Puppetry and Prose in the little match girl passion
By Meaghan Lanctot '21
ATB Ambassador
Based on Hans Christian Andersen's famous story The Little Match Girl, the little match girl passion is a musical epic composed by American composer David Lang. His piece, dramatizing the short yet poignant life of Andersen's titular protagonist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008. Building from the tradition of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Lang juxtaposes Jesus' crucifixion with the little match girl's untimely death to highlight themes of suffering and salvation in the tale.
With Lang's blessing, Maine-based Figures of Speech Theatre adapted his music into a complex performance intended to be "[an extension of] Lang's work with imagery examining the spiritual and psychological worlds of the little match girl and her dead Grandmother." The Holy Cross Chamber Singers have joined the company to perform Lang's score, marking the first time that the music will be sung by such a large group in this production. The performance combines storytelling, music, acting, puppetry, and dance to create a multi-faceted artistic exploration of one girl's transcendent journey through life and death.
An interview with John Farrell, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Figures of Speech Theatre (edited for clarity):
What drew you to the short story and Lang's musical interpretation of it in particular?
JF: About maybe six or seven years ago, I was looking for a new work to create a theater piece around, and a friend of mine sent me a clip of the music. I loved the music, so I found the rest of it and I listened to it. I was really taken by the music itself and the idea behind it, which was to take the Hans Christian Andersen story of The Little Match Girl and interweave sections of that text with sections of text from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. As David Lang says, [it] creates a moral equivalence between the suffering of a child and the death of Jesus. That layering of ideas is the sort of thing that really attracts us in our theater work. A lot of the time what we're looking for is what form has the best sort of chance of expressing the content that we're interested in. The piece, the music, the idea all felt like something that our theater company could handle and expand upon in the theatrical piece, so I wrote to David Lang for permission to create a theatrical setting for his music. He wrote back and said "That sounds great. I've checked out your website, I love Maine, I love puppets, so go for it!" And we did.
What are the Japanese artistic influences on the performance?
JF: In 1980, we were lucky to go to an international puppetry festival in Washington, D.C., and there I saw for the first time a form of puppetry called bunraku. It's a traditional Japanese form that's still performed today, and I was just smitten. It was a very refined and lifelike movement that was also stylized, so the puppets were working on this beautiful level of abstraction and real at the same time. That got me really excited about the potentials of [puppetry]. I started building puppets for our company that would have the ability to move in a very subtle, delicate way strongly influenced from the bunraku.
In 1987 and 1988, our company toured Japan each summer to eleven different cities, and after one of our performances a man approached us and said "I would like to invite you to my studio." What I didn't know at the time was that this was one of the [few] people in all of Japan who knew the complete process of building traditional bunraku puppets from scratch. He had been impressed by the carving that he saw of the puppets in our show, and offered to take me under his wing as a teacher. For those two summers I studied with him informally, and over the next ten years I made twenty different puppets. [I went back] to study with him and was very lucky to get a Creative Artist's Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission to go back to Japan for six months.
During that time, I was going to see Noh dramas, the traditional masked drama that originates back in the 1400s. I was blown away by what Noh does; it's this amazing combination of singing, poetry, dance, music, masks, and acting all together. I realized right then that Noh would have a significant influence on our work from there out. The performance of the little match girl passion is very much informed between the Noh and the bunraku theatre [styles]. The little match girl is a puppet operated in the bunraku style, which means that she's worked by three puppeteers clad entirely in black, visible to the audience but in the shadows. They have to coordinate her body with extraordinary precision.
What is the significance of the writing on the puppet's face?
JF: In traditional Japanese bunraku puppet construction, the face is first carved in wood and then [decorated] with a paper and glue mixture. The paper that is favored is little scraps torn out of Japanese Noh drama books, so the actual books that have the words and music for Noh performances are pasted all over the face to create a surface that separates the wood from the outer layer — 15 layers of ground oyster shell mixed with glue. In making the puppet of the little match girl, I created the head first and pasted Noh scripts onto her face. I loved the way it looked knowing that her face was not going to end up being like that in the performance. From there I did the surface of her face, and as I was looking at her face I thought, "It feels so unmarked by the circumstances of her life." On that impulse, I picked up a tiny sharpie and started writing the story on her face. I actually wrote the entire Hans Christian Andersen story on her face. I knew the audience was never going to see it but it felt like she was now permanently marked by her own story.
How did the Pietà inspire your design for the Grandmother's mask?
JF: Because the Hans Christian Andersen story is a Christian-oriented story, and because Bach's St. Matthew Passion is obviously from the same tradition, I thought I wanted to look within that tradition for inspiration. Even though I was making a mask that was influenced by Japanese traditions, I also wanted that mask to carry some of the weight of the suffering of Christ's mother. I pictured the Grandmother being an embodiment of the divine principle and it seemed like going to the Pietà was a natural look [for that]. I looked at as many photographs of her I could get, and it's amazing how that face changes according to how it's pictured. While the face itself didn't end up in the mask very much, the veil around it ended up being an influence. Certainly in the performance when the Grandmother is holding the body of the child you have that echo.
What excites you about performing with the Holy Cross Chamber Singers?
JF: Partly, I'm excited just about the chance to see how it works. How does a situation work in which the people singing the music have already prepared their version of it, and we've prepared the theatrical version? Now the challenge is to make them mesh together seamlessly. A couple weeks ago, we were able to listen to a rehearsal in Fenwick Theatre, and I stood on stage in about the location where the little match girl passion will be performed. It was really moving and beautiful to hear a collective of people producing the music. We had done it with four singers — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — but this was a whole group of people. It was also a group of young people, and it was especially tender and lovely [to me] to see young people taking on this material.