Perhaps the greatest puppet show I have ever seen was Ada/Ava by Manual Cinema. So it was with great excitement that I got tickets for Mementos Mori, a new production making its New York premiere this week. Manual Cinema is aptly named. They make cinematic art right in front of the audience. Using overhead projectors, the puppeteers keep the action moving which is then projected on a center film screen. You are watching the cinema as well as the activity to make it all happen. Add in live, originally composed music and you are (sort of) transported back to the silent film era.
Manual Cinema states that it aim is to take the visual and sonic vocabulary of film and TV and use it to explore themes and stories that are weird, powerful, human and theatrical. Mementos Mori is a piece created to explore how modern technology, particularly smartphones and social media, has shifted our relationship with presence and absence, death and dying. Death herself is a character. All of this is done with six overhead projectors, screens, actors and close to 500 different shadow puppets and slides over the course of the show. Running nearly 1:30, this is complex choreography. The resulting “cinema” is incredibly unique and impressive.
I’ll admit that I loved Ada/Ava more than Mementos Mori largely due to the storytelling. But this last effort was longer and infinitely more complicated (double the projectors for example). Manual Cinema is based out of Chicago and travels the world. Search them out. Whatever is playing, go. Oh, and tickets for this show were $25. A momentous value. And isn’t it fun that they use low tech overhead school projectors to create these awesome visual effects?
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