From Josiah Meigs and Me, 2000 [Enlarge in New Window]

Janie Geiser: Josiah Meigs and Me: A Song Cycle for Puppets

For the average American, puppets usually bring to mind images of Pinocchio, the Muppets, or other impossibly happy creatures from childhood. Film and puppet artist Janie Geiser knows all the stereotypes associated with puppetry, but she pays them no mind. In the many puppet shows she has created in two decades of work, Geiser has consistently demonstrated not only puppetry's unique potential for telling very human stories but also its essential magic.

"I have always been attracted to puppetry because you are not confined by gravity or human scale as you are in traditional theater," says Geiser. "That opens up a whole range of artistic possibilities."

Experimenting with possibilities is Geiser's stock in trade, and though the LA-based artist isn't much for labels, there is little doubt that she is perhaps today's leading innovator in postmodern puppetry. In most of her shows and films, Geiser uses puppets not just to tell stories but to deconstruct experience and to delve into recesses of psychological experience and mood.

For the performance Ether Telegrams (1999), loosely based on three stories from Edith Wharton's collection of ghost stories, Geiser utilized puppets and 16mm film clips to relate the story of a woman's envy of her husband's first wife, who is dead but communicates with him through a series of letters. The piece's chilly atmosphere, emphasized by a monochromatic color scheme, conjured a whole climate of anxiety that related the Victorian-era's obsession with death, ghosts, and the afterlife. And in her films The Secret Story (1996), Lost Motion (1999), and Immer Zu (1997), Geiser used puppet-like figures to convey ideas and emotions that accompany the human struggle to make sense of childhood memories and unconscious drives. Geiser's latest puppet project is Josiah Meigs and Me: A Song Cycle for Puppets, a collaboration with singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt. The piece was presented as a work in progress at Arts at St. Ann's in Brooklyn in 2001.

Gifted but troubled, Josiah Meigs was a man whose life story has enough complexity and truth to appeal to an artist of Geiser's sensibility. Meigs (1757-1822) was a brilliant thinker, adept at mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. He was a writer, a newspaper editor, and at one point the Surveyor General of the U.S. under President James Madison. He was perhaps best known, however, as the first president of the University of Georgia, in which capacity he distinguished himself as a man of integrity and boundless intelligence. But Meigs was also a free thinker who espoused no religious beliefs. His goal was to make the University of Georgia a secular institution. The Protestant-packed board of trustees saw differently and sent Meigs packing. He died in near poverty.

"It's a very American kind of story," says Geiser. "A person of integrity wants to do the right thing, and they come up against the usual obstacles of money and power. Meigs's life offers many analogies to artistic, political, and economic life today."

The almost routine tragedy of the story is part of its appeal. Indeed, Geiser explains that Chesnutt chose Meigs as the focus of the song cycle because the man reminded him of his own father, a hardworking union man who lost all of his benefits and pension following a plant closing.

The staging, says Geiser, mirrors and extends the structure of the song cycle. Among its various elements, the set includes a toy theater with cut-outs drawn from 19th-century folk paintings, scientific diagrams, and book illustrations. The set also revolves and has different staging areas for hand and shadow puppets and other figures. Meigs changes throughout the piece in concert with Chesnutt's music, appearing sometimes as a tiny hand puppet, and at other times as a giant. The show incorporates 16mm film clips, and a proscenium made of twigs frames the set. "It's a modernist version of folk history," says Geiser with a laugh.

Chesnutt, an acclaimed troubador of narrative-driven songs about the broken and disaffected, has composed 14 works for the cycle, which he performs solo on guitar and synthesizer. The songs, says Geiser, "are like the story: melancholy, but there is humor, too."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | History | California | 2000