Free Neighborhood Tour with Poncili Creación and Sandglass Theater Co. and Doppelskope

The “Chaotic Tranquility” of Poncili Creación

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Poncili Creación fully delivered their spectators into a theater of cruelty, unleashing what they call, in a properly Artaudian epigram, “chaotic tranquility.” Their show, Hungry Garden, is most simply a series of monsters eating each other. The show began with a few small flower puppets on sticks that bounced across the stage (and into the audience—one landed on my shoulder and asked for a sip of my coffee) making silly noises. Each movement of the puppet was punctuated by improvised musical accompaniment, created at the “whim of [the musician’s] own fun and creativity.” As the show progressed, however, each creature was pursued by an even bigger one who gobbled up, dismembered, or battled the preceding one. The show, presented as a part of the festival’s Free Neighborhood Tour, was attended primarily by young children and their families. The kids swarmed the apron of the stage in one giant morass while parents took their seats in chairs behind them. 

Children and parents alike screamed with horrified glee as each new monster appeared. Every shriek, held between genuine terror and unbridled delight, captured something of the shattering, vital life force that Artaud called “cruelty”: “that immediate and violent action which the theater should possess” ([1938] 1958: 84). Monsters stole children’s coats, munching on them before pooping them out while children jumped up to retrieve their digested and excreted belongings. The young audience members grabbed puppets from the puppeteers and held onto them until another puppet would reach back into the audience, gobbling up these rogue puppets after snatching them from their temporary charges. As puppet heads flew, eager spectators would scramble to fetch them and deliver them back to the puppeteers. For the most part, the children had an intuitive sense of where they could interrupt the story and where they were invited to facilitate it. Occasionally, however, children would climb onto the stage, the boundary between audience and performers having been largely dissolved, and the puppeteers would yell “Parent!” and point at the runaway young ones until they were retrieved. Such violations of the typical contract between audience and performer were welcomed and celebrated

Many have debated whether or not Artaud’s cruelty entailed literal violence. “A little real life blood is immediately necessary to manifest this cruelty” he tells us while also claiming that he wants to capture the “magical liberty” of dreams, not “a servile copy of reality” ([1938] 1958: 84-88). Poncili Creación also activated this fault line. At one point a giant bird-like puppet emerged at the back of the audience, its tall neck towering over us. With its pink body and yellow beak it slowly threatened to topple over into the audience with each giant peck. Whenever a larger puppet would appear than the one before it, the audience would break out in a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as the monsters would do slo-mo battle. As the giant bird puppet swung its neck around, threatening to lose its balance, some cheered on the ensuing battle while others shrieked as they dodged the puppet’s beak. At one point, a puppet monster died and was sent out to be carried through the audience in mourning as we all wailed in grief. One puppet lost a tooth—a common casualty for Hungry Garden, where often puppets need repairs between shows. 

Of course, puppet violence is not real violence, even as Poncili Creación invited very real destruction of their puppets. They did awaken, however, “everything that is in crime, love, war, or madness” (Artaud, [1938] 1958: 86) They invited revolt, rebellion, and upheaval and were not afraid of the chaos that they awoke in their spectators. Some teeth would be lost in the process. At the end, Poncili Creación thanked their sponsors—a now overly familiar genre for all theatergoers who are more commonly addressed as donors than spectators. Poncili Creación subverted the genre. Their sponsors: “the power of representation” and “giving new life to discarded trash!” Anyone has access to their theater of cruelty; anyone can instill in their spectators the will to fight. “If we can do it with a shoe, we can do it to reality” they told us.