A working life: the puppeteer
Puppetry helped Corina Bona conquer a major phobia and revitalised her career. She talks about the job of bringing inanimate figures to life
Corina Bona is retraining me to count to 10. With my right hand buried inside the head of Treelo – a fluffy green and blue lemur from the kids' TV show Bear in the Big Blue House – I snap its mouth open and shut as we lip sync through the numbers. We get as far as three before she interrupts.
"Look at your puppet so you can see what he's really doing," she instructs me, "so that the mouth is really opening when you say the numbers."
Treelo's head, I realise, is bobbing helplessly all over the place. "It's important to understand that the top of your hand is where the eyes are and your focus is," she goes on, "so it's really key to make your thumb do the work. Otherwise, you flap the head up and the eyes lose the focus."
Prior to being salvaged from a charity shop by Bona and converted into a puppet, Treelo was once little more than a discarded old stuffed toy. The transformation is a quietly magical thing in itself, it occurs to me, given the powers of expression she has bestowed on him. But Treelo earns his keep, accompanying his new owner on the puppetry workshops she holds with autistic schoolchildren. "They recognise him and feel more comfortable with him," she says, fondly. "He's quite a friendly little chappie."
Her company, Little Ray Puppets, is based at Coexist Studios, a once- abandoned office block now repopulated by creative, community and charity workers in the achingly cool Bristol district of Stokes Croft – it even has its own Banksy mural.
She directs me to a "safe" chair in her gleefully ramshackle workspace, a narrow, plywood-walled partition cubicle shared with a longtime friend who works as a costume designer. Stop-motion animators, artists and university lecturers occupy the adjacent partitions and the air feels charged with creativity. "We've got a whole building full of people doing wonderful things," she says, clutching the armrest of her seat as it drops off.
Bona has lived and worked in Bristol for 11 years, the last five as a puppet maker, puppeteer and puppetry teacher, belying a dislocated transatlantic accent acquired from a childhood spent following her Argentinian mother and Venezuelan father – a travelling Gillette executive – around the world. "I grew up in Colombia, Mexico, the US, the UK ... I went back to Argentina when I was 15, I left when I was 18, and I've been here ever since," she says, looking weary at the thought of it all.
Peering down from the shelf beside us is a lippy-looking old dear in an elasticated checked skirt called Gran-ma. "She's ancient, the first puppet I ever made," she says fondly. At the time Bona, then working as a theatre set designer, was sharing a house with a puppeteer "who booked a theatre without really thinking about what she was gonna do next" and coralled her housemates into each planning a 15-minute segment: "That was the first time I thought, brilliant, I'm really going to go for it, I'm gonna make a puppet and do a show, it's gonna be great."
Her resulting mini-production, Scaring Gran-ma, told the story of a cat's attempts to bump off its elderly owner "because he'd heard on the radio about another cat that had inherited a lot of money and therefore assumed his owner was also rich. Which, of course, isn't true at all …"
Arguably more remarkable than its conception, was the fact Bona could perform it at all, given that, by then, she had developed a severe stage phobia that had already laid waste to her early dreams of an acting career.
How did puppetry help her overcome her fear? "It was fine," she says in wonderment, as if still bemused that the solution had not occurred to her earlier, "because no one knew it was me. The Gran-ma puppet works with you sitting beside it and wearing a black hat with a veil. I'd literally lose all inhibition and say what I wanted … Gran-ma's really terrible at flirting with young men and they seem to enjoy it. So I had the time of my life."
As it was a daytime production in a pub theatre, Bona would go downstairs between shows with the puppet and talk to people in the bar: "I think that helped me lose the fear; it was a really liberating moment," she says.
In recent years Bristol has become a hub for puppeteers, fuelled by the presence in the city of several major production companies includingGreen Ginger Stuff and Nonsense and Picked Image, as well as theBristol Festival of Puppetry, the second staging of which was in the summer. And it was through Green Ginger that Bona properly launched her career, getting herself on to a two-year course with the company as part of a training project called Toast in the Machine.
While it all seems perfectly feasible in Stokes Croft, I wonder if, in the wider world, the occupation suffers slightly in popular perception.
A case in point is the film Being John Malkovich, the story of a marionette puppeteer who discovers a portal into the Hollywood actor's mind. I tell her I find it odd that such an eccentric tale should be so many people's reference point. But then, is it fair to assume the appeal comes mainly from the power of total control over another personality?
"Massively," Bona agrees. "You can submerge yourself in a character in a way you personally can't as a performer. I can't be an old woman; you can put make-up on me, but I really don't know what it feels like. Whereas with a puppet I'm observing and putting those characteristics into it, and I can see it in front of me and it's physically easy. For me anyway, it's something I can engage with easily."
Even so, I've never been able to work out whether Being John Malkovich is glorifying or mocking puppeteers. "I would say a bit of both," she says, smiling wryly. "There is a bit of a stigma attached to marionettes. It is quite obsessive."
By marionettes, Bona means the string-operated figures that constitute puppetry's "high art" form – far removed, she readily admits, from the ones she works with. "[Marionettes] are like the opera," she admits. "To work them you have to train for years; you can't just pick up a stringed puppet and make it come alive."
Then there is bunraku, "the style we all try and do now", the Japanese physical puppet form involving three people operating a figurine in harmony. "But none of us can really be properly trained because, in Japan, it takes 30 years to become a proper bunraku person," she explains. "Normally, the puppets are about a metre tall and made of wood, pretty heavy. So often there's one person doing one hand and governing the torso, one doing the feet and the other doing the other hand and head. The beauty of it is that you get super-realistic movement."
Currently, Bona is rehearsing for her next show Little Edie, a Pickled Image production based on the 1975 documentary film, Grey Gardens, about the eccentric lives of the aunt and first cousin of Jackie Onassis, that will run at the Jacksons Lane Theatre in Highgate, London, as part of the Suspense Puppetry Festival in early November.
Before that, though, is a short tour of Norway's Lofoten Islands, undertaken as part of a funding agreement with the Nordland Visual Theatre. "They're amazing people to work with because, once you've applied, you pretty much receive the funding straight away if they like your application," she explains. "All they ask in return is that you tour there for two weeks."
Finding arts funding in the UK is hardly straightforward, though Bona says it is just one aspect of making a production: "There's all the rigmarole of whether you should apply for funding, or try to do it on a hope and a prayer … it's quite a challenge. And rehearsing for long periods is also a big challenge, physically."
Yet she has few regrets about finally putting down roots as she approaches 30. "There aren't many other places where you can be as expressive as in England," she points out. "There are so many different ways of living here. In South America I felt very restricted; if you do anything artistic there you're considered Bohemian and out of the norm. Whereas here you can be artistic and still be considered a serious business. I really value that."
To my surprise, I realise that Treelo the lemur has been lurking on my hand throughout our conversation. And I'm intrigued to know – once the show is over and the puppet is packed safely back in the box – does she ever, just occasionally, catch herself in conversation with her hand at home? There is a guilty silence. "My partner can tell you more about that," Bona mumbles. "It's not that he walks in on it, but sometimes the hand does the talking. 'Excuse me, I want this, I want that …'"
For the first time she looks genuinely embarrassed, but then she shrugs. "It's easier to say things through a different media sometimes."
Curriculum vitae
Pay: "At the moment I earn £1,000-plus a month, but it varies. Last year it was more like £600. The work, for me, that's best-paid is making puppets – around £500 for a week's work depending on complexity. Workshops are a good earner, too."
Hours: About 40 a week.
Work-life balance: "It can take over when I'm doing a show, but it doesn't feel like work most of the time because it's so much fun."
Best thing: "You can be anything or do anything. It really is limitless."
Worst thing: "I really hate having to rely on funding. I guess having been brought up in a business family, I've always thought that if things are worth it and provide a good service, they should be sustainable. But when it comes to making artistic shows, the reality is that it's always a gamble. You need to have the space and the money to experiment and make mistakes."
Overtime
Corina loves Bristol's live music scene, "especially Baba Yaga's Consort, who play gypsy-folk, and crazy Mexican punks Dogface Sockets. I like mash-up music because of all the places I've lived."Corina is reading Who Runs Britain? by Robert Peston. "I'm trying to figure some things out. Before London had its riots, we had a little one here … it's interesting, being so close to it." Corina's favourite filmsare fantasy puppet-fests The NeverEnding Story and The Dark Crystal. "It's so typical, isn't it? But I've always had a love of the fantastical."
