Hamid Rahmanian: Song of the North

Revitalizing Classics on the Modern Stage:
Puppetry and Multimedia in Hamid Rahmanian’s Song of the North

An Essay by Yiwen Wu

The vibrant and colorful performance of Song of the North began before it began. When the audience members walked into the Studebaker Theater at The Fine Arts Building, the eight puppeteers had already started warming up on the stage. We saw hundreds of finely carved shadow puppets being passed around in their hands. There were two tables placed side by side across the stage, upon which two projectors behind two wooden frames faced the audience. It was unclear where the actual stage would be for the performance until a big screen descended and covered the “backstage” entirely. The magic of Song of the North lay in the excitement of seeing the impeccable live performance of puppetry on a large-scale cinematic screen, without knowing how it was  done behind that screen. 

A multimedia performance, Song of the North brought together shadow play and digital animation. It was a feast for the eyes, wherein the digital animation led us into a flamboyant and dream-like world while the crisp images of the shadow puppetry punctuated the characters’ movements. The shadows, in particular, were combinations of two-dimensional images and three-dimensional bodies. Sometimes, volume was added by attaching strips of fabric to the flat shadow figures. Other times, the presence of the actual human bodies provided the dimensional sense. In these instances , the puppeteers wore exquisitely detailed puppets directly on their heads like masks. When these puppeteers were draped with lacy  shawls or other translucent fabrics, their projected shadows were particularly visually captivating, balancing the sharp contours of the carved puppets with the soft edges of textiles. Throughout the show, the puppets moved so seamlessly and so harmoniously with the background animation that I even wondered if the performance was all a recording rather than a live show.

After all, the mechanism of the performance remained an enigma until its very end when we had a peek into the backstage, once again onscreen.¹ Its creator, Hamid Rahmanian, shared after the performance that there were in total 483 puppets playing against 208 animated backgrounds. In the performance, the projector doubled as a light source for the digital animation as well as the shadow performance. The space between the projector and its projection was a space for play, where the puppeteers manipulated hundreds of puppets in various movements. The wooden frames on the tables in front of the projectors functioned as reference points for the ends of the projection, ensuring that all the images were contained within the screen. 

The backstage was divided into different layers of image-making, in a composition style that is often used for animation effects. In his seminal work, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, Thomas Lamarre calls our attention to animation’s usage of layering images on a specific kind of multiplanar machine, as opposed to cinematic filming where the mobile camera is the adjustable hand behind the visual (2009). In this puppet play, as well as in animations in general, the sense of movement was achieved within and between layers of the image (for example: a human character in the front appears to be running when it is the background that is moving horizontally.) It is probably not an accident that such animetic thinking was applied to Song of the North, given that the creator used to work at Disney, where the first multiplanar machine was invented. In the case of Song of the North, Rahmanian cleverly utilized the structure of animetic composition, while at the same time achieving  more flexibility by leaving open space for the shadow puppets to freely manipulate their distances between the screen and the projector, thus creating an illusion of zooming in and out. The final performance, then, can be also seen as an intermedial artwork where different material forms and their underlying formal structures mix with each other. 

Song of the North was Rahmanian’s second installment of his Shahnameh-themed shadow-play trilogy, adapting Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings, a tenth-century tale. For such a historical text, the creative team also faced the issue of adapting the story to a twenty-first century audience. Scenes of violence, in particular, were reconsidered and rewritten. Interestingly, these new scenes ended up becoming the most visually spectacular ones in the play: for example, a rather atrocious animal massacre scene was substituted by a supernatural encounter with the demons in the underworld. The vibrant colors of the performance, in the end, not only provide pleasure to our eyes but also encourage us to critically engage and reflect,  breathing new magic into the old story.