Handspring Puppet Company
| puppetry performance and scenic design | |
| Founded | circa 1981 |
| Founder | Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones |
| Headquarters | Locations in South Africa, England, and the United States, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Key people
|
Thys Stander |
| Website | www |
The Handspring Puppet Company is a puppetry performance and design company established in 1981 by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, situated in Cape Town, South Africa. Thys Stander is the company's chief puppet maker.
Jones and Kohler met at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. Both openly gay, they began dating soon after. At first, they designed puppets for children-targeted productions, which Jones initially disliked. Kohler "introduced him [Jones] to the west African tradition of puppetry for adults," working with Malcolm Purkey and Barney Simon, among others.
1987 saw their exhibition of "Unmasking the Puppet" at UNISA. Prior to that, Esther van Ryswyk directed their puppets in a play called Episodes of an Easter Rising (1985), based on David Lyttons's radio special of the same name. It premiered in Charleville-Mézières, France.
In 1997, they worked with William Kentridge on Ubu and the Truth Commission. It premiered in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 26 May 1997. Kentridge had been working for some years with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg, most notably on Woyzeck on the Highveld in 1993 and Faustus in Africa in 1996. The latter, according to Kentridge, was "a huge undertaking", after which he and the company were on the look-out merely for something small to "do and survive". Starting on 18 September 1998, Ubu and the Truth Commission played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for four performances.
Yaya Coulibaly's play Tall Horse (2006) toured Africa under the supervision and direction of the company. On 1 March 2011, Kohler and Jones demonstrated a hyena puppet used in Faustus in Africa (1995) at the TED 2011 event in Long Beach, California.
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Wikipedia