The Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival published one of my essays on Book of Mountains and Seas, an opera composed by Huang Ruo with puppetry by Basil Twist. Read Elemental Animisim: (De)/Constructing the World in the festival archives.
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Elemental Animism: A Ritualistic Opera (De)/Constructs the World
An Essay by Marsian De Lellis
Gnarled, petrified branches levitate and materialize into a colossal figure that chases after the sun. Transfixed, we watch as the giant struggles to breathe and ultimately disintegrates before our eyes. Book of Mountains and Seas is a ritualistic opera featuring twelve singers, two percussionists, and six puppeteers in which we repeatedly witness a world that is created and destroyed in plain sight. The production sources ancient Chinese myths compiled in the fourth century BCE to unpack humanity’s precarious position in nature. Its epic genesis stories, spanning millennia, and themes of ecological conflict—conveyed through the medium of puppetry—are apropos in our consumerist climate of planned obsolescence, at a moment when our relationships with objects have come into crisis.
This contemporary adaptation is a synesthetic collaboration between visual theater–maker Basil Twist and composer Huang Ruo, whose songs are vividly imagistic. The staging is strikingly sparse. Upon entrance, attendees are greeted by a minimalist configuration: a vast ivory scrim shielded by a dark circle. Instrumentation mirrors this simplicity, with designated areas for percussive elements—drums, chimes, and vibrational bowls. Instead of a full orchestra, Huang streamlined to the most primitive sounds, stating during a talk back at a Los Angeles performance of the piece that I attended, “All civilization starts with voice and percussion.”
Singers from ARS NOVA Copenhagen emerge from darkness. One by one, their faces are illuminated from the ethereal glow of handheld tablets displaying the score. Twist’s use of materials is similarly elemental and poetic. His main ingredients are silk, rice paper lanterns, and driftwood—suggestive of metamorphosis—something that once existed as a tree but has been shaped by water and time.
Twist’s driftwood pieces are not as natural as they appear—adding another layer of complexity to the design dramaturgy. Constructed from cardboard, boned with PVC, and endowed with clips, they can attach in different configurations. Outer bark is fossilized from polystyrene batting, “destroyed with a heat gun,” he explained at a panel discussion that was part of the Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium at the festival. “It twists and curdles and has this fantastic organic quality.” At the end, the bark is entombed in resin. Despite their naturalistic appearance, these materials are paradoxically crafted through a “really stinky, toxic process,” he added.
Twist’s puppetry allows us to view the story from a macro perspective, contemplating the cyclical nature of existence, where particles assemble, take on identities, organize into consciousness, die, and reemerge in the ecosystem. The Earth’s formation is illustrated by the giant Pangu, whose body transmutes into assorted components of the planet upon his death.
Shoulder to shoulder, the chorus echoes a cacophony of primordial chaos. When they split apart, they reveal Pangu’s dislocated face made of driftwood. As puppeteers reverently lower Pangu, his emerald lantern eyes dim and roll back, leaving an inanimate pile of raw materials. Having recently experienced the death of a parent up close, the image resonates with me on a primal level. This conversion from life to lifelessness touches a fundamental part of the human experience in the inevitable cycle of creation and decay that we are all part of.
Puppeteers then reconfigure Pangu’s pieces into a mountain range, pulling silk from lanterns—tears that weep into endless rivers. The lanterns radiate amber and cerulean, floating above the highlands as they reincarnate into the sun and moon. The polyphonic spectrum of voices drop out and movement ceases. A final image of the newly created Earth retains hints of Pangu’s face, reminding us of its origin.
Another myth depicts how ten suns once scorched the Earth until the god Hou Yì shot down nine, leaving just one to create the light of day. The gradual emergence and elimination of each sun, represented by glowing, hovering lanterns, creates a sense of cosmic wonder. Their protracted trajectories, along with overlapping choral voices and intermittent finger cymbals, cultivate a meditative, hypnotic atmosphere. In an age in which we consume media in fleeting moments—where anyone or anything can go viral for fifteen seconds—one might expect a deliberate, unhurried procession of lanterns, conveying geological time, to feel drawn out. However, the execution had the visual grandeur needed to captivate even the most attention-deficient observers.
The final segment portrays the giant Kuā Fù’s futile quest to capture the sun, a metaphor for ambition and relentless pursuits of unattainable goals. Agitated beats activate the diligent puppeteers, who, like worker ants with a hive mind, swiftly assemble Kuā Fù’s figure from scattered salvage. Evoking a sense of séance and bondage, we watch in voyeuristic awe as they hoist the giant—strings visible—resurrecting him from a resting assemblage into a towering athlete. Dysregulated, Kuā Fù runs in place, and although he desperately drinks from silk rivers that appear around him, his defiant stance ultimately succumbs to dehydration. A leg falls off and he continues to fragment until his remains become unrecognizable. Forests of peach blossom trees sprout in the form of falling confetti-like petals, as a result of his death, during the curtain call.
In this production, text is secondary to visual storytelling. Language is decorative, integrated into projection design as part of the overall composition. What is sung is partially Chinese and partly made-up language. Huang has termed this a pre-human “celestial language.” He elucidated in L.A. that whether it’s “what the singers are chanting [or] what the birds are speaking,” the audience can “imagine what the text is about,” regardless of what language they speak.
I have begun to reconsider much of Twist’s work in terms of abstraction, particularly in how he uses puppetry to transmit profound emotional states without relying so heavily on narrative or dialogue. Instead, Twist creates sensory experiences that oftentimes transcend literal storytelling. His compositions, which reframe simple objects into powerful symbols, arouse visceral responses. Ultimately, Twist’s productions invite viewers to engage on an intuitive, emotional level. His collaborations with composers, such as Huang, enhance these sensory experiences, blending auditory and visual elements seamlessly.
Book of Mountains and Seas was presented in conjunction with The Chicago Opera Theater and Beth Morrison Projects at The Studebaker Theatre January 26-28, 2024. Puppeteers included Emily Batsford, Lute Breuer, Rosa Elling, Rachel Schapira, Ben Elling, and Ashley Winkfield.
The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival is celebrated for consistently excellent and unforgettable puppetry experiences. It is an oasis of fascination and artistry — representing a breadth of style, quality of work and spectacular depth of artistic achievement from the US and abroad.