Nov 23, 2009 | 11:47
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Jul 27, 2009
Toy stories
Associate Professor Dan Froot, sitting, with puppeteer Dan Hurlin, in front of one of the toy theater stages. Photo by Rachel Benioff.
The UCLA World Arts and Cultures professor, who teaches classes in interdisciplinary performance and the business of the arts, spends his out-of-class time raising awareness about hunger through plays based on the people he meets while volunteering. He presents the serious issue through the medium of toy theater, performed by puppeteers using paper dolls, marionettes and small toys on stages no more than four feet wide.
Froot's project, called "Who's Hungry?" attracted the attention of UCLA's Center for Community Partnerships, which gave him a grant and other support, said Center Director Margaret Leal-Sotelo. "What really resonated was Dan's vision and innovation in raising awareness about food insecurity and homelessness in a way that brought a human voice and human scale to the story," she said.
Froot interviews homeless people to develop lengthy oral histories, then transforms their stories into scripts. By staging the plays in the neighborhood where the interviewees live and by using toy theater to perform them, he and his colleagues maintain a small scale that Froot says makes the issue more immediate and comprehensible.
"I wanted theatergoers to witness plays about people in their own neighborhood — people they might pass every day," Froot said. "It was about taking a micro approach to a macro problem."
Using toy theater is an extension of that micro approach, he explained.
Click to enlarge: One of Froot's toy-theater stages. The two-dimensional grocery carts glide past the paper doll. Photo by Dan Hurlin.
Froot focuses on the issue of food insecurity: people who don't have reliable access to healthy food. They are people who have to choose between paying the rent or buying food, Froot said, or people who stretch their limited food budgets by buying inexpensive processed foods that provide calories but not nutrition.
Sandy, one of the people featured in Froot's plays, sometimes had to choose between feeding herself or paying insurance on the van she lived in.
Froot's first version of "Who's Hungry?" focused on West Hollywood, where he volunteered with hunger relief agencies, particularly with the group Hunger Action Los Angeles. He worked a food line once a week, where he slowly got to know the regulars.
"It took me about seven months to establish enough street cred to begin asking people if they would do the project with me," he recalled. "I spent time on the street talking to people, just getting to know them, so the message was out that I wasn't just there to swoop in and take their stories for my own profit."
Click to enlarge: A marionette walks past a stove on the toy-theater stage. Photo by Rose Eichenbaum.
He searched for mentally stable people with whom he had good chemistry, asking 25 of them to join him before he found five who agreed. He conducted "book-length" oral history interviews, amassing 10 hours of tape and 200-page transcripts on each person, for which he compensated them with an hourly wage and a copy of the transcript.
Froot worked with professional puppeteer Dan Hurlin to adapt interviews from three of his narrators into 20-minute plays, continuing to consult with the narrators along the way.
"I would go to them with our musical ideas, our visual plans, our scripts," Froot said. "They would give us their feedback, their opinions and their permission."
He also invited them to be involved in the performances, although only one agreed.
"Whenever you're working in disenfranchised communities, representation is a big question," he said. "Keeping the narrators involved was a way of making sure that we didn't appropriate their stories for the sake of an issue or our own work as artists."
The performances are much more than simply reading the interviews aloud, said Teresa Barnett, head of UCLA's Center for Oral History Research, where Froot plans to donate his research.
"People often do performances based on oral histories, but they tend to be unimaginative," Barnett said. "They just recite the words. But because Dan's an artist and performer, he found a way — through toy theater and his writing — to recreate the histories in a way that was so inventive. He really brought the stories to life."
Froot's research will also become the oral history center's first histories from the homeless.
"It's quite unusual to have these in an archive. I'm not aware of any others," Barnett said. "I was really intrigued by the project — even the term 'food insecurity,' I didn't know anything about that. It documented something that should have broader awareness, and because of his donation, now researchers can come in and do work on this."
Froot's performances took place in June in West Hollywood. He recently started the process over again in Santa Monica.
"Right now I'm going out and establishing volunteer opportunities and meeting people," he said. "In about nine months I'll begin the oral history process, and about a year after that we'll adapt the histories into new plays. We're trying to take it from community to community and establish a sort of franchise idea, so more communities can have this experience with plays about people in their neighborhoods."
Watch three two-and-a-half-minute excerpts from Froot's plays:
Froot worked with professional puppeteer Dan Hurlin to adapt interviews from three of his narrators into 20-minute plays, continuing to consult with the narrators along the way.
"I would go to them with our musical ideas, our visual plans, our scripts," Froot said. "They would give us their feedback, their opinions and their permission."
He also invited them to be involved in the performances, although only one agreed.
"Whenever you're working in disenfranchised communities, representation is a big question," he said. "Keeping the narrators involved was a way of making sure that we didn't appropriate their stories for the sake of an issue or our own work as artists."
The performances are much more than simply reading the interviews aloud, said Teresa Barnett, head of UCLA's Center for Oral History Research, where Froot plans to donate his research.
"People often do performances based on oral histories, but they tend to be unimaginative," Barnett said. "They just recite the words. But because Dan's an artist and performer, he found a way — through toy theater and his writing — to recreate the histories in a way that was so inventive. He really brought the stories to life."
Froot's research will also become the oral history center's first histories from the homeless.
"It's quite unusual to have these in an archive. I'm not aware of any others," Barnett said. "I was really intrigued by the project — even the term 'food insecurity,' I didn't know anything about that. It documented something that should have broader awareness, and because of his donation, now researchers can come in and do work on this."
Froot's performances took place in June in West Hollywood. He recently started the process over again in Santa Monica.
"Right now I'm going out and establishing volunteer opportunities and meeting people," he said. "In about nine months I'll begin the oral history process, and about a year after that we'll adapt the histories into new plays. We're trying to take it from community to community and establish a sort of franchise idea, so more communities can have this experience with plays about people in their neighborhoods."
Watch three two-and-a-half-minute excerpts from Froot's plays:
Sandy's story: 'Eight Days Without a Dog'
Froot's puppeteers use only items from the 99-cent store, where Sandy does all her shopping, to communicate without words how losing her dog affects her ability to maintain contact with the network of services that support her.
Leo's story: 'Dawn'
In the most classic example of traditional toy theater, this story is told through two-dimensional cutouts representing Leo on a bench in downtown Santa Monica, and his observations of the people and things that pass him by.
Robert's story: 'What the Fireman Said'
Froot used stationary figurines, marionettes, papier-mâché and more to tell Robert's entire life story in 20 minutes.
