Puppet Performance Art

Think of your typical Italian opera. Now substitute a trance beat for the aria, a blank screen for the Venetian cityscape, a hand-crafted marionette for the buxom donna and art for her paramour.

Put all these elements together and you have the puppet opera created by French artist Pierre Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

A schoolhouse-style history lesson sans the rhyming cartoons: the Carpenter Center, designed to be an artwork unto itself, is the brainchild of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier—a self-created title meaning “the rooster” in French. Josep Sert, Spanish architect and the Design School dean at the time, commissioned Le Corbusier (affectionately called ‘Corbu’) to create the Carpenter Center despite reluctance from the Harvard administration. An international meeting of artistic minds, to say the least.

Huyghe’s project details the events in a 24-minute short film,  “Huyghe + Corbusier: Harvard Project.” The puppet opera, with its soundtrack of DJ scratches, depicts both the major players behind the creation of the Carpenter Center and contemporary art connoisseurs. Harvard is represented in a catch-all character named Harvard Dean of Deans, who physically mirrors both Darth Vader and a flying beetle. Linda Norden, associate curator at the Fogg Art Museum, describes the puppet opera as illustrating “Harvard’s relationships to living art.” She states that the creation of the Carpenter Center represented the “collision of two worlds.”

Norden is represented in the show as the lone female marionette. The mysterious egg-like structure beneath the Carpenter Center ramp served as the site of Huyghe’s live performance last month. VES concentrator William A.W. Parker ’07 says “the show was more of an experience. The enclosed space created a kind of lucid dreamscape for the fairy tale to take form.”