In Conversation
with Patrick Sims – director: Hilum
Interviewed and submitted by:
Neha Tickoo
Vijay Singh
One of the attractions of this 6th edition of ITFoK is Hilum - a tragic comedy in puppet
performance presented by The Anttiaclastes – a puppet theatre company based in Allier , France
Patrick began theatre at the age of around twenty. He began
with Cinema, especially with animation and switched over to puppetry shortly
after. Even in his current engagements with videos the end result is a live
performance. Puppetry gives him freedom to be autonomous. He calls himself a Puppet
Factor as someone whose work in a performance revolves around puppets, robots,
and sometimes even in animals. His contribution as a puppet factor is to be
able to see even mundane objects as puppets and essentially as performing
bodies and devise means to incorporate them in work.
Puppetry that is generally believed to have been originated
about 3000 years ago is one of the most contemporary forms for Patrick. He
likes the “anarchic quality” of this medium that is the “autonomous ability” of
the puppetry to mix up with other forms to convey the message of revolt and
satire. Patrick studied traditional Java shadow puppetry and informed himself
of different traditions of puppetry around the world including that of India
but he does not dwell on a traditional grammar for his performance; rather he
is interested in using objects of different shapes and size and bring the
element of animation out of those to create an effect of surreal quality.
According to the director, the play is based on the meaning
of “Hilum” which is a part of liver, anatomically, understood as a depression
of fissures where vessels nerves or ducts enter a bodily organ. One significant
example is the belly button or the Umbilical cord.
Taking a metaphoric cue from the swirls of and the stages
of a washing machine cycle, Patrick believes that he could visualise a washing
machine as the incubator or the contained universe. Hilum is a performance that
ambitiously navigates along vivid imaginations aroused from the grotesqueness
of the human body and the domesticity in which it houses itself. Centrally, the
conflicts of a family are highlighted through the conflicts arising between the
child’s play and the washer woman’s chores.
Hilum is a devised performance by the French Puppeteer company
called Les Anttliaclasts. It has been performed several many
times at various places including Germany
and the ICA (Institute
of Contemporary Arts ) London
The formalistic structure that this performance follows is
that of marionettes themselves being the manipulators. The autonomous nature
immersed in contemporariness of this performance emerges with the use of
popular elements such as the voice of Elvis Presley and a large American car,
apart from making use of nursery rhymes, pictures of cartoons, and partial
objects. All these and other references to the expressions of childhood form a
part of the performance.
The performance builds a compelling comment on the societal
sub-structures of a family and brings forth the anxieties of a little child
trapped in the relationships of the domestic household.
Culturewars. org says in its review about the performance
at London
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