By ANDREW BEUTEL
The most intriguing thing about puppetry, according to Tyler Menard, is that the art he conveys through the puppet is something that he could never portray himself on stage. That’s because he and the puppets reach a deeper realm of the human consciousness, he said.
Menard, a puppetry major, also said that his most formidable role as a puppeteer was when he played a father in the show, “Little Things.” The father dies but while alive devotes himself to teaching his little girl about life.
The motivation for the role was the director’s father. She had described him to Menard extensively prior to production. But Menard still struggled to grasp control of the character.
“I had never been a father. I struggled to get into the mind and being of the puppet and I was overwhelmed that I had to teach this girl the nature of life,” he said, “It was frustrating trying to achieve the same person she (the director) had conceived her father to be.”
After repeated disappointing rehearsals, one night Menard said he finally put all the pieces he had picked up together. He and the puppet essentially became one. He knew at that moment that he had attained an authenticate sense of the character. He had reached the goal of the role that he had set out to fulfill.
His interest in drama has always been connected to his love for the art of puppetry.
When Menard was a child he created stories in which his toys became characters. His parents recall him talking about how he animated each of them.
“From a very young age, I had an interest in both visual and performance art,” Menard said. Menard got into acting as a teenager. At his high school, Norwich Free Academy, he worked behind the scenes and learned stage construction and operation of everything. He also took acting an art classes as well as music lessons.
When he entered the University of Connecticut, he was a music education major but quickly learned that he didn’t want to dedicate his life to music. “It wasn’t a creative enough outlet for me. Puppetry, I realized, was the venue that combined all my artistic interests,” Menard said, “It involves set designing, stage building, creation and construction of the character and performing, as well.”
More than the theatrical and performance dimensions of puppetry, Menard was fascinated by how everything is possible with puppets and there’s also a storytelling dimension. “The puppet has the ability to surpass what human actors can do. What humans can’t do, puppets can,” he said. “You can tell a story more visually than you can with just human actors. The puppet touches people in a unique way.” But puppetry allows Menard to be an artist, actor, writer and musician. In other words, he must utilize all his talents as a puppeteer.
The puppeteer has to construct the physical figure and at the same time create the personality of the puppet from the material of his imagination. Also he has to write the script, outline dialogue and puppet movements, develop music, engineer the stage display, and then dynamically perform the skit. The whole process can take years to complete.
When all of its facets are synthesized into production, the result is Puppetry Theater. “It’s challenging to get at the nature of each character because, unlike with acting, these are characters you’ve constructed yourself,” said Menard. “And it’s not about you, it’s about the puppet and bringing it to life.” He said the hardest part of puppetry is coming up with a concept and then, overall, a script that is entirely original—that is, discovering how to tell a story in one’s own way.
To do this, Menard said, tests all of his creative faculties. Neither acting nor music asks as much from the artist because puppetry requires the skills of each. As a puppeteer at UConn, he said, he’s always performing and often in musical shows such as “The Phantom of the Opera.” Though it’s difficult, with puppetry, Menard said, nothing hinders his creativity—everything is wide open for him to experiment with—from serious to comedic roles and everywhere in between.
“Puppetry’s about exploration. I try to take it on from all angles with my own individual creativity,” Menard said. There is a market for puppetry majors that can be lucrative depending on how talented the puppeteer is, according to UConn graduate and puppeteer Eric Brooks. “There are countless numbers of puppeteers who get really high-paying jobs in
Hollywood, Disney, touring shows, Broadway, international positions,” Brooks said. “The list goes on and on.”
Menard is a senior now and is still acting as well as performing puppetry shows. He’s looking forward to graduating so he can begin a career in puppetry. He’s prepared a portfolio to send out to Cirque du Soleil, Walt Disney, and the puppet designer Michael Curry. “Puppetry seems so strange to people but it’s everywhere you look” Menard said. “What puppeteers ultimately want to do, what I want to do, is become a part of and contribute to its art and history.”
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