Puppetry in South Africa

Handspring Puppet Company

Performances: 1997 South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway, USA, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, UK
Handspring Puppet Company was founded in 1981 and has grown under the leadership of Artistic Director Adrian Kohler and Executive Producer Basil Jones for 30 years. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, the company provides an artistic home and professional base for a core group of performers, designers, theatre artists and technicians.  Handspring’s work has been presented in more than 30 countries around the world.

Taylor came to see great significance in the figurative role of the puppet, for its every motion was, in essence, tropical:

"The puppet draws attention to its own artifice, and we as audience willingly submit ourselves to the ambiguous processes that at once deny and assert the reality of what we watch. Puppets also declare that they are being "spoken through". They thus very poignantly and compellingly capture complex relations of testimony, translation and documentation apparent in the processes of the Commission itself."

Their contribution to South African puppetry since the 1980s has been not only to develop an indigenous form of iconic South African multimedia performance rooted in a skilled puppetry design and performance but also to put adult puppetry on the local map.

Their experimentations in crossover multi-disciplinarity with William Kentridge have set the standard for contemporary puppetry performance both locally and abroad. In the vaguely documented and defined puppetry traditions of South Africa, their work has stood as the guiding canon of contemporary South African puppetry for adult audiences, for the past twenty years.

As a developing art form, South African puppetry has come to the fore in the global visual performance scene largely due to the groundbreaking interdisciplinary work of The Handspring Puppet Company in collaboration with physical theatre director and fine artist William Kentridge since the early 1990s.

In 1981 a group of former art students formed The Handspring Puppet Company in Cape Town. After touring South Africa with a series of original plays for children, the company moved to Johannesburg in 1986 and worked in television and with directors of ‘straight’ theatre. Their work in collaboration with artists William Kentridge, such as Woyzek on the Highveld, Faustus in Africa, and Ubu and the Truth Commission, has been touring internationally since 1991.


Sources: http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubu_and_the_Truth_Commission#Plot

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