African Scenery and Animals

"Yes, a book called African Scenery and Animals that I [Basil] was introduced to when I worked at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Botswana. It is the most sought-after and highly valued piece of Africana – published in the early 1800s. It is a very beautiful production, a huge book. Each of the images is beautiful and if you have one or two of these you are lucky. Through the book you get to know the artist – the National Museum has a couple of his works. He was the first European to draw African people with a deep understanding and sensitivity and love. Daniell was fifty to seventy years ahead of his time, the first person to represent the Other not as grotesque or curious. Although he is a colonial artist, what you see in his original work, his sketches from which the engravings in the book are taken, are depictions of the continent before the colonial context. He was the first artist to visit the Batswana and the first to depict the Khoi San people in a sympathetic way. But secondly, it has led me to contemplate another possible life as a curator, quite apart from our work in theatre, but nonetheless an extension of it. There has never been an exhibition of the artist, Samuel Daniell. I wanted to do one until I realised what the cost of the insurance would be, and I then I thought, Well I am a puppeteer. And thirdly, I suppose because of the book’s connection to an important period in our theatrical lives when we were caught up in the work of artists and writers living in exile and trying to find ways to influence what was happening in South Africa. This was a formative period for all of us and it influenced all of our work. No, the drawing style is very different to our way of making puppets – too classical and not nearly as expressionist as we have tried to be. But the next book has been a fundamental influence on our work – Glove and Rod Puppets by Hans Jürgen Fettig, translated by John Wright. Yes, it was published in the seventies and is a very rare book now. But it was the handbook that was my bible and has been a constant reference for the designing of puppet movements. I [Adrian] didn’t study puppet theatre at university and so I have had to teach myself everything along the way. The book was introduced to us by Toby van Eck – he had gone to study with Fettig who, by all accounts, was a grumpy man and didn’t have a fully fledged professional theatre career, but his great passion and skill was to make and perfect direct-controlled puppets. There are lots of illustrations and diagrams and mechanisms – indispensable."