Erth's puppeteers re-create prehistoric aquarium - South Bend Tribune

Erth's puppeteers re-create prehistoric aquarium - South Bend Tribune

Erth's puppeteers re-create prehistoric aquarium - South Bend Tribune

Posted: 13 Feb 2020 03:00 AM PST

The Australian entertainment venture called Erth Visual & Physical Inc. takes its name from the acronym Environmentally Recycled THeatre. Founded in 1990, the company had its first big success with a show called "Dinosaur Zoo Live," in which puppeteers control a series of dinosaurs and a narrator talks the crowd through some informative details.

Now, Erth's co-founder and artistic director, Scott Wright, has taken a similar concept under water. The show, "Erth's Prehistoric Aquarium Adventure," explores several creatures who lived in the ocean at the time the dinosaurs roamed the land. The program comes to the Mendel Center at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor for two matinees on Saturday.

The show's primary narrator is a marine biologist, augmented by the elaborate puppets and their puppeteers, who also say a few lines here and there. Eryn Malafronte, a veteran of the dinosaur show, is on board as a puppeteer and sometime narrator this time around as well. She says that there are a ton of logistics and only a few humans to make everything happen.

"We all have specific puppets that we use individually, and for others, we have to come together and operate them as a team," she says by telephone from Winter Springs, Fla. "We have big ones, like a giant mother Plesiosaur, which requires multiple people. There's a big anglerfish which also requires multiple people to handle. There's so much teamwork. We're all puppeteering and breathing as a team, just to make it look so good."

Somehow, this all happens with merely three puppeteers.

"When we come out (for curtain bows) and it's just three of us, it's always a shock to a lot of the people," Malafronte says.

The performers need to have acting chops and highly developed puppeteering skills. They also better be in top physical condition.

"We all run around so much," Malafronte says. "It's a huge cardio workout."

The dinosaur puppets were mostly quite heavy, but the aquatic creatures are the opposite. In some cases, they're inflatables. This helps convey the sense of lightness and flotation needed for underwater life.

"We had to learn how to create this fluidity of movement," Malafronte says, "mostly by studying fish and jellyfish in real aquariums."

The puppetry is rooted in the Japanese discipline of Bunraku puppet theater, in which the performer is often visible behind the apparatus. In this show, the players wear all black in order not to distract too much, and the audiences tend not to be put off. Malafronte says that when she sees fan art from children who've seen the show, the drawings almost never include the humans.

She says it's a point of pride that many children come away from the experience with an aspiration to become marine biologists themselves. In a time when some segments of society are regularly ignoring or even deriding scientists, this is a valuable aspect of the show.

"We have a message towards the end of the show about pollution in the ocean, and it's important to us that most of our materials are recyclable," Malafronte says. "Even our merch reflects this. We have reusable straws and water bottles. Anything we can do to help clean up is great."

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