Dance is not one of the art forms I have ever immersed myself in, so I only occasionally read articles by a Dance critic. Joan Acocella, however, is also a great book reviewer and I know I should always at least glance at what she publishes. This was one of those times when I was pulled in, and could not stop reading (or watching; click above to go to a short video based on the subject of her review).

Her brief description of a series of puppet shows captures my attention, in spite of my not having seen a puppet show in decades. First, it has to do with lost and found heritage being valorized by a talented artist–a variation on what we call entrepreneurial conservation. And the mix of written and video presentation of the review is a fine example of the rapid paced march of an old school, paper-based magazine to the drum of its new digital platform, something we can appreciate as the same happens in our sector (travel and hospitality). In that sense even the title of the work being reviewed, “Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed,” echoes the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction.

FORGOTTEN FUTURIST PUPPET SHOWS

Dan Hurlin stages Fortunato Depero’s unproduced plays at Bard SummerScape.

In 2013, Dan Hurlin, a performance artist and puppet artist, was working at the American Academy in Rome when he stumbled on evidence that during the First World War Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), one of the Italian Futurists, had written four puppet plays that were never produced. Where were they? Hurlin travelled to Depero’s home town, Rovereto, at the foot of the Italian Alps, to examine the man’s archive. “I sat at this big table, wearing those white cotton gloves they make you wear,” Hurlin remembers. “The librarian brought out a huge box, full of sheets of paper, each covered with tissue paper. And I turned the sheets, and there they were—the plays. I practically wet my pants.” What the box contained was pages and pages of stage directions, and also set designs. There was no dialogue, and there were no drawings of the puppets. This last discovery, I thought, must have been a blow to Hurlin, but he reported it to me with no apparent sorrow. I should have known. He is a puppet designer, and he was not unhappy to have to design the puppets himself. They are a triumph of cubo-constructivo-Bauhausianism—pear-shaped heads, conical legs—all of this in Fisher-Price reds and greens and yellows, and sporting nice little accessories: an aigrette, a cigarette.

It is enough to read that first paragraph, and then watch and listen to Dan Hurlin and see some of what he is talking about, before reading the rest of the brief review of his show at Bard SummerScape:

Read the whole review here. And if that make you wish you had been able to attend, and also to put it in very specific context, have a look here:

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — The timing could not have been worse — or more perfect. A series of short plays written nearly a century ago acquired an icy and unexpected urgency when they received their belated world premiere last week. And an audience was frozen into the kind of stillness that no one dares interrupt, not even with a startled gasp.

The cause of such extreme discomfort was a scene in, of all things, a puppet show, which runs through Sunday at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College here as part of itsSummerScape festival. True, this work of cryptically stylized vignettes, written in 1917 by the Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero and midwifed into stage life by the American designer and director Dan Hurlin, bears the title of “Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed.”

But that name could describe a comedy of anarchy starring the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges. Certainly, the first half of this 75-minute production — enacted by toddler-size Bunraku puppets manipulated by a visible team of performers — would seem to suggest a rarefied variation on such rowdy fare.

A chicly dressed drunken lady in red (albeit one with a single peacock-feather-like eye and a turnip-shaped head) struggles to find her footing on a shifting red staircase and falls; a husband and wife (green-skinned and bespectacled) progress from what looks like an everyday domestic argument into increasingly agitated warfare that peaks with their removing each other’s arms.

The gray-haired woman seated near me watched these activities with the audible delight of a chuckling child at a Punch and Judy show. But like everyone else, she fell silent when a dapper, portly puppet suddenly loomed over an upstage wall of screens. He was holding a red rifle, which he trained on an animated corps of hand puppets gathered below. One by one, they fell over, as a projected image tallied the body count.

In prefatory remarks to the audience on Friday night, the festival’s director of theater programs, Gideon Lester, warned that the fragmented stories of “Demolishing” would bring to mind the “terrible events of the last few days and weeks.” (The fatal shootings in Minnesota, Baton Rouge and, the night before, Dallas were still fresh to the point of rawness.)

But because this was taking place on the sort of college campus where syllabuses could be tagged with “trigger warnings,” I was skeptical. How upsetting could an esoteric puppet show be, even one from an Obie-winning artist like Mr. Hurlin, whose previous subjects have included the bombing of Hiroshima?

But “Demolishing” — the text of which was discovered by Mr. Hurlin during a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome — would be harrowing at any point during the past century. It was written during World War I, and that epochal conflict no doubt informed these plays’ vision of a world of mechanized death-dealing, a point that Mr. Hurlin underscores with video footage toward the production’s end…