Freer attributes his early interest in out-of-the-box theatre to the time of his life where most of us incorrectly imagine that we’re going to “find ourselves” – high school. “I was in all of the plays,” Freer recalls, “and funnily enough every teacher I ever had through different schools and different years were all into the latest experimental techniques. So even from a young age I was given a pretty interesting insight into making theatre that is quite out there and quite exploratory.” Freer eventually got sick of what he cynically describes as “the whole self-conscious acting thing” and shortly after joined the now-defunct performance troupe Splinters Theatre of Spectacle, where he met Cady and Terrill. After being involved in a performance company that used objects and costumes to tell a story, Freer’s theatrical world was opened wide. Describing his breaking away from Splinters to forge his own path with Cady and Terrill, Freer says “it was just growing up; a coming of age kind of thing. Just realising that we wanted to really push a style of theatre that was specifically giant puppets. The evolution of dreams and people and time. [Snuff Puppets] just grew out of that, and it just kept growing and growing. Literally, the puppets got bigger.”
So big in fact, that Snuff Puppets have to be operated from the inside. The performers put the puppets on like clothes. “It’s the opposite of manipulating the puppets from the outside,” Freer explains. “They’re like costumes, but they have ropes and all kinds of levers on the inside; they’re quite mechanical.” And they’re quite gigantic: cow puppets bigger than cows, crocodile puppets that could eat a real crocodile, human puppets that tower over busses. The scale of the puppets is one of Snuff’s most distinctive features; the rough and near-grotesque form of the puppets is another.
“There’s a very handmade aesthetic to our work. They’re quite obviously human made and presented – the very opposite to a slick, polished product.” As the chief designer of the puppets, Freer embraces the free form approach. “The puppets do actually present themselves as you’re building them. You realise what you’re actually making as you’re making it, instead of working to a strict plan.”
And just as the puppet’s design comes to life as it’s being created, so does the story that puppet will help to tell. “The stories for the shows come from the actual puppets,” says Freer. “It’s a process of making the puppets first, and then seeing what they can do, and then making stories from that. It’s a bit different from having a finished script and then making everything to that – in fact, it’s almost the other way around. It’s quite interesting because who knows what might come out of a rehearsal period with a whole bunch of big puppets?”
From humble beginnings born of just two puppet heads, Snuff Puppets has since put on dozens of full and roaming shows across the globe, from Scandinavia to Korea to the US and back again. Winning accolades and awards alike, their shows are essentially a collaboration of puppetry, live music, and visual theatre. While each show does have vague narratives lines, Freer and his team are wary of sticking to a standard narrative structure. Opting instead for a focus on physical theatre and music, Freer explains that, “music is really important. There’s not a lot of language, so music almost becomes like the voice of the puppets at times.” It is perhaps this lack of a scripted dialogue that has made Snuff Puppets so internationally successful. “Because there is limited language spoken in our shows, it moves through different cultures more easily.”
But for now, Snuff Puppets is at home in Footscray about to unveil their newest puppet star, unbelievably even bigger and more elaborate than anything they’ve made to date. Aptly named Everybody, (s)he’s a dual-gender, multi-racial 23-foot human. Everybody the puppet is the star of Everybody the show. This giant human is made up of dozens of smaller anatomically shaped puppets: hands, feet, kidneys, and yes, even both sets of genitals. While creating movement with these unusual but very familiar forms and accompanied by a live band, Snuff Puppet’s trademark sense of anarchic black humour is never far away.
Everybody is an exploration into the human body, how we all possess one, and how similar we all really are. “It’s about everybody,” Freer reiterates. “The physical body that we all share unifies us all. That encompasses a lot of ideas about the very nature of human existence. We’re using that concept to tell the stories.” It is set to be an audience-immersive work as the performance space is the same room in which Everybody was built it. Apprehensive to give too much away though, Freer simply hopes “to give people an experience that they never could have imagined.”
BY KATE MCCARTEN
