A Pinocchio Tale That Isn’t Wooden

A Pinocchio Tale That Isn’t Wooden

A review of Charlie Petch’s Daughter of Geppetto.
By Derek Newman-Stille

In their performance “Daughter of Geppetto”, Charlie Petch takes the fundamental idea of Pinocchio – “I want to be a real boy” – and turns it into a Trans tale, asking questions about what “real boy” means and the questions this poses about gender and performance.

Petch performs a one-person play, using multiple media including a sound board that lets them echo sounds and play with soundscapes to provide context for their act of storytelling, music performed by Petch, and shadow puppetry to invite the audience to think about ideas of echoed voices, overlapping waves of sound and the idea of puppetry itself (since Pinocchio is, ultimately, a puppet). Petch brings attention to the ways that theatre is made and the theatricality of theatre, breaking down the boundaries between audience and stage. They invite their audience to think about performance itself and the ways that we perform our identities off stage, pointing to the scripted way that we express gender in our society.

Like much of Petch’s work, “Daughter of Geppetto” defies simple categorization, encompassing theatrical performance, puppetry, musical performance, spoken word poetry, and fairy tale.

“Daughter of Geppetto” illustrates the craving and need for fairy tales in the Trans community and the power that fairy tales have to shift and change and adapt to new voices. For a community that is constantly being told about tradition and that we don’t fit into tradition, the idea of adapting fairy tale traditions for the Trans community is important because we need these stories. We need to play with our fairy tales and see ourselves in and through them.

“Daughter of Geppetto” is a powerful, evocative, and, yes, transformative tale. It is beautifully dark while also delightfully light and playful. It is new and innovative while also playing with and illustrating the magic of traditional tales.

 

To find out more about Charlie Petch, visit their website at http://www.charliecpetch.com

Check out a trailer for “Daughter of Geppetto” here https://youtu.be/YYt5NHfYB_U

Saved From The Music

Saved from the Music

A review of Jay Asher and Jessica Freeburg’s Piper (Penguin Random House, 2017)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Fairy tales have frequently invoked disability, often using the disabled body as a motivating point for stories of change and transformation. Jay Asher and Jessica Freeburg’s graphic novel Piper explores the question of what would happen if the Pied Piper of Hamelin encountered a young woman who is Deaf and therefore couldn’t hear the allure of his magical pipe. Maggie, a young Deaf woman who has been ostracised by her village, becomes a foil for the Pied Piper, a person who has a strength that counters that of the Pied Piper. She has the ability to resist control because of being Deaf.

Maggie became Deaf when children put her in a barrel when she was a child and throughout her life she experienced ostracism and violence from the rest of her community. When the Piper arrives in her town, the first thing he notices is the prevalence of violence and oppression in the community and the power that those in positions of authority or wealth exert over the rest of the community. He notices that the town has a rat infestation, which is has the ability to counter with his ability to summon rats with his pipe, but he also reads the imbalance of power in the town and wants vengeance for those who are attacked by the community. His own father died as a result of violence from a community that ostracized him and this has left the Piper aware of the violence that ostracism can visit on those who don’t conform.

Asher and Freeburg give us a modified version of the tale, giving further context to why the Piper eventually lures all of the children away from the village beyond the fact that the town doesn’t pay him for removing all of the rats.

The tale evokes disability again when the kidnapping of the village’s children is discovered after a disabled child is unable to keep up with the rest of the children and therefore escapes the Piper’s abduction, therefore situating this tale as one that uses disability and Deafness as symbolic media within the context of the tale, associating bodily difference as a way to demonstrate the town of Hamelin’s abuse toward disempowered groups.

This is also a fairy tale within a fairy tale since Maggie creates stories about those who have been violent toward her. She shifts the narratives that are imposed on her and remakes herself into a position of power by retelling her experiences as fairy tales. Ultimately, she shifts the tale of the Piper of Hamelin, her own tale, in order to modify it, remaking the story into the one that is familiar from legend and obscuring the reality of the tale.

To find out more about Piper, visit https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539282/piper-by-jay-asher-and-jessica-freeburg-illustrated-by-jeff-stokely/9780448493664/

Do Emperors Dream of Electronic Nightingales?

Originally Posted on Speculating Canada, here is my review of Michelle Sagara West’s “The Nightingale”.

Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

Do Emperors Dream of Electronic Nightingales?
A review of Michelle West’s ‘The Nightingale’ in Once Upon a Galaxy Edited by Wil McCarthy, Martin H. Greenberg, and John Helfers (Daw, 2002).
By Derek Newman-Stille

Michelle Sagara West (here writing as Michelle West) takes Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” from once upon a time into the (un)Happily Ever After, transforming myth into science fiction. Andersen’s tale is one of nature versus artificiality, pitting the natural songs of a living nightingale against the regularity of a clockwork nightingale. Both are able to produce music, but the variety and passion of the biological Nightingale surpasses that of the artificial.

Michelle Sagara West plays with this contrast between the natural and artificial by setting her tale In the future. West introduces the nightingale to the audience first, narrating from her perspective. She is constructed entirely as an object of the Emperor, an extension of his…

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