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Preparing a puppetry epic
by Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio
January 23, 2004

Mercurius Lumen is a visual poem. Puppeteer Dan Polnau describes it as a children's pop-up book morphing before your eyes. There's no dialogue, but a lot of singing and music. (MPR photo/Chris Roberts)

An epic production is unfolding at Bedlam Studio on the West Bank of Minneapolis. Mercurius Lumen features an orchestra of international musicians and a cast of more than 50 puppets. Not a word of dialogue will be spoken. The play's primary purpose is to help audiences re-engage their imaginations, and explore the ancient roots of humanity.

Minneapolis, Minn. — In nearly every theater production, there's a point before opening night when things fall apart. Everything you've been working on for months maybe years, seems on the verge of collapse.

	Mercurius Lumen puppet

For puppeteer Dan Polnau, creator of Mercurius Lumen, it came this week. As he sits bleary-eyed in Bedlam Studio, surrounded by puppets so creepy you can imagine them guarding the gates of hell, Polnau takes a deep breath.

"This is the trickiest part," he says. "Exactly where we're at right now."

For Polnau, founder of Puppetry Arts Studio, this is the part in rehearsal where the puppets take over the production. It's just like a writer letting the characters determine the course of a novel. In a play as mythological and fantastical as Mercurius Lumen, Polnau says you have to pay attention to the puppets.

"And if you resist it, or you're not listening, you can kill the magic," he says.

Mercurius Lumen sounds like something Homer would come up with. It begins with Hermes, the protagonist, on his death bed, in a dream state. He's about to undertake the journey of his life.

"He begins to travel back through past incarnations, back to his first life on this planet," Polnau says. "And then he begins to go even further back, back through ancestral lines and back back back, into the shadows of antiquity."

Hermes, says Polnau, is the everyman. He represents humanity on the verge of crossing a bridge, of evolving to the next level. To get there, Hermes must carry with him an understanding of the roots of existence.

	Dan Polnau

With the god Mercury and an old crone guiding him, Hermes travels back through what Polnau calls the layers of creation, through the human and plant realms into the underworld, and then up into the heavens. He finally comes back to earth as the ringmaster of a circus. While it's hard to boil down the play's meaning to a few sentences, Polnau is willing to give it a shot.

"It's about death and rebirth, both literally psychologically and metaphorically," he says. "The little deaths that happen every day, and the big death that is impending for all of us and the mystery of all that."

Mercurius Lumen is a visual poem. Polnau describes it as a children's pop-up book morphing before your eyes. There's no dialogue, but a lot of singing and music.

Polnau has assembled an orchestra of international musicians, including Chinese flute virtuoso Zhang Ying, and Finnish vocalist Petra Zilliacus. Zilliacus performed with Twin Cities singer Ruth Mackenzie in such productions as Kalavala, and The Snow Queen. She's a specialist in ancient scandinavian singing techniques.

"Dan is really exploring the common unconscious of all the people of the world," Zilliacus says. "And he wanted to access some of the oldest singing styles in different places of ther world."

Polnau also handpicked a number of artists who's vision he admires but who previously had no experience with puppetry.

One was Minneapolis sculptor Allen Christian, who's helping build the puppets and will serve as a firsttime puppeteer. Christian says Mercurius Lumen has become a means for him to strengthen his own spiritual identity.

"I think we really need to connect with that thing that's so deep inside us," he says. "We don't even know it exists. We can't hear it. And it's kind of about opening the soul up and allowing this thread that weaves through all of us to tie us back together again."

Mercurius Lumen opens tomorrow night at Bedlam Studio in Minneapolis. It's actually an excerpt of a four and a half hour production Polnau hopes to stage next fall, funders willing. He understands the risk of performing a puppetry piece with no words, but he says if fifty audience members come away with 50 different interpretations, he's comfortable with that.

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