The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella profiled Basil Twist in a recent issue, and the magazine’s online team visited Twist at his studio, which you can see in the video above (click on the image), and the profile itself is worth a read:

“The crucial point about puppets,” Twist told me, “is that they are real and unreal at the same time.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, many writers and visual artists (Alfred Jarry, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Sophie Taeuber-Arp), looking for something that was a little bit human, but much more art, made puppets, or works for puppets. The trend continues. Opera now routinely supplements its human casts with puppets, as in the Metropolitan Opera’s productions of “Madama Butterfly” and “The Magic Flute.” So do Broadway musicals, such as “The Addams Family” (for which Twist designed the puppets) and “The Pee-wee Herman Show” (where he helped), not to speak of Julie Taymor’s blockbuster “Lion King.” Some visual artists now use puppetry in a way that makes their work more haunting. Jim Dine has been making versions of Pinocchio for decades. The recent Quay Brothers show at the Museum of Modern Art included films of mechanical puppets performing vaguely obscene actions.

Twist doesn’t think much of the idea that puppetry is necessarily linked with the avant-garde. “The only connection is that both of them are marginalized,” he says. He seems to feel that insisting on the vanguard angle betokens a certain insecurity, an effort to raise puppetry’s status, buy it a fur coat. To him, puppetry is fine the way it is: modest. Still, you don’t see him performing at the Y. He’s been presented by Lincoln Center and the Spoleto Festival. As for there being no important relationship between puppetry and modernism, he is at this moment creating a show to the defining work of modernist music. And it is largely abstract.

Read the whole profile here (subscription required).