MONTREAL—It was snowing lightly last Thursday afternoon as the performance of “Les Bêtes dansent ou le sortilège discret de la nature sauvage” (“The Dancing Beasts or the Discrete Spell of the Wild”) began in front of Montreal’s Pavillion Saint-Viateur and in the surrounding park.
Performers from Mexico City’s La Liga Teatro Elastico (The Elastic Theater League), which was founded by Jacqueline Serafin and Iker Vicente in 2011, began strapping on the harnesses that help them hold up life-sized puppets of wolves to perform a ritual hunt.
“The ancient dance of the predator and the prey that allows life to flourish on the planet,” is how the troupe describes the outdoor pageant.
The show was the opening performance of Montreal’s 13th annual Festival de Casteliers, a showcase of international puppetry (which sponsored my visit).
La Liga Teatro Elastico had spent two days that week making puppets and cardboard wolf masks with local children. But they had “never” been in a snowstorm before and found it magical. “We were scared before we traveled. What is this weather? We need a lot of clothes,” puppeteer Daniel Loyola told me the next day. “But it is great.”
The pageant—which they’ve presented across Mexico and in Spain, South Africa and South Korea since 2016—is inspired by the Mexican gray wolf, which was nearly driven to extinction by human hunting. The show mulls the animal’s role in ecosystems as well as in the imagination of indigenous peoples and the descendents of European colonists.
“In Mexico and the United States politics disappeared the wolves in the beginning of the 20th century,” Loyola says. “What is the predator? It’s a monster? It’s the bad guy in the tale? We say probably not. They can move the rivers, like in Yellowstone. … Historically the wolves changed the way of the river.”
In “The Dancing Beasts,” Loyola says, “The hunt is the death of the deer, which is necessary for the life because it permits the life of the planet.”
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The puppet wolves and deer are assembled of wood sticks, furry fabric, cloth ears, bones, gourds, accordion bellows, baskets, straw. Each wolf is supported by two metal poles—one rising from the harness on the operator’s back, the other in the operator’s hands—that elevate the puppets above the standing crowd. The poles are elaborately rigged with cables and ropes that animate the animals’ legs and mouth. Seen up close the wolf puppets can resemble schematic robots or three-dimensional sketches. But in motion—or when you look into their shiny eyes—they can feel strikingly alive.
Several children follow each wolf, carrying their own puppets of butterflies, birds and beasts or wearing cardboard wolf masks. Performers howl and seed pods along the wolve’s legs tinkle musically.
“The play is participatory theater with children,” Loyola says. “The subject is basically ritual hunting. We work for a week with children thinking about the wolves and the role they play in nature. We would talk with children at different levels, about the anthropological, biological, archaeological and political also.”
Puppet ravens dangling from poles fly by. Loyola says, “the wolves become alive and they begin to reconstruct the pack. And they play in the space. Then from another space comes a deer. And they find the deer. And they start to pursue the deer. It’s an ecological system.” The whole performance can take two hours.
Two puppeteers operating the deer make it seem to bound around the park, trailed by drummers. “The deer in different Mexican cultures is the god of the sun,” Loyola says. “It’s also the connection between the earth and the sky.”
The wolves follow the deer a block and a half through the city, into the ornate Theatre Outremont. (“It was our first time in a theater,” Loyola says.)
“At some point, the pack finds the deer—in this case in the theater,” Loyola says. “And they develop the hunt in the pack. The hunt is more like a dance. It’s a ritual of the hunt.”
On stage, as a band plays behind them, five wolves circle the deer, which kicks and bucks and swings its antlers menacingly. The wolves bite the deer along the legs, until one seizes it by the neck, killing it. Which is symbolized by performers taking a gourd out from the neck of the deer puppet, cracking it open, and scattering the vivid red rose petals inside around the stage.
“The alpha [wolf] gives the final bite to the deer and the deer in a moment understands it’s the end and he gives himself to the wolves,” Loyola says. “It’s not an easy gift. You fight and I fight and now you have the honor to eat me.”
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