Forts: A Puppetry Piece

Performed at Stanford in the Memorial Auditorium visiting artist’s office, June 4, 2014

A short, intimate puppetry / object theater piece for one person at a time, with homemade sound effects and a warped recording of my voice reading the grandmother’s “black fairy tale” from Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.

Created with the help and guidance of Basil Twist.

A public domain translation of the speech (originally in German):

Once upon a time there was a poor child, and he had no father or mother, both were dead. He had no one in the whole world.  So, he searched day and night, but there was no one in the world, and everything in the world was dead. And because there was no one on the earth, he went up to the sky to visit the kindly smiling moon; but when he got to the moon, it was a piece of rotten wood. So instead he went to the sun; but when he got to the sun, it was a wilted sunflower. So then, he went to the stars, but when he got there they were just little flies a shrike had stuck in a blackthorn. So the little boy decided to go back to the earth, but when he did he saw it was just an upturned pot. And he was all alone. And there he sat, and wept, and there he is still, all alone.