The Northern Light

NATASHA KORSHIN

Buzz Schwall dangles his handmade marionettes around his apartment in Bootlegger's Cove. Schwall, who used to design sets for Anchorage Opera and Cyrano's Off-Center Playhouse, learned the art of puppet making during a visit to the Czech Republic in 2001. His puppet troupe, known as Buzz-O-Plex productions, performs downtown in Peratrovich Park on Fourth Avenue every other Saturday throughout the summer

Marionette matinees come to downtown

By Paul Bryner
June 20, 2005
It’s a warm and lazy Friday afternoon as Brian Hutton and Tammy Sitar broach the topic of breast augmentation for marionettes.

“Once I’ve gone to work on her, she’ll have some noticeable wiggle,” Sitar said.
The marionette under discussion is seated in an eight-inch high black leather armchair in the center of Buzz Schwall’s living room. A piece of unfinished wood cut in the shape of a guitar is hanging strapped to her shoulders with a piece of twine. Sporting a head of auburn hair and a silky white dress, the marionette was originally conceived as Donna Elvira, the heroine of the Mozart opera “Don Giovanni.” In a few weeks’ time, however, she is to debut in the role of Charo, the buxom flamenco guitarist who so often graced the set of “Love Boat” and still makes appearances on today’s “Hollywood Squares.”

NATASHA KORSHIN / NL

As Hutton and Sitar discuss the manufacture of a blond wig for the Elvira marionette, puppeteer Colin Brown experiments with manipulating the threaded rod which controls Elvira’s hands. If he holds it out at just the right angle, he can make her wrist flex and rotate like that of an actual guitarist. Making flexible wrists and ankles are just two of the techniques puppet-maker Schwall has taught himself, since he made his first marionette for a workshop in Prague in 2001.

The Charo routine will be performed in Peratrovich Park, at Fourth Avenue and E Street, as the second of a series of marionette shows commissioned by the Anchorage Downtown Partnership as part of their Downtown Summer in the City project. The Buzz-O-Plex performers, who have also performed shows at Side Street Espresso, The Alley and the Discovery Theater at the Center for Performing Arts, are experimenting in a new style for the shows in the park

“Up until now we’ve pretty much used prerecorded stuff,” Hutton said. “For the park pieces we’re doing a talk-show format. It has a nice, loose feel and we get some good mileage improvising dialogue.”
Sitar said this can be more of a challenge.
“You have to focus on being clever with your voice and making the puppet move at the same time,” Sitar said.

NATASHA KORSHIN / NL

At a Friday rehearsal, just over a week before the next biweekly performance, the ensemble discusses the same sorts of topics that come up at the writing sessions for any sitcom or TV variety show: how much time to allow a particular joke, whether a scene is becoming too static, and how to gear the material to make it interesting for both children and adults.

But the atmosphere has little of the high-stress conditions of network television. There’s a sense of relaxed time. Troupe members will wander into the kitchen and smoke a cigarette as they mull over their ideas. While performer Catherine Shenk reviews a videotaped scene from Disney’s “Snow White,” which she plans to parody, Schwall wanders over to his computer and searches online for recordings of flamenco guitar.
It was a roundabout course of events that led Schwall into puppetry. In 2000, he was working as the master carpenter for the Anchorage Opera when he began to develop carpal tunnel syndrome.
“I realized that I’d have to give up the sort of heavy work I was doing,” Schwall said. “I had to find something else.”
In 2001, he took a trip to Prague to attend a workshop that encompassed both the construction and operation of marionettes. Although he has worked on several styles of marionettes, he’s chiefly focused on a rod-style design, in which the marionette is suspended by a metal rod that runs from the top of the puppet’s head to the control handle, which the puppeteer manipulates.
“It’s not as fluid as a marionette worked only by strings.” Schwall said. “On the other hand, you don’t have to worry as much about everything getting tangled up.”
Schwall compensates for the stiffness of the marionettes by making the torsos out of a stack of lime-wood “ribs” connected only by leather straps. This allows for the wiggling hips of the Charo puppets as well as the subtle, expressive movements of Schwall’s favorite work: the grey-lipped harlequin puppet with huge, sad green eyes that played the part of Canio in Schwall’s production of “Pagliacci.”
“It’s just in the last year and a half that I’ve been making marionettes that justify the first two years or so of frustration,” Schwall said. “The Canio puppet is the first one that you can look at and feel his heart. . . . When I did the ‘Pagliacci’ piece, it was the first time I really enjoyed it. The puppeteer is focused on the puppet and the audience is, too. A relationship is formed through the puppet. When it works, everyone can take an extra step, get outside themselves.”

The Buzz-O-Plex show “Marionettes in the Park” plays every other Saturday from 2-3 p.m. at Peratrovich Park at Fourth Avenue and E Street. Listings can be found at buzzoplex.net

No ordinary string section at this opera

Puppets express passion of 'Don Giovanni'

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 4th, 2005
Last Modified: March 4th, 2005 at 04:55 AM

In Room 14 of the Ship Creek Center on Fourth Avenue, as the crowds swirl through during Fur Rondy, the cast and crew of one of the smallest theatrical productions in Anchorage are working on the lighting, cues and music for a production that is mere days away.

"Small" in this case refers to neither the production's budget (though none of its "actors" are being paid) nor the size of the cast it employs (though the "cast" numbers only seven and the crew is even smaller). It refers to size. The proscenium arch is barely five feet above the stage, and the actors -- marionettes all -- stand a little over 2 feet each.

As any production feverishly preparing for its premiere, there are a few glitches in this rehearsal. A can light flips off its mounting, plunging part of the stage into darkness, and one of the main characters takes a header off a wall, landing with a wooden clatter. Behind the theater wall, Buzz Schwall, the impresario responsible for bringing this diminutive production of the opera "Don Giovanni" to the stage, sighs.

"This is why I like to use union people," he says.

In the "Don Giovanni Puppet Show," Don Giovanni invites the statue of the Commendatore to dine with him, as his squire, Leporello, looks on, horrified. The production, a three-scene version of Mozart's masterpiece, will be presented on nights when the Anchorage Opera takes a break from its full-scale performances. Photography Oliver Korshin

Though stage and cast are small, what is not is Schwall's ambition: The production is a three-scene version of Mozart's moody, intense jeremiad against libertinism. The performances this weekend will occupy the same stage space as Anchorage Opera's full-scale production of "Don Giovanni" during dark nights -- when the opera suspends its performances both to bridge traditionally slow nights and to give its cast and crew a chance to rest from their massive undertaking.

If your previous experience with puppets consists of the British act Punch and Judy or watching "Sesame Street" with your toddler, you're in for a surprise. This "Don Giovanni" has much of the drama, violence, betrayal, pageantry and -- of course -- soaring music that the full-sized production has, plus a few twists.

One of the things that has made Schwall's production possible, aside from the cooperation of the opera company, is a project grant he was awarded in October by the Rasmuson Foundation in its latest round of awards in support of the arts.

The money made it possible for him to hire Yngvil Vatn Guttu, education director for Alaska Theatre of Youth, to direct the acting and music. He also hired stage manager Heather Griffin, videographer Jeff Silverman and costume designer and puppeteer Tammy Sitar, as well as additional puppeteers Katherine Shenk and Brian Hutton. The Anchorage Opera's own Ed Bourgeois has served as the production's story consultant.

Schwall began talking with Bourgeois about the project last August, and though Bourgeois green-lighted it at the time, rehearsals didn't start until January, after the grant money flowed in. In addition to hiring his crew, Schwall -- who trained as a maker of marionettes in the Czech Republic -- had to make two new cast members from scratch. Don Giovanni and Donna Elvira are new additions to Schwall's stable of marionettes, the other roles being filled by puppets such as "Melissa," who in this production is playing the ingenue peasant girl Zerlina.

Don Giovanni seduces the peasant girl Zerlina, who is on her way, bouquet of roses in hand, to be married to someone else in "Don Giovanni puppet Show," created by Buzz Schwall. Photography Oliver Korshin

"In the past, she's played much more forceful roles," Schwall says. "But in this production, she's much more ... demure."

Schwall and the other cast members talk about the marionettes' acting chops with absolutely straight faces, and watching as the dress rehearsal unfolds, it's easy to see why. In the hands of experienced puppeteers, the figures gradually lose their strange, stiff cartoonishness and begin to seem more fluid and expressive, as if the figures were masks worn by the puppeteers, extensions of their bodies, and not merely jointed assemblages of wood dangling from strings.

"The more you work with and watch the puppets, the more you forget -- and they seem to forget -- that they're puppets," Vatn Guttu says. "It's something about how the puppeteers project their energy. They make it so a block of wood can transmit emotion to the audience."

A drunken banquet unfolds, food falling from a plate, tankards and wine glasses scattering. Leporello hides, grim and goggle-eyed behind a chair as the Don's terrified aria begins and he is pulled toward his fate. Vatn Guttu watches, her fingers motionless on her Powerbook's keyboard.

"There's something about a marionette," she says. "It's meditative and kind of dreamy. Eventually, the audience begins to trust them as if they were real."

Arts editor Mark Baechtel can be reached at 257-4323 or mbaechtel@adn.com .

DON GIOVANNI PUPPET SHOW is at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 6, and 7 p.m. Monday, March 7, in Discovery Theatre. Tickets: $10, available at CarrsTix.

Nearly $160,000 awarded to artists by Rasmuson

Anchorage Daily News

(Published: December 2, 2004)

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Eighteen Alaskans received the first Individual Artist Awards from the Rasmuson Foundation. Nearly $160,000 was distributed. The announcement came at a public reception Monday at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

Sylvester A. Ayek, an Inupiaq carver from King Island, received the Distinguished Artist Award of $25,000. He works with ivory, stone, marble, wood and metals to create sculptural works inspired by the Inupiaq and Yup'ik traditions. Distinctive rounded marble polar bears are his signature work, which is on display in numerous locations around the state.

Seven Alaska artists each received $12,000 Individual Artist Fellowships, designed for mid-career or mature artists to focus their energy, attention, and resources for one year while developing their creative work, according to the foundation.

Recipients include Alvin Amason, visual artist from Fairbanks; Hal Gage, photographer from Anchorage; Mary Katzke, filmmaker from Anchorage; Carla Potter, clay artist from Ketchikan living in Anchorage; David Rosenthal, Cordova painter; David Woodie, Juneau painter; and Sheila Wyne, visual artist in Anchorage.

Project awards of up to $5,000 went to literary artists Oakley Cochran, Jerah Chadwick, Anne Marie Kahn and Andromeda Romano-Lax; puppeteer Buzz Schwall; visual artists Duke Russell, Susan Farnham, Andrew Daoust and Jane Oliver; and Native artist Kelly Ann Monroe. These are for specific, short-term projects that have a clear benefit to the artists and the development of their work. This category is open to emerging, midcareer and mature artists.

The Individual Artists Award will be offered every year. The next deadline for project awards is March 1, follow by a Sept. 1 deadline for Project, Artist Fellowship and Distinguished Artist Awards. For more information visit the Rasmuson Foundation Web site at www.rasmuson.org or call Victoria Lord at 297-2700.

Vol. 13, Ed. 41 October 14 - October 20 2004

EYE ON ART


Someday he'll make a real live boy

By Bruce Farnsworth

A cloud of deceit and betrayal enshrouds everyone around.  Heartbreak, the kind that makes murderers of otherwise stable folk, abounds. A dark, passion-fueled plot threads its way through a patchwork of melodrama that includes the old play-within-a-play canard. It must be an opera. In fact, I'm in Buzz Schwall's Bootlegger Cove apartment, watching him and his troupe rehearse their puppetry version of the finale to the opera Pagliacci.

They say something happens at midlife. Buzz got dreamy (no, really, I've heard women say that about him). Actually, Buzz will tell you he got carpal tunnel syndrome, but I prefer to think he just got in touch with his inner Gepetto. Either way, his recent incarnation as Anchorage's premier puppet impresario has confounded many of us who have counted on him for years to be our rudder - practical and levelheaded, resistant to fads (see his Bishop's Attic LP collection, where Nelson Eddie leans on Dizzy Gillespie) - and unassuming in his persona (check out his old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat and Louisville Slugger letter jacket).

Buzz is a jack-of-all-trades - handyman, painter, illustrator, welder - who worked a career in construction. But what happens when a jack-of-all-trades turns 50 and suddenly his jack is broken? Buzz was already a knowledgeable stagehand before he turned to puppets. For 10 years, hardly an opera performance went up or down at the Performing Arts Center without Buzz's help. But the hands and wrists started to ossify from arm-wrestling rope and rigging and schlepping scenery. Rigor mortis was moving into his fingers.

“I realized if I was going to stay in theater, it would have to be miniature theatre,” Buzz said recently as we sat at The Alley, a downtown bar home to an eclectic weekly menu of music and the site of his next production. “It was then that I thought,” he said, placing a fingertip to his temple, an affected light-going-on-in-the-brain look crossing his face, “I thought, 'aha, puppets.' I thought, 'I should take up puppetry.'”

At first he just experimented, putting up his first puppet show at Cyrano's in collaboration with writer Brian Hutton in August 2001. Then Buzz did the practical thing and went to Prague to learn the ways of his new calling.

“Prague is the cradle of European puppetry. It's a recognized art form there,” he said. On a field trip to the Czech provinces, Buzz saw an inspiring puppet performance of the opera Don Giovanni. “I've seen that opera many times, and it was never as riveting as that. It was the full three-hour version, and I couldn't take my eyes off it.” He left Europe with splinters under his fingers, as puppeteers might say.

In 2002, after building and producing a couple of small puppet shows in Anchorage, he accepted an invitation to go to with a local group to recently invaded Afghanistan. The group built a school while Buzz built puppets. With those and the puppets he brought with him, he entertained Afghan children at schools and orphanages.

Since the trip to Afghanistan, Buzz has produced, in addition to a string of small puppet plays, three significant, spoken-word or performance poetry events at The Alley. One featured a scene from the French opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, performed entirely by puppets. Lighting, scenery and imaginatively conceived and costumed marionettes animated his custom-made mini theatre, giving audiences a glimpse into Buzz World, where puppetry is “a recognized art form.”

Whatever you make of his choice to found a company - Buzzoplex - dedicated to producing puppetry and performance poetry in Anchorage, you have to agree the unusually high humiliation potential of such an artistic venture qualifies as breathtakingly risky. But as it turns out, there was an unknown vacuum waiting for someone to saunter in and fill - village puppeteer.

This summer Buzz created a pod of whale-sized puppets, the largest, a lumbering 20-footer, for the Alaska Theatre of Youth Summer Conservatory production of Roald Dahl's The BFG.  He has done workshops for teachers and kids around the state. And this coming spring, he's mounting a puppet adaptation of his beloved Don Giovanni on a “dark night” during the Anchorage Opera's run of the same classic at the Discovery Theatre. For now, he's back at work, testing the beneficence of the Art Gods with more puppetry and spoken word.

I've followed Buzz around for a few weeks now as he prepares for the latest Buzzoplex production, “Four Nights in October.” The performance centers on the finale of the opera Pagliacci, and it's happening at The Alley every night at 7 p.m. from Sunday, October 17, through Wednesday, October 20. Puppet opera rehearsal can seem strange at first. Buzz's multi-purpose, two-bedroom apartment is a workshop, stage, laboratory and living quarters. Sitting in his living room, I looked down at miniature props and performers from a chair just a few feet in front of the stage, which with only minimal squinting resembled a life-size stage from the fifth-tier balcony of a grand opera house. About 75 puppets hung in rows and sat on racks all around. To observe this array of critters is to glimpse Buzz's path from beginner to journeyman. There are early puppets with bodies made of bottles and dissected Barbie dolls. The evolutionary continuum leads through the primitive rod puppets to the more sophisticated and complex marionettes that make up his current troupe.

They trend steeply upward  in workmanship from crude to ethereal. Some of his most recent creations even look familiar, like a waitress who might have served you breakfast last weekend at Snow City Cafe. During the past few weeks, I've observed the modeling and carving of Buzz's latest handmade thespians. The progress is impressive. Perhaps even more impressive is the willingness on Buzz's part to start something new. At age 50, he took up a European art form that requires years to acquire competence and many more years to achieve mastery - a willingness to start out putting on sloppy shows using simple objects, manipulated by untrained actors - all the time knowing that to replicate what he saw in Europe would require considerable gritting of teeth and swallowing of pride.

So now, as the curtain rises, the latest phase in the come-lately career of Buzz Schwall begins to reveal itself. I watched as Buzz and diva puppeteer Tammy Sitar ran through a rehearsal of Pagliacci's finale. A vintage vinyl disc on a turntable played Leoncavallo's score. The wooden puppets moved about dramatically, just like real human opera performers, only less woodenly. Buzz and Tammy argued and pleaded in Italian - him with her to admit and renounce her betrayal of him with his rival, Tonio, and her with him to try and understand the problem is not him, it's her and, anyway, it meant nothing to her. Or something like that. The enraged cuckold, Pagliaccio, was having none of it, but he did have a knife. He sang louder and more dramatically as he advanced on his kneeling lover, Columbina. The tension was puppet-string taut. The end was nigh. The music soared, then sobbed. Some asshole's cell phone went off. Wait, it's mine. Damn. Then the long, drawn out, yet moving ending and, whoa - it's all just like a real night at the opera. For the sake of our “slower” readers, I won't reveal the surprising ending, but if puppet gore offends you, don't go.

Rehearsal was over. As he cleaned up, I asked Buzz to name the biggest difference between working in puppet theater versus working in full-size theater. He cocked his head and looked thoughtfully at the overflowing ashtray he was poised to empty. “They're not different at all,” he said. “You're still working with actors. In regular or puppet theater, actors still come late to rehearsals, strew stuff all over the stage, then go home, leaving the ashtrays full.”

Buzz Schwall & Company perform a scene from Pagliacci at “Four Nights in October” at 7 p.m. every night from Sun., Oct. 17 through Wed., Oct. 20 at The Alley, 900 W. 5th Ave. Performance poetry by local writers; musical interludes by DJ Faustus. Food available. Admission $10.

Anchorage Press articles, commentary, news, reviews, features and calendar are copyrighted by: Anchorage Publishing, Inc. 540 E. 5th Avenue Anchorage, Alaska 99501. For information call 907-561-7737 . Website development by Press Online Services .

Power in Puppetry

Buzz Schwall's imaginative shows cross borders, break down barriers

By SUSAN MORGAN

Anchorage Daily News
Published: October 19th, 2003
Last Modified: October 20th, 2003 at 01:25 AM

A bare-chested male puppet dangles to the side of an elaborate miniature stage. Down below, a replica of the mythical three-headed dog that guards hell, Cerberus, awaits hapless wanderers against an elaborate backdrop of well-gnawed chicken bones. The puppet maker, Buzz Schwall, happily demonstrates that the eyes of three bat-winged female puppets light up and glow a bright blood-red. When completed, they will also boast nipple rings on their generous bare bosoms.

Clearly, this isn't your children's puppet theater.
But then, what Schwall, 53, and a few of his talented friends are building in artist Sheila Wyne's Spenard studio isn't meant to be. Instead, they are producing a grown-up puppet opera of the classic myth "Orpheus and Eurydice,'' the story of a man so in love he journeys to the underworld to find his bride, only to lose her again because of that love.
If that story line is too much of a bummer, don't despair. For an upcoming amalgam of puppetry, poetry and jazz he's dubbed "Four Nights In October,'' Schwall and his cohorts also have created two original puppet shows, including one set in a Spenard pawnshop and a soap opera starring, yep, Barbie and Ken.
Poet Brian Hutton wrote the latter piece, "Soap on a String,'' which draws from the "Orpheus and Eurydice" story with a character named Brad Orfman, a Cerberus-esque secretary and a cabdriver strongly resembling Charon, the boatman for the River Styx.
Hutton and filmmaker Jeff Silverman co-wrote the pawnshop piece, based on the adventures of their characters Willem and Harvey, previously heard on Hutton's weekly KNBA radio show.
"This is the natural progression, from radio to puppets,'' Silverman says.
Performances each night by Anchorage's top spoken-word artists, including Hutton, Angela Ramirez, Jackie Carr, Mark Muro and Forrest Attaway, are also on the agenda, along with musical interludes by a local jazz trio.
Schwall never set out to be a puppeteer. Since coming to Alaska in the early 1990s, he has worked at a youth hostel, built opera and theater sets, and held various other jobs.
Ask him about a career, and he'll tell you he's still looking.
"I guess I've got that short-attention-span thing,'' he says. "Once I've done something, I don't want to do it again.''
Puppet making found him by chance. He honed it during a recent visit to Prague, Czech Republic, and took the skill with him in April on a humanitarian trip to northern Afghanistan.
The team's goal was to build schools for girls in a country where females were previously denied an education. Schwall was selected for his commercial construction skills and just felt it was the right thing to do.
"So many people are out doing bad stuff,'' he says. "Maybe we could do something good.''
But getting to the area proved a problem. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, Schwall and fellow Alaskan Mark "Freddy" Frederick were stopped as they attempted to travel north.
Already they had noticed destroyed airplanes stacked around the runway in Kabul and soldiers in nearby bunkers with machine guns. Then there was the hotel bell clerk with an AK-47 and banana clip.
"That first day, I became well aware this wasn't Anchorage,'' Schwall says.
While the men waited for permission to enter a tunnel that would lead them into a northern province, photojournalist Frederick disappeared.
"He was gone for 20 minutes,'' says Schwall, who imagined his friend had been thrown in prison and that he was next.
Then Frederick reappeared, a smile on his face.
"He said, 'Oh, we were just having tea and bread,' " Schwall says. "I'm like, 'You were what?' "
Adding to the tension was an obviously unhinged man nearby who began swallowing pieces of glass and then moved on to a bullet.
"You're thinking the next morning is going to be rough" for the guy, Schwall says.
Eventually the pair continued their journey and joined the rest of their team. When locals took over much of the school construction, Schwall turned to entertaining the children. He'd brought a few puppets from home and taught the Afghan teachers how to make others.
"Pretty soon, they were telling me, 'No, this is how you do it,' '' he says. "So that was pretty fun.''
The result was wildly popular, standing-room-only puppet shows.
"He is the biggest kid I've ever met,'' Frederick says. "He was amazing with the kids there. Amazing.''
Schwall says the trip changed him. He learned not just how different that culture is -- "And maybe it should be left that way,'' he adds -- but that people everywhere, including the team from Anchorage, are trying to help one another.
"That's my experience now in life,'' he says. "Noticing how good people are.''
Now Schwall prepares for puppet shows closer to home by carving heads from wood and figuring out how to dress his creations. A whole contingent of like-minded friends is helping him carry it off, including Wyne, who signed on to help build the set and design the puppets.
The event follows a similar one Schwall organized last January, minus the puppets.
"That turned out really well,'' says Alley general manager Christine Wallace. "Buzz puts a lot of time and effort into making a superb show.''
Is she nervous about attracting an audience for this unusual event? Nah.
"It's all art,'' she says.
Schwall is as excited as anybody. He's jazzed about the opera, in which Orpheus will become something of a "biker dude,'' and can't wait to hear new poetry by the spoken-word artists.
"Maybe people need to sit around and listen to thoughts again instead of watching 'The Simpsons,' '' he suggests.
Hutton, who will be performing his own poetry as well as working a few puppets, thinks the combination of spoken word, puppets and jazz is perfect.
"I think it's really cool,'' he says. "I don't know where it's happened anywhere on the planet.''
Schwall, whom Hutton calls a "gizmo-ologist,'' has put about $3,000 of his own money into the project so far.
"If I break even, I'll be ecstatic,'' Schwall says. "It would be great to make gobs of money, but I don't see that happening.''
But his Afghanistan traveling partner doesn't think that's what matters anyway. Frederick remembers a show Schwall staged at an orphanage where hundreds of people fought for seats.
"Buzz's value as an educator through his puppetry is truly untouchable,'' Frederick says. "I'd love to see him carry the power to the people who need it.''

Daily News arts editor Susan Morgan can be reached at 257-4587 or smorgan@adn.com.
FOUR NIGHTS IN OCTOBER will be presented by Buzz O Plex Productions at 7 p.m. today, Monday and Oct. 26 and 27 at The Alley, 900 W. Fifth Ave. Three original puppet shows, performances by six spoken-word artists and jazz by The Mike James Trio will be featured each night. Admission: $15. Call 272-5687 for information.

Puppets get the run of the house

Photo by BILL ROTH Anchorage Daily News Buzz Schwall touches up the paint on a puppet named Wilheim that he used recently for the character of Leporello in a production of the Mozart opera "Don Giovanni" at the Discovery Theatre.

By DAWNELL SMITH

Anchorage Daily News

Published: April 3rd, 2005
Last Modified: April 3rd, 2005 at 06:41 AM

Furniture means nothing to a puppet. A marionette thrown on a La-Z-Boy turns into a tangle of limbs and strings; a mob of them on the futon becomes an insurmountable knot.

No, puppets don't need furniture. They need hooks, nooks, shelves and rods.

They need wall space, not floor space. They need a place to hang, not hang out.

Buzz Schwall lives in a puppet's dream home. His apartment on the third floor of the Ebb Tide in Bootlegger Cove looks vaguely off-kilter and worn, the effects of enduring the Good Friday earthquake and all the decades since. The walls are scuffed and off-white, and the carpet is the color of weak coffee.

Schwall does not hide the carpet; the carpet is bare. He does not lounge in the living room; the living room is spare. He does not adorn the walls with paintings, portraits or photographs; he hangs puppets there, and pretty much everywhere.

In his sparse corner pad, Schwall designs, carves, adorns, manipulates and lives with dozens and dozens of puppets. They dangle from walls in every room except the bathroom. He collects puppets made of foam and cheesecloth and others made of wood; he has puppets with three heads and puppets with no heads; he owns puppets that resemble Furies and fairies and others like divas and gnomes. Most are his, but some came to him as gifts or souvenirs.

One of his puppets has a clear plastic tube for a body so kids can watch germs pass from its hands to its belly. Another one, a blanket-toss puppet, depicts four figures in parkas sending a fifth soaring.

Just imagine all those puppet shadows cast in moonlight, all those animate forms swaying during an aftershock.

No, nothing about his workspace seems typical for an 55-year-old carpenter who gave up his occupation after his arms suffered from years of abuse. Having made sets for arts groups including Anchorage Opera, he "just took the theater scene and made it smaller," he said.

Schwall's apartment stores the fruits of his artistic evolution. The living room holds puppets and plywood shelves of puppet sets the size of dollhouses. Everything else looks like an afterthought -- the tiny TV set, the low table with stereo equipment, the loose stacks of albums and CDs, the blue cooler with a red ashtray full of ashes.

A few strides to the south is his bedroom, where he sleeps on a mattress without a frame, and another room that he uses as a studio. The small workplace is cluttered with workbenches and power tools, puppets and posters, drawings and art. Piles of wood and hand tools gather under the benches; pinholes pockmark the walls.

Up on the closet shelf with a bunch of other cans and supplies sits a toy tow truck and a Tang container full of stuff, all of it stored above a dusty chop saw and other tools. On the floor by the window on the other side of the room lies the set for "Orpheus," a wall of boiled-down chicken bones he collected from the Wings and Things restaurant.

A puppet show clearly requires more than marionettes, but the marionettes give the show its life. To build them, Schwall begins with 10-foot 4-by-4 boards. Since he owns battery-operated tools -- even his chop saw, drill press and band saw -- he often cuts the large planks into manageable sizes at artist Sheila Wyne's studio, where he also helps out on Percent for Art projects and other jobs.

Sometimes his vision for a puppet begins with an image in a magazine or with someone's face. He cuts out photos and does drawings first, then makes ceramic models, technical drawings and eventually, through patience, a wood puppet with a story of its own.

"I'm becoming better as a carver," Schwall said. "They're becoming more expressive and articulate."

He started making puppets after taking a workshop in Prague, Czech Republic. Typically, he makes them for performances, not for sale. He did his first puppet show in October 2000 (the same period in which he moved to his puppet pad) and finished his most recent production last month with the help of a Rasmuson Foundation grant of $5,000.

The money allowed him to pay the manipulators and crew of his puppet rendition of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in the Discovery Theater, which played when Anchorage Opera's flesh-and-blood production took days off to let performers rest.

So far, Schwall breaks even with his performances, "but it would be nice to make money," he said.

In the meantime, he covers rent and utilities -- his only real expenses -- by working on projects for Wyne, working as a stagehand at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts and picking up other jobs when he can. This month, he will be technical director for Kokopelli Theatre Company's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar."

But as a puppet maker and puppeteer, he hopes to do more operas and expand his cast of characters. He plans to produce "Four Nights In October," a production of scenes from "Pagliacci" and "Don Giovanni," this summer at The Alley along with something from a third opera and a performance of music and spoken word.

He credits Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes for his love of opera. Music always accompanied the physical humor and absurdities of those cartoons.

"Doing these operas is like making cartoons, only using marionettes," he explained. "It's a much more immediate gratification than the laborious process of animation. Hopefully this will evolve and become a learning experience for others as well."

In the meantime, Schwall plugs away in his dusty studio, experimenting and learning from each joint and facial expression. Puppets all have the same structure and centerline, he said. If carved right, they will stand as if carrying their own weight.

He used to think he should strive for lightness, but then he figured out that "they have to have weight and resistance to move right."

Of course. Puppets need weight and resistance -- and a comfortable place to hang.

To learn more about Buzz Schwall's work, check out www.buzzoplex.net .

Reporter Dawnell Smith can be reached at dsmith@adn.com .

Photo by BILL ROTH
Anchorage Daily News

Buzz Schwall touches up the paint on a puppet named Wilheim that he used recently for the character of Leporello in a production of the Mozart opera "Don Giovanni" at the Discovery Theatre.

Puppets get the run of the house

Buzz Schwall Web site: www.buzzoplex.net