“Striking frogs and getting fairies ready!”
It’s the first rehearsal for act one, scene one of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Basil Twist is telling the frogs how high to hop (and when to “strike,” or leave the stage) and the winged fairies how to glide through the air with grace. A crew of 12 young puppeteers does its best to make the creatures respond.
Twist and his company have come to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., for two weeks of work to stage Ottorino Respighi’s 80-minute, three-act puppet opera “La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the Woods).”
By late May, when the production premieres in Charleston, S.C., at the Spoleto Festival USA, the stage will be filled with a seemingly effortless beauty. But building a world of fantasy requires dealing with numerous hard realities.
For the preview at MASS MoCA, the piece will still be a work-very-much-in-progress. Not all of the puppets are built yet, let alone costumed. Large chunks of Styrofoam suspended on strings have been filling in as substitutes. And the music will come from a recording. Eventually, the Gotham Chamber Opera will become part of the production, adding seven vocalists, a chorus of 20 and a 34-piece orchestra.
With a budget of nearly half a million dollars, “Sleeping Beauty” is the most ambitious undertaking thus far in the rapid rise of Basil Twist. Five years ago, at age 30, Twist created an underwater abstract treatment – “puppet show” seems hardly the right description – to Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique.” It was produced on a budget of $40,000 for a four-week run at Here, a small performance space in New York City’s SoHo district. The piece caused a sensation and played for 18 months. After a national tour, it returned to New York last year for an off-Broadway run of six months.
“Since I did that, the music world opened up to me,” says Twist. “People were excited about how I treated the music.” Since then it’s been one high-profile production after another for Twist, all involving puppets.
His “Petroushka” premiered at Lincoln Center in 2001 and also played at Jacob’s Pillow, as well as five other venues across the country. It caught the attention of conductor Neil Goran, director of the 4-year-old Gotham Chamber Opera.
“I thought it was one of the greatest evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,” says Goran. “It was unbelievably inventive in every possible way, one unexpected moment of genius after another.”
The biography of Basil Twist III says that he’s a third-generation puppeteer. But that implies something a little grander than reality.
“There’s many puppeteers who belong to dynasties. I don’t come from that kind of lineage,” says Twist, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.
His mom was a part-time puppeteer who mostly entertained children “very kind of `Sesame Street’-style,” says Twist while his grandfather was a professional musician. “Puppets were a hobby of his and were part of his act sometimes,” Twist says.
Even if Twist doesn’t have the finest of puppetry pedigrees, the art form is certainly in his blood. His affinity for it showed up early on.
“I made all these `Star Wars’ puppets,” he says with a bit of hesitation and a shy toothy grin. Recalling his childhood in the 1970s, Twist says, “I made R2D2 out of L’eggs pantyhose containers.”
Twist arrived in New York City in the late 1980s but soon departed for France, where he spent three years at the International Institute of Puppetry in the rural town of Charleville.
“Charleville ends up being like North Adams,” says Twist, quietly laughing again as he sits in the cafe at MASS MoCA. “(It’s) out in the middle of nowhere, but there is this incredible thing happening there … this mecca for puppetry. People come from all over the world.”
The school’s broad curriculum gave Twist a fluency in the range of international puppetry styles and techniques. Today, when he mixes traditions within one piece, such as putting string puppets and hand puppets on stage at the same time, he’s called avant-garde. But Twist thinks of himself as something of a traditionalist.
“I’m real old-fashioned in that I like the puppeteer to be hidden,” he says. “When I was in France, and in most contemporary puppetry these days, like say `Avenue Q’ (a puppet musical that’s been playing on Broadway for 18 months) the puppeteer is visible on stage. It’s almost the definition of a modern puppet performance. I got so sick of that.”
Although Twist is clearly ready for the challenges of major productions, he still has the most fun making a new puppet in a few hours for an impromptu show. Most often over the years such productions have been in the company of New York City drag queens.
“There are not many puppeteers hanging out in that world,” says Twist, who has performed at many of Manhattan’s gay nightclubs as well as at the famous drag festival Wigstock. He even has immortalized as a puppet the Lady Bunny, Wigstock’s founder and host.
“We would do duets. The real Bunny and the puppet Bunny … the stupidest stuff, but when a puppet does it, people just die,” says Twist.
Becoming an opera director allows for less spontaneity.
“I used to do everything myself,” says Twist, “but once a show gets so big, I can’t possibly build everything myself. It is a struggle for me to let go and have others do the work.”
With “Sleeping Beauty,” Twist is getting plenty of practice at delegating.
“He’s very easy and very silly,” says Jessica Scott, a puppeteer in the current production. She also assists Twist at his studio in Manhattan’s West Village, where work on the current production will continue after the MASS MoCA residency.
“Something that characterizes Basil (is) the way he gets you to commit,” says Scott. “He’s consciously cultivated a community.”
Twist has been building his team ever since “Symphony Fantastique.” As an administrator at Here, Barbara Busackino commissioned that piece and has produced each of his subsequent projects.
“He is extremely controlling, extremely decisive, and he is wonderful because of that,” says Busackino. “If he says there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs, there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs in the end. … You can get a team behind that and realize it. Of course there’s tons of experimentation and failures along the way.”
It’s not just other puppeteers who are getting behind Twist’s vision. Prestigious institutions also continue to seek him out. Lincoln Center has recently come on board for “Sleeping Beauty” and will present the production at its annual summer festival this year.
In the meantime, Twist is keeping busy creating more stage magic.
“I’m into spiders. That’s part of what sold me on this show,” he says. “I saw spiders (in the story) and was like, `Great!’”
Originally appeared in the Times Union, February 13, 2005.
Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.
