Performance Review

Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass

Figures

The 1996 production of Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass was a revival of the puppet and mask spectacle which premiered in 1988. Juan Darién unites the moral themes with which a mass and Quiroga's story are each concerned: the celebration of a martyr; the prevalence of greed and prejudice; the promise of rejuvenation through nature, compassion, and (reflexively) the artistic imagination.

The 1996 Juan Darién was a multidimensional, polyvocal spectacle generated by nineteen puppeteers and nine musicians. Goldenthal's score was a rich hybrid of themes, evoking "the worlds of the church, carnival, and rain forest" (Elliot Goldenthal, "Notes on Juan Darién," Theater 20.2 [Spring/Summer 1989]: 53). Taymor's display of puppet and mask forms was equally diverse, with bunraku rod puppets, shadow and hand puppets, half-puppet/half-human performers, and commedia-derived half-mask characters sharing the stage with singerpuppeteers and, eventually, the human character of Juan Darién. The scene in Juan Darién where puppets and masks from many traditions cavorted and recombined freely pressed the boundaries of the puppet-human connection into new and revealing contours.

This recombination was most striking in Taymor's use of puppet "skins," which covered all exposed parts of the human performer's body. The trace of the body thus remains palpable, and the friction between it and the puppet "skin" refigures the double vision involved in simultaneously watching puppet and puppeteer. This was best expressed in the character of the Mother, who adopts the jaguar/boy, Juan Darién. The performer of the Mother wore a slightly oversized head mask, with all unclothed flesh--forearms, hands, bare feet--concealed in the puppet "skin." When the Mother finds a jaguar cub outside her door (a small freestanding puppet), she cradles the puppet in her arms and unfastens the front of her dress, revealing a bare breast for nursing. The breast, like the other skin, is also not human but constructed. The false breast insisted on the illusion of the puppet as whole, even under the clothes. That the character proffered the breast to the mouth of the papiermâché jaguar pressed further any illusion of "naturalness." The representation broke many taboos, including that of human-animal intimacy. It also destabilized any assumed connection between the gender of the performer/puppeteer and the character: any body could wear this "skin."

Taymor's Mother/puppeteer yielded further transformations. After nursing, the jaguar pup becomes a human--represented by a three-foot rod puppet handled by a bunraku-style puppeteer. When Juan attended school he was both rod puppet and hand puppet simultaneously, a bifurcation which signified the sundering of wholeness under educational systems, and prefigured Juan's separation from his mother. At Mother's death, the puppet Juan was replaced by a human actor playing Juan--and the actor's "birth" facilitated the Mother's death. Juan lifted the mask off his mother's face, sundering the connection between performer and character, and revealing the opposition of life and non-life in the performer and mask. The performer remained onstage singing while Juan cradled and washed the mask, readying it for burial. Similarities between the performer's face and the mask reinforced the visual trope of seamlessness between process and product, yet the new distance between the human face and its likeness rendered seam as seem. This moment enacted the misrecognitions [End Page 360] in love and death, wherein love, as identificatory projection, can be bestowed on any responsive suturable thing--and death is permanent disruption of projection, the rending of seams between the human being and the world.

The complex semiotics of the Mother character did not develop in other characters or moments in the show. Juan Darién followed a realistic narrative structure after the Mother's death, guiding Juan through seemingly fantastical encounters which nevertheless ensured his delivery into a moral framework of sacrifice and redemption. The most interesting structural deviations were in disruptive entr'actes called "Tiger Tales"--well-crafted, bawdy shadow plays presided over by a rod-puppet skeleton figure, Mr. Bones. The Tiger Tales broke into Juan's journey with guerilla theatre rapidity, and provided their own lessons about seeming and seaming: women might be men; food may be garbage; humans could be jaguars. Indonesian in origin, nonsensical in meaning, the Tiger Tales were reminders within the largesse of Juan Darién of how little puppetry needs to tell a tale well.

But the tales' vestigial relationship to the spectacle of Juan Darién described the overall position of puppet and mask language in Taymor's storytelling. Although that language seemed integral to Juan Darién, the most powerful narrative agencies were the music, which functioned like a soundtrack (and indeed is now available on CD), and the boy Juan, especially in his emotional and aggressively underscored torture and crucifixion scenes. Puppets and masks certainly augmented Taymor's theatrical language by means fantastical; however, the puppets and masks ultimately were subsumed by conventional structures of meaning- and pleasure-production. Taymor's innovations in puppetry can be, as specified above, astonishing and profound. But in the recent Juan Darién, Taymor's creatures told Taymor's tales, not their own.

Beth Cleary
Macalester College

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