Tall Poppy Interview: Noah Kenneally, Puppeteer

Did you dance in the hallways, and on taxicabs? And wear legwarmers?

No legwarmers, but we did do odd things in the hallways for sure. Anyway, I started theatre in high school, and I was so sick of it by the end of it, just the formality and the artifice. But I loved telling stories and I loved making art. So I did street theatre for five or six years after high school, because I felt there was less lying. And then I started doing sculpture, and dance, and all kinds of weird stuff unrelated and realized that I wanted to relate them in some way. I went to Bread and Puppet in Montreal in 1998 and saw that that’s what they were doing. They were relating movement to landscape to giant sculpture to tiny sculpture – they combine so many different artistic media together to make a really effective thing. And that’s why puppets.

I know you workshopped The Lost Supper last year, but how long has it been in the works?

The Lost Supper is a Shadowland Theatre production, and I think the artistic directors of Shadowland have been thinking for several years about a theatre piece focusing on food. Last summer we had a week in the middle of the summer where all we did was research and development, so we got together (“we” meaning folks from Shadowland, folks from Puppetmongers, our director Mark Cassidy, Mark Keetch, who works with Clay and Paper) and we spent this week making things in the morning, trying stuff out in the afternoon, and just hanging out and telling stories about food. We read a bunch of stuff about food and researched a bunch – we came up with lots of material, and took it and workshopped it into different scenes and stories. So that’s a very long answer, but it’s been about a year and a half in development, but probably three years in conception. The idea originally came out of the 2003 blackout, and it was supposed to be called Blackout Stew because Ann and Brad (of Shadowland) were interested in the way people responded to the blackout – you remember, people having cookouts in their backyards because they needed to eat everything that was thawing in the freezer, and there’s this movie store near me that has ice cream, and they were handing out free ice cream for hours, just getting rid of it because they had nothing else to do.

Tell me more about the show itself.

The show is a group of people come together under unspoken circumstances and share their thoughts and feelings and memories about food. They come together to eat together, and out of that eating together they become more and more comfortable with each other and they create this community, in a way. And these puppets, these characters, are life-sized puppets and we express their stories through different kinds of puppets. So we have hand puppets, and rod puppets, toy theatre style puppets – we tried to combine all different aspects of puppetry into the show, not so much to showcase what puppetry can do, but just to explore the different facets of it, and how different puppets affect the stories being told.

Is there food in the show?

There’s lots of food in the show. It’s hilarious because we are constantly eating throughout rehearsal – we are SO HUNGRY. Just thinking so much about food, it’s hilarious how much we actually eat. There’s food all the way through it.

Do you feed the audience? Because that's a really good way to make people like you.

That was originally the plan. We hope to feed the audience with the art. We originally wanted to have a crockpot full of soup bubbling throughout the performance, so people get to smell it through the show and then get to eat afterwards. But the logistics of that…I don’t know. I think at the opening we’re going to have a bunch of food, a bunch of different soups. And if that’s successful maybe we’ll keep doing it, but I don’t know yet.

What’s your favourite food?

That is an impossible question. I don’t know that I have a favourite food. Pizza springs to mind…I love Japanese food…I really like fruit – in the winter I get really into those seedless clementines. They are so addictive, it’s like fruit crack. And the greatest fruit I ate while living in Chinatown was mangosteen.

Do you have any new favourite foods as a result of the show?

I really like green beans now, and I was never really big on them before. I have a renewed interest in salads, and you’ll see why when you see the play. I don’t know, it’s hard to narrow my favourites down…

I know, it’s not really a fair question – I’ve been accused of being rather childlike with my constant demands that people list their favourite everything.

(Laughing) That’s fine – oh, I really love smoked tofu. Smoked anything, really. I had amazing smoked gouda from that place on Bloor – that deli?

Elizabeth Meats? It’s not there anymore!

Elizabeth Meats in GONE? What? Where did it go?

No one knows, it’s this big mystery. One day it was just boarded up, newspaper all over the windows. Nothing new has gone in there yet. It’s kind of tragic. What are your favourite food places in Toronto, restaurants and shops?

There are so many amazing food places in Toronto. I really love the sushi land stretch on Bloor.

Which is your preferred spot?

I used to be a fierce loyalist to New Generation, but they’ve kind of gone downhill lately, and now I think it’s Sushi on Bloor that really does it right.

And other places?

I really like The Swan on Queen, it’s sort of a diner style place – gorgeous food. I like Vicki’s Fish and Chips on Roncesvalles. And I had some really great pizza from an Italian place in my neighborhood, Amico’s. There are just so many good places to eat in this city, we are so lucky.

The Lost Supper plays at the Tarragon Extra Space until October 9. Tickets are $15-$25. 416-531-1827.