PUPPETMASTER “PAS DE DEUX”:
Planet Puppet: A weekend at the ventriloquist convention (Mina Tavakoli, n+1)
Men and women behind me were grunting, lowing like cattle. We were all grunting, lowing like cattle. This was Vent 101, a workshop designed to coach red dotters through the basic tactics of the art. Together, we were unveiling the core of the ventriloquial mystery by practicing the letter B with our teeth clamped together.
The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures, biblical if not Delphic in provenance. I can only describe it as cousinish to learning the violin and getting very good at whistling at the same time. Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls, regardless of whether they’re the standard, wooden manikin type (called “hard puppets”) or the squishier, usually more zoological ones (our “soft sculptures”), while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. These little hummingbird motions, behind their cage of clenched, unmoving teeth, continue the joke inherent in the word ventriloquist, from the Latin venter (“belly”); loqui (“to speak”); “belly-breathing,” or the illusion of voice from elsewhere.
There is no real “throwing” of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet — there are five of them — inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken, or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.
Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like “I like to hike” is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas “I prefer puppetry” is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (“I trefer tuttetry.”)
Tonight’s tutelage was hosted by a man named Dan. His road-to-ventriloquial-Damascus moment was in 1965, care of a life-changing encounter at a Phoenix amusement park with Curly Q, a dummy belonging to the visiting Miss America pageant winner of that year. “I just about collapsed when I saw him. I was 5 years old,” he told us proudly. “But what about you all? Why vent? What’s your reason? And can you all hear me OK?”
Some wanted to do it because they’d joined a church ministry; many wanted to be able to tell stories to their grandchildren. One man raised his hand and announced that he’d always dreamt of a career in stand-up comedy, but felt too nervous to stand solitary onstage. Dan nodded understandingly. “When I’m up there without my puppet, I feel kind of exposed. And when I have one of my characters with me, I can relax a little bit more, and I can feel like I’m sharing the failure with somebody else if that’s what happens. I don’t take the full burden.”
We moved through the hard letters noisily. A few of the more gifted and seasoned in the back of the room were capable of showing me an elegant, dummy-free trick called “bifurcating,” where a ventriloquist speaks with lip movements that completely mismatch the sentence spoken. This has the terrific effect of looking like a flesh-and-blood human speaking with a laggy network connection, or someone being dubbed in a foreign-language film in real time.