DERIVES (DRIFTINGS)
A little man in a trench coat and fedora shoots heavenward like a balloon, gets pulled up short by his string, and is hauled in by another, larger version of himself. A huge gray blob with tentacles like arms gives birth to a naked man. Worms emerge from an undulating moonscape, kiss, and then are stalked by a goose. A giantess cuts off the head of a Popsicle-sized man, then scoops out his insides with a spoon and eats them.
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There’s something childlike as well as dreamlike about Derives, the way it frees the imagination, indulges instincts, and eliminates logic. One scene drifts into another, often without theatrical cues; instead changes in the lighting and music happen mid-scene. The images themselves have dreamlike associations. The way the smoke in the very first image, a tiny train chugging across the stage, drifts is repeated in various kinds of floating creatures throughout: angels, hummingbirds, fish, flying people, bugs stroking across water. Strings of various kinds seem important, perhaps because they anchor things that might otherwise drift away: the cords tied to balloons, the filaments in a spiderweb, and by association the wires used to manipulate marionettes. And if shows can represent Freudian phases, this one’s definitely oral: it features lots of tongues, weird noises, sucking, licking, kissing, and mastication.
By far the creepiest and most original thing about Derives is the way it blurs the distinction between puppets and real human beings. Of course puppet shows anthropomorphize the objects onstage, but Derives goes further: not only are the puppets humanlike, the humans are puppetlike. The first puppet we see is so lifelike we think it’s a real man; when a genuine human being comes on, he moves so like a puppet we forget he lives and breathes. Moreover, puppets rather than human beings are often the locus of emotion. When the redheaded female puppet conducts her indiscriminate seduction, it’s the shy male puppet who seems most affected: while the real men hoist her up and caress her in a kind of gang grope, the male puppet cowers in their shadows, repulsed or afraid.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Florian Tiedje.
