with fake accent.
I felt guilty about this, says Judd, and
later travelled to the Czech Republic with
(Green Fools) Xstine Cook to learn about
Czech theatre and immerse myself in its
culture; mostly out of interest, but partly
as a kind of penance.
The story seems almost too good to be true.
As Pete says, Judd will often exaggerate
things in the service of myth-making. Even
the story of the Old Trout that the group
named themselves after, a fish who would
supposedly answer any question you ask, if
you [could] find it (Judd), was an
embellishment added as the company was
gaining traction and being interviewed by
various newspapers. As Judd revealed to me,
[It] makes a better explanation for our
name than the actual explanation, which is:
we cant quite remember why we chose that
name. He goes on, We thought it meant old
friend in Newfoundland, but it doesnt.
Apparently [Newfoundlanders] will call a
child a trout if it does something
endearing. In England [Old Trout] means old
lady.
Whatever the exact details of the Cestovani
play, it was an important bit of early
creative success. It certainly made Judd
question whether university dramatic
societies were the best places to spread his
wings as a puppeteer. More importantly, it
brought Judd back to Calgary, where he and
Pityu and other future Trout members began a
four-year collaboration (1995-1999) with the
Green Fools and other members of Calgarys
alternative culture scene.
The Green Fools, as somewhat established
theatre performers, were becoming
increasingly interested in puppetry. They
produced a number of shows in which future
members of the Old Trouts were principle
authors and collaborators: The Death of
Benevuto Cellini (the fruit of Xstine
and Judds travels to Prague, backed by a
Dada music ensemble called Street of
Crocodiles), Punch and Judy, Bosch
(based on the triptych painting The
Temptation of St Anthony), The Ice King
(A tale about the men aboard the doomed
Franklin Expedition. According to Judd it
was Possibly a very good play, hard to
tell. The play was basically about men
freezing to death, and it was debuted in the
middle of a Calgary heat-wave.)
The Old Trouts might have remained Green
Fools, but that companys founding members
were becoming more and more interested in
street circus and other brands of outdoor
performances, in integrating their work into
the fabric of city life. Judd, Pityu and the
others were quite clear that they wanted the
controlled environments of indoor theatre
stages, the ability to tour, and some of
them had lofty dreams of performing in
large-scale theatre settings dreams that,
as it happens, have come true.
GATHERING TROUT
[W]ith the cold autumn wind
upon them, they had decided that the
future held only two directions: They were
either going to open up a flea circus or
commit themselves to an insane asylum
They talked about how to make little
clothes for fleas by pasting pieces of
colored paper on their backs They talked
about making little flea wheel barrows and
pool tables and bicycles. They would
charge fifty-cents admission for their
flea circus. The business was certain to
have a future in it. Perhaps they would
even get on the Ed Sullivan Show.
from Trout Fishing in America by
Richard Brautigan.
Many of the original Trouts had already been
gathering intermittently at the Palmer Ranch
throughout their youths and into their adult
lives. It was, according to a Trout-authored
Alberta Views article, an anchor
when we felt storm-tossed or when our
notions were growing thin, a mythic and
mystical place that embodied our
connection. More practically, it had also
been the place where Pityu and Judd had
acquired or borrowed farm equipment for
Pityus sculptures. These sculptures were
large-scale, motor-driven pieces and
dioramas that incorporated puppets. So the
strings between the Palmer Ranch and
puppetry were, by the mid-nineties, already
starting to move.
Notes on the Art of Puppetry in an
Atmosphere of Dread, the aforementioned
article, suggests that it was the dread and
panic precipitating the turn of the
millennium that had driven them to the Ranch
to make puppet shows in 1999. Pete, who
entered the fray a few months after the
initial group had gotten together, describes
it thus: Judd had the magic horn and blew
it.
To earn their keep, the Trouts had to do odd
jobs around the farm. Its difficult to tell
it any better than Judd and fellow original
member Stephen Pearce already have:
We felt a strength returning to
us as we toiled. In the dark mornings, the
mountains cold and enormous over us, we
delivered hay to horses with frost on our
whiskers and clouds of steam puffing into
the air from their huge warm lungs. We
collected eggs, fed the pigs, damaged
tractors. And then back to the [puppet]
workshop, where we would work into the
night, growing shaggy as the days passed.
The Ranch may have also provided the
opportunity for a consideration of scale.
Separate from the mythic tales of artistic
camaraderie, separate from the heroic
template of turning away from the trappings
of the modern world in order to pursue a
humble vocation; separate from all of this,
I think, is the image of a bunch of human
beings living and working somewhere at the
foot of the mountains. While further into
the prairies the farmer may see nothing but
sky for miles and miles, may understand
himself or herself as being in direct
contact with the void or with a god, I think
that the landscape particular to this part
of Alberta, gives a different impression:
the image of something bigger than oneself
always being somewhere just over there; a
major factor, whether material or spiritual,
that animates a life. The conversation
between Mountain and human is akin to the
conversation between puppeteer and puppet.
One may see the enormity and potential of
oneself, but also the poverty of ones own
materials, ones absolute smallness.
AMBASSADOR TROUT
Peter Balkwills Puppet Intensive at the
Banff Centre is an example of branching out
that all of the members of the Old Trout
Puppet Workshop do as individuals in order
to promote their art form, earn a living,
and ensure both the viability and visibility
of the company going forward. Pete is
married and has children. Judd is and his
wife Mercedes Bátiz-Benét, herself a
respected playwright and theatre director,
as well as a frequent Trout-collaborator,
live with their young son in Victoria. While
both Pete and Judd are still deeply in love
with the craft, writing and production of
puppet theatre, neither of them is very much
interested in remaining, or able to remain,
as touring members for a large portion of
the year. Those jobs are now often given to
some of the numerous actors and puppeteers
eager to work with the company. Projects
like the Twelfth Night stage design
are ideal. Even more ideal for someone like
Judd would be continuing the film and
television work, work that would allow him
to move back and forth between his Victoria
home and Fort Trout without any sidetracks.
Pityu is the one Trout who still tours with
every production. His responsibilities at
home in Halifax are less traditionally
defined, so its often easier for him to be
away for long stretches. He says there are
slow days at the easel in his tree-fort
painting studio, days where he feels eager
for Judd or Pete to call from the opposite
side of the country and say a new project is
on. Seventeen years later, he still loves
the experience of being on the road.
There are also numerous practical aspects to
an original Trout being on tour. It ensures
that the sets onstage look the same as they
did when first built by Judd, Pete and
himself at Fort Trout. When a puppet or
stage prop inevitably breaks, it is
important that someone familiar with the
initial construction is there to fix things.
More broadly, Pityu says, its important to
be a kind of ambassador for the original
troupe, to ensure there is that presence.
That presence is significant to maintaining
the overall spirit of the company. All the
Trouts continue to feel that spirit as a
trio, either while building at Fort Trout,
or on the occasions when their schedules
allow them to perform together. But if Judd
and Pete both tend to think more broadly and
abstractly about the continuing existence
and future projects and offshoots of the
Workshop, Pityu tries to remain flexible
enough to help with the practical
applications of these broader visions, such
as set and graphic design.
Pityu sleeps in one of those old RVs out in
the gravel parking lot while hes in
Calgary. Judd and Pete both make a point to
mention this, and seem to enjoy that a bit
of that early mountain man camp-out remains
a part of their day-to-day workspace. When
Pityu says that he wants to be someone who
tells fantastical tales in a fantastical
fashion, its a feeling that one can apply
to the whole collective, to where theyve
been, and to what they hope to be able to
continue to do.
When I went to talk with Pityu the studio,
he pointed me towards the kitchen, where,
with no running water in the RV, he had been
forced to fashion a homemade shower system
that connected with a water pipe inside Fort
Trout. He had acquired an inflatable
kiddie pool, which he had to place up on a
table so that the hose could connect to the
water source above him. A circular rod and
shower curtain had also been affixed to the
rafters.
The shower was an outlandish, but totally
functional, contraption. There amid the
skulls and shrunken masks, the leather boobs
and heads of bulls, it brought to mind the
image of a pond, something not unlike the
swimming hole at the Palmer Ranch a kind
of timeless, trout-full thing that members
of the Stoney Tribe, farmers, cowboys or
hikers would gather around: maybe to bathe,
maybe to fish, maybe to write a poem or to
carve a walking stick; or maybe, as the
audience to some elemental theatre, to just
sit and watch the bright lights play over
the water.
