PUTNEY — Puppeteer and educator Finn Campman is coming home for Thanksgiving.
On Saturday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m., Sandglass Theater, a 60-seat performance space that specializes in combining puppets with music, actors and visual imagery, will showcase Campman's Of Bread and Paper.
Campman, of Putney, had been an integral member of Sandglass from when he first began working with puppets there about 25 years ago until his teaching career made touring with the company impossible.
Inspired by Roma folk tales, Of Bread and Paper is a show played simply with paper figures, light, and shadows.
“It tells the story of a poor refugee trying to find his way home,” says Campman. “His exile is self imposed but enforced by the struggles of the world: poverty, conflict, indecision, and love.”
A storyteller tells of a paper man who has nothing but a small round of bread. As he seeks his fortune, he is confronted by a dream that seems to unfold his future, a future that holds his true love, a child, and the need to return home.
As he is released from the dream, he finds himself confronted with the ghost of his future in the form of the storyteller himself.
“It is a play made of fairy tales and shadows and, like One Thousand and One Nights, the story unfolds within itself, revealing layers of narrative,” says Campman.
“This performance is wonderfully representational of the sentiment of the holiday, and depicts a generous, thoughtful and beautiful journey of the soul,” says Shoshanna Bass, who handles the press for Sandglass. “This evocative piece, which played to sold-out audiences at the 2012 Puppets in the Green Mountains festival, invites you to enter a world of light and shadow where layers of meaning are glimpsed and gradually revealed,” she says in a news release.
Campman studied printmaking and literature at Sarah Lawrence College. Since then, he has worked with Roman Paska at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, he has taught puppet construction and design at Helsinki College of Art and Design, and has worked as an artist in residence at Hamilton College in Clinton. N.Y.
He is co-artistic director of Company of Strangers, whose production Moth and Moon won a citation of excellence in 2002 from the North American center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA). He has toured Scandinavia, Portugal, Hungary, Germany, France, Spain, and Israel. Campman has presented his work in two Puppetry In The Green Mountains festivals, which take place in the region every other year.
He teaches language arts and fine arts to seventh- and eighth-graders at Hilltop Montessori Middle School in Brattleboro.
The making of a puppeteer
“I have been making theater and puppets with Sandglass since 1991,” says Campman. His interest in puppetry began when he was in high school and saw a performance by the ensemble - actually only three people - of Sandglass founder Eric Bass.
He was “absolutely overwhelmed,” he said. “I immediately went home and began building puppets.”
Campman put his interest in puppetry aside long enough to study philosophy, poetry, and printmaking in college.
“I was working setting type in New York City when I discovered that they were looking for a builder at Sandglass,” he says. “I moved back to Vermont to work there.”
Starting as a builder and backstage technician, Campman developed into one of the most gifted puppeteer artists at Sandglass, as well as an inspiring teacher.
He taught puppet and object manipulation for six summers at Sandglass Theater's Summer Intensive. To more securely support his growing family, Campman began teaching at Hilltop Montessori more than a decade ago.
With great regret, he had to leave the company when the demands of teaching made the commitment to touring no longer feasible.
“Touring, I would be out up to 100 days a year,” explains Campman, absences that he could not integrate into his schedule at Hilltop. “When I told Sandglass I had to stop touring, I felt like a lost family member.”
Campman loves teaching at Hilltop, but it does take up most of his time.
“Nonetheless, I still strive to find a place for puppetry,” he said. “I need those hands-on objects for sanity. Puppets will always be a part of my life.”
Creating a puppet show can take a long time to develop and realize.
“I make my own puppets,” Campman says. “I tend to work visually. I come up with an image or material I want to explore,” he added.
Campman has long been interested in the folk tales of the Roma people, the itinerant ethnic group that used to be known as gypsies (a name that is now considered a racial slur). He wanted to create a show around them.
However, Of Bread and Paper is an original tale.
“Since could not find a single Roma folktale I wanted to present, I created one of my own,” adds Campman. “But for it I have called on the language and themes central to the Roma folklore literature. In addition, Of Bread and Paper is about bread, sharing and touring, things that were important to the Roma people. ”
He said that his production concerns a young man, who is “if not naive, then kind of out to seek his fortune.”
“Our hero, though special magic, reaches into his pocket and finds he has bread, but only one piece at a time,” Campman said.
“Structurally, the story is played across three levels. First, there is the hero himself, which I play, dressed in a paper hat and coat. Next, there is the same figure, but now as a small puppet figure. Finally, there is the figure transformed in a dream. So, as in the One thousand and One Nights, what we have is story within a story within a story.”
Campman feels that, while not a fable with a moral, the piece's lesson of sharing bread makes it a good piece for Thanksgiving, so he's delighted to be able to return to Sandglass and present Of Bread and Paper on this particular weekend.
“It is quite an honor,” said Campman. “For years and years, that slot was dedicated to [Sandglass co-founder] Eric Bass's Autumn Portraits, a moving piece which I have seen many times. I feel the weight of responsibility to live up to the tradition set for those seasonal performances.”
“Of Bread and Paper is not a new show,” he added. “I have been touring the piece for five years now and perform it about four or five times a year.”
“This show was made to be easy to tour. Everything was made out of paper and scissors - the puppets and even much of my costume - so all could fit into a simple suitcase.
The production has a strong unified visual look. “It is all made with craft paper, so there is a real unified aesthetic,” he added.
After the Sandglass performance, Campman will be taking Of Bread and Paper on the road for a series of performances throughout New England.
But he thinks the timing of his Putney performance at his former theater company gives his show an extra resonance.
“It becomes a beautiful little story for Thanksgiving,” he said.