If you’re interested in organs and theatre, quite soon you will visit Mr Stravinsky & Co and their lenten feast. Some background:
The play Petrushka seems to derive from a native older Russian buffoon and minstrel tradition and the Western European puppet theater tradition with its roots in the Italian commedia dell’arte. Possible evidence of the Petrushka play in Russia is found as early as 1637 in an engraving and description by a [German] traveler, Adam Olearius. From around the 1840s to the 1930s, the Petrushka show was one of the most popular kinds of improvisational theater in Russia, often performed at fairs and carnivals and on the streets on a temporary wooden stage (balagan). The show was presented by two performers, one of whom manipulated the puppets, while the other played a barrel-organ. Recorded textual variants from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depict the adventures of Petrushka, a dauntless prankster and joker, who uses his wit as well as a vigorously wielded club to get the better of his adversaries, who often represent established authority. The themes tend to be sexist and violent. Petrushka is usually dressed in a red caftan and pointed red cap, and has a hunch-back, a large hooked nose, and a prominent chin. The most popular scenes involve Petrushka and a handful of characters, among them his fiancée or wife, a gypsy horse trader, a doctor or apothecary, an army corporal, a policeman, the devil, and a large fluffy dog. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1911) is probably the most famous adaptation of this puppet theater show.
Here are two music-box players and dancers competing for public in the first Shrovetide Fair scene, at the beginning of the ballet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFSndjJTAk
Recalling that a barrel organ is in some ways nothing more than a mechanised accordeon, some more fair soundscape with accordeon noises, here in accordeon transcription (ho!ho!) played by Mika Vayrynen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUtctqwyy2s
If accordeon pastiche can be played on the accordeon, there’s no reason why a ballet about organs and puppets and puppetmasters shouldn’t be performed with organ, puppets and puppetmaster. That’s roughly what Basil Twist seems to have done starting in 2001:
First performed in 2001, this “Petrushka” also involves a conceptual sleight of hand. In the ballet dancers play puppets that come to life. In Mr. Twist’s version, puppets play puppets, and when they come to life, they dance. It works perfectly, plunging us directly into the story’s imaginative universe.
Unfortunately I can’t find video of him in action.
[There’s a more interesting introduction to the Russian stuff here.]
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