REVIEW: Wakka Wakka's “Dead as a Dodo”
Futuristically original yet deeply historic, we feel this hero’s journey in our bones
The world leader in visual theatrical imagination, Wakka Wakka returns to New York’s Under the Radar festival with the gutting, cutting-edge Dead as a Dodo, their fifth major co-production with Nordland (Norway) Visual Theater.
Dead as a Dodo, set deep within the underworld, follows two skeleton friends, a Dodo and a boy, tirelessly digging for fresh bones in order to reassemble who they once were before they disappear forever. When Dodo miraculously sprouts feathers, the established order of their world ruptures, sending them on an epic odyssey to outrun the jealous Bone King and navigate the newfound transformation together.
Fusing puppetry, object manipulation, masks, video art, and original music, the ensemble company led by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage devises a visually thrilling futuristic fantasy that’s equal parts comedic and epic, wholly universal in its exploration of love, fear, friendship, and survival. The creative team’s seamless collaboration paints the vibrancy of the world in bold, breathtaking brushstrokes of puppetry (Waage), sound, music (Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson), lighting (Daphne Agosin), scenery, and costume design (Warnock and Waage). Through their lens, what begins as cartoonish unfurls into magnificence, creating a stunning yet approachable science fiction that transfixes audiences young and old. In fact, every time you think you have a grasp on the extent of their world-building prowess and creative toolbox the team one-ups your imagination, daring you to go even further.
Beginning in concentrated exceptions to darkness, the design expands as the story grows in stakes and scale. An intimate introduction to our duo in essentially post-apocalyptic isolation soon gives way to gasp-inducing spectacle as their journey takes them across realms; in one such sequence it’s the characters that may be drowning, but it’s the audience who is left breathless. As the characters’ known world expands, the props, scenery, lighting, and projections zoom out, filling more and more of the stage, including a heart-wrenching moment of ascension in the latter half where the vertical amplification of the space induces heightened awe.
Across the eighty minute adventure, the camouflaged ensemble of puppeteers, to borrow from Dickens, move as one “living sea,” or more aptly as a living cosmos, ebbing and flowing, expanding and contracting to carry the characters through change. In a visual marvel of repeated sleight-of-hand, Waage’s Dodo design incrementally goes bare-boned to Muppet, a transformation to be cheered until the implication of separation back to the land of the living lands like a sock to the stomach.
More ambitious in geography than some of their previous works’ unity of place, the occasional scene transition pauses with dead air (no pun intended), particularly around the introduction of secondary characters who aid or intimidate via abrupt appearances that prioritize comedy over cohesion. Being dropped in medias res in the Wakka Wakka Universe (WWU?) is nothing new, where their signature lore usually adds depth of believability and circumstance by de-centering excessive exposition. And while it’s not necessary to know their other installments or catch the clever Easter eggs, knowing their body of work connects through theme over scrupulous characterization allows slightly more grace for the disjointed Whack-a-Mole written appearances of ghouls and gondolas.
Written by Warnock, Waage, and ensemble with original music and sound design by Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson, the musical quest raises compelling questions around the universal human feeling of yearning that here cavernously transcend “death” or “life;” indeed, the ensemble’s skilled personification of puppets as the medium of choice poses meta-questions of meaning-making for the terms “alive” and “coming back to life,” with life being just a particular state of being the characters can remember, long for, an/or travel to as they’re nonetheless active, singing, dancing, and sprinting while on the brink of a disappearance mysteriously more final than death itself.
In a post-Tim Burton culture, the elusive appeal of finding success as a spooky premise can be lucrative if able to creep the eerie and odd into the mainstream outside of a Halloween weekend. Just ask the current Beetlejuice and Addams Family global touring and licensing rights, both aided albeit by major recent Hollywood IP investments. In such an IP-driven market, to be a guest in Wakka Wakka’s universe and to experience their careful, expertly crafted world-building is refreshingly disarming. Walking out of this risky original, the audience was abuzz: “Do you think it’d be good for kids? It was kind of scary.” “I bet I know exactly how they did that trick.” “Okay I’m destroyed, that challenged my whole worldview.” Their most commercially tourable to date, Dodo’s technical and emotional prowess practically guarantees you leave the theater talking, taken in first by the whimsical bones of the premise then blown away by its heart.
Running through February 9 at Baruch PAC in Manhattan, Dodo feels at once wholly original yet deeply historic, reflecting ourselves and our fears and imagination back to us as we feel this hero’s journey in our bones– it’s ours.
Production credits
Wakka Wakka’s
“Dead As a Dodo”
Presented by Baruch Performing Arts Center, a co-production with Nordland Visual Theatre, Nord Universitet and The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
In partnership with Under the Radar
Written and Directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage with help from the ensemble
Ensemble: Alexandra Bråss, Lei Lei Bavoil, Dorothy James, Andy Manjuck, Hanna Magrete Muir, Sigurd Rosenberg, Peter Russo, Marie Skogvang-Stork, Anna Soland, Kirjan Waage, Olivia Zerphy
Producers: Kirjan Waage, Gwendolyn Warnock and Gabrielle Brechner; Associate Producer: Tom Gustafson; Assistant Producer: Olivia Zerphy.
Creative team includes Puppet Design and Construction: Kirjan Waage; Props and Additional Puppet Construction: Lei-Lei Bavoil, Alexandra Bråss, Frida Vige Helle, Dorothy James, Andy Manjuck, Hanna Magrete Muir, Jack Markussen, Sigurd Rosenberg, Peter Russo, Marie Skogvang-Stork, Anna Soland; Original Music and Sound Design: Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson; Projection Design: Erato Tzavara; Lighting Design: Daphne Agosin; Set Design and Costume Design: Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage; Additional Prop, Painting and Sewing: Rosalie Arends, Cornelia Waage, Jack Markussen; Associate Lighting Designer: Gillian Hanemayer.
In collaboration with: Figurteatret i Nordland, Nord University, and The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. Supported by: Arts Council Norway, Oslo Teatersenter, Sea-Cargo AS, and FFUK.
“Dead as a Dodo” runs January 8 – February 9, 2025 at Baruch PAC (55 Lexington Ave, Manhattan). Tickets are now on sale at https://bpac.baruch.cuny.edu.
Run time is 80 minutes with no intermission. It is appropriate for ages 7 and up. For more information visit https://www.wakkawakka.org/dead-as-a-dodo.