2024 Festival Archive: Wakka Wakka

Wakka Wakka:
Dead as a Dodo

January 20-21, 2024

The Biograph’s Začek McVay Theater

Presented by Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

With special support from: The Ferdi Foundation, Manaaki Foundation, Cheryl Lynn Bruce & Kerry James Marshall. With additional support from Cheryl Henson

 

Scholarship and Resources

Live and Let Die: Dead as a Dodo Is a Thrilling Musical Odyssey
That Suggests the Final Nostos Is Extinction (And That’s Okay)

An Essay by Jesse Njus

Premiering at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January 2024, Dead as a Dodo is a Virgilian, pop-rock odyssey through the extinction underworld. The third installment in Wakka Wakka’s Animalia trilogy, Dodo is the most meditative and perhaps (counterintuitively) the most optimistic of the three plays. While Animal R.I.O.T. and The Immortal Jellyfish Girl are both critical reflections on whether life can continue to survive on Earth, Dodo is a hero’s journey that slowly reimagines extinction not as a fate to be overcome but rather as destiny to be embraced—the next step that all life in the universe must eventually take.

Dodo opens with the cast of puppeteers huddled together in the center of the stage, surrounded by projections of a cave. The ground of the cave is formed by the bodies of the puppeteers, who are hooded and completely dressed in black but covered in sparkles so that their movement causes the cave to appear studded with diamonds. Out of the cave floor embodied by the puppeteers, a rod-puppet bone suddenly appears and begins to soar around the enclosure. In an attempt to capture the floating fossil, two stuffed cloth puppets push themselves out of the sparkly black soil by means of Bunraku-style puppeteering. The two new arrivals in the Bone Cave are both skeletons: one is the skeleton of a Neanderthal boy missing his right arm and left leg bones and the other is a complete Dodo skeleton. Upon catching the bone, the Boy tries desperately to attach it in place of his missing leg, but although the bone is nearly the right length, the single large bone is obviously unable to bend where his knee would be. The urgency of the Boy’s faltering attempts to walk on this new bone seems overwrought until he despairingly tells the Dodo that he is afraid of disappearing.

In Dodo, Wakka Wakka posits that extinction is not the end; true erasure means dissolving entirely out of existence and being forgotten. As extinct creatures’ bones dematerialize, they need to replace them with new bones or risk completely fading away. In their efforts to preserve the Boy, he and the Dodo have snuck into the Bone Cave, the private hunting ground of the Bone King and his daughter, the Bone Caller. After the Bone Caller discovers them and wrests the new bone away from the Boy, he realizes that his missing leg has been replaced by a limb composed of the same glittering substance as the cave. He is returning—dust to dust—to the primordial earth, and as he struggles to preserve the existence he knows with the Dodo, she suddenly starts growing feathers. While the Boy is dissipating, the Dodo is resurrecting.

Watching the puppets change over the course of the play is revelatory. The Boy’s skeleton is slowly replaced by twinkling black dirt, while the Dodo’s frame is replaced by flesh and feathers. The puppets’ metamorphoses remind spectators that all life changes as it ages, dies, and decays. Death and extinction are a necessary part of existence, and the reversal of the Dodo’s natural journey surprises and even frightens many of the denizens of the netherworld who repeatedly exclaim against it. Nonetheless, the Boy is determined to facilitate the Dodo’s return to life, and in an act of Orphean heroism, the Boy helps the Dodo fight through the obstacles of the underworld. They brave numerous strange creatures including the Bone King and his daughter (parallels to Hades and Persephone) and row down the Styx with the ferryman Charon, who appears as a friendly Venetian gondolier to guide them on the river. The journey is both magical and musical, filled with moments of great beauty, such as Charon’s enormous pet fish, a massive puppet that swims transcendently around the stage and appears frightening above the water and gorgeously iridescent when “under water” beneath a black light. The joyous music underscores the narrative connection to Orpheus, while providing rollicking moments that help offset the growing sense of tragedy that besets our hero.

Although the Boy excitedly watches the Dodo grow increasingly plump and less skeletal until she finally becomes a warm body, the Boy is unable to follow when she is unexpectedly pulled upward in a glowing beam. A single feather falls on the Boy, who is left alone in a ruptured afterlife. The center cannot hold; inhabitants of the various realms of extinction are swept across the stage as though blown by a whirlwind, the Styx has changed course, and a heartbroken Charon mourns his beautiful fish who has turned to shimmering dust. Something is deeply wrong, and the disintegration seems to be tied to the Dodo’s unexpected resurrection.

While the Dodo, unlike Eurydice, returns to the land of the living, the play critiques rather than celebrates this development. The Dodo is revived by three characters from Animal R.I.O.T. (Mr. Fox, Dr. Yellowfish, and the Walrus), who are clearly attempting to fix humanity’s blunders. Yet not all mistakes can simply be undone. Extinction, like death, cannot cavalierly be reversed, and attempting to alter it has unintended consequences. In Animal R.I.O.T. the three characters were anthropomorphic animals portrayed by a human actor wearing a mask, but their appearance in Dodo as small stuffed puppets severs their human connection, stressing that their misplaced attempts to repair humanity’s legacy has led their newly ascendent species to repeat humanity’s hubristic errors.

In keeping with a classical hero’s journey, Dodo’s ending is both tragic and cathartic. The Boy has been reduced to only his skull and ribcage when a giant Woolly Mammoth appears upstage, completely formed of glittering earth. The Mammoth carefully gives the Boy’s skull and rib cage to the puppeteers as the Boy fully transforms into a scintillating shadow, entirely composed of lustrous soil. As the Boy settles onto the Mammoth’s back, he explains that he must visit his friend. In the living world, the three resurrectionists declare that: “The age of the dodo has begun!” and then decide against resurrecting hominids in order to give other species a chance to thrive before humans kill everything. The Boy will never have a chance to join the Dodo, but perhaps that is as it should be. The Mammoth brings the Boy to visit the Dodo, and he tells her that he is proud of her (and her newly hatched chick!). It is not clear if the Dodo can still hear the Boy, but he explains that he can finally fly, and he is going to cross galaxies with the Mammoth.

If our world is going to end, it should end in style. Dodo is the most ambitious play of the Animalia Trilogy, which scales up over the course of the three presentations from the understated set and costumes of the solo-performance Animal R.I.O.T. to the full cast of puppeteers and use of special effects in Jellyfish and Dodo, which also includes animated projections and musical numbers. Several plays at the 2024 Chicago festival dealt with aging and dying, but only Dodo considered the death of a species, an ecosystem, and even a planet as part of the life cycle of the universe in which nothing is truly destroyed, only transmuted. One of the inhabitants of the afterlife who helps the Boy and the Dodo is a Keplerian astronomer, whose telescope seems out of place in a netherworld until one realizes that perhaps the realms of extinction consist not of jeweled substrate deep in the fossil layers but of stardust. This underworld is a mythic realm, and unlike Ishtar, Odysseus, and Aeneas before him, the Boy knows that his fate is not to return to life. Instead, he follows the path of Dante, who desperately wanted to reach Paradise and emerged from Hell at dawn on Easter morning to see the stars. The Boy has become one with the heavens; in the universe, nothing is extinguished, and we are all star stuff. 

Festival Performances

About the Performance

January 20-21, 2024
The Biograph’s Začek McVay Theater
2433 N. Lincoln Ave.

US Premiere

A marionette made of ice will melt your heart in Anywhere, an exquisite, landmark string-marionette work created by the French company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert. Freely inspired by Henry Bauchau’s novel “Oedipus on the Road,” Anywhere evokes the long wandering of Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone. The fallen Oedipus appears in the form of an ice puppet that gradually melts, then appears as mist and finally disappears in the forest, the place of clairvoyance. Anywhere traces with gentleness and strength a poetic journey, in black and white, of fire and ice, which speaks to us about our bodies, our environment, our fragilities, and our wanderings in the infinite circle of renewal.

Reviews + Interviews

The best things we saw at the 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, by Kimzyn Campbell, Irene Hsiao and Kerry Reid in the Chicago Reader

Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, 2024, by Joshua Minsoo Kim in Tone Glow

ChiIL Live Shows On Our Radar: Dead as a Dodo, by Bonnie Kenaz-Mara in ChilL Mama

Sixth Chicago Puppet Festival astonishes and delights, by Angela Allyn in Chicago Stage and Screen

Past Performances and Further Reading