“It’s New Eyes We’re Trying to Create”: Speaking with Blind Summit’s Mark Down

Mark Down is the artistic director and co-creator of Blind Summit, a puppet theatre company based in London, founded in 1997. I spoke with him following his 2013 tour of the United States with the production of The Table, for which Mark was both director and the lead puppeteer on a Bunraku-style puppet named Moses. Moses is the only character in The Table. With its comic combination of scripted and improvised dialogue organized into a stream of related bits, the show has the rhythm, reason, and punch of a standup routine. The Table is thus a show about a show. However, rather than placing an external analytical frame on an otherwise unknowing cast in the style of Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Table locates the analytical frame inside a single character—Moses, a puppet whose primary narrative is about being a puppet. Publicity materials for The Table explain that Moses is having an “existential crisis.” But while Moses is interested in aspects of his existence, there is little in his seventy-minute monologue that suggests a crisis. He is simply interested in deriving humor from the nature of his being: a raspy, lusty, boisterous, and occasionally bawdy composition of cloth and cardboard, assigned to soliloquize on a tabletop. The narration of Moses’s backstory—most notably his development as part of a short performance commissioned by the London Jewish Community Centre—is intertwined with discussion of his relationship with the three puppeteers who operate him, and includes a detailed orientation to puppeteering. The Table’s lessons are, in this respect, disarming and direct. The show also operates on a higher plane, as we are invited to meditate not only on the relationship between the team of humans and their simple construction, but also the relationship between the character and his platform (the table itself), and the relationship between illusion and material reality. “You can’t choose what you believe,” Moses points out in the second half of the show.

The Interview

Mary Elizabeth Anderson:

How did you come to make a performance about a single puppet on a table? Did it start with the development of the character, Moses? Or did it begin with a particular story idea from which Moses emerged? Where did he come from?

Mark Down:

Yeah . . . it’s funny. We’re just at the moment, sort of picking apart, trying to work out how we make work. ’Cause it all sort of happens by accident . . . over a long time. Very originally . . . the very first puppet. . . . We were doing a workshop for Dan Hurlin with some puppets that Hurlin had at a university outside New York that he is a, uh . . . which I can’t remember . . . it’s a woman’s name . . . Sarah Jane . . .

Mea:

Oh, Sarah Lawrence!

MD:

Sarah Lawrence. Yeah. We went and did a workshop there. And he has these cloth puppets. And we . . . played with them a bit and we thought “God, there’s a really good idea.” So we went home and made some and did workshops. And then, we were making 1984 and, uh, we had to do a presentation. It was a work in progress. And to fill time, essentially—because we were at a festival and they sold tickets to our work in progress and I certainly didn’t really have anything [to show]—so I thought I would explain how the puppet works. And we used these puppets. And I was off the puppet, so someone else was doing the puppetry and it was like a sort of airplane demonstration: I would say something, the puppet would do it. And then the puppet started misbehaving and sort of ran away and that. And later I looked at the photographs and was really struck by how well this puppet stood out. I thought “Wow, this white sort of pillowcase really sort of zings.” And we’d been making puppets that were really detailed and lighting was a nightmare. Because skin really catches light and, uh, um, I’m not keen on...