Handspring Puppet Company

History

Jones and Kohler met at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. Both openly gay, they began dating soon after. At first, they designed puppets for children-targeted productions, which Jones initially disliked. Kohler "introduced him [Jones] to the west African tradition of puppetry for adults," working with Malcolm Purkey and Barney Simon, among others.

Productions and exhibitions

1987 saw their exhibition of "Unmasking the Puppet" at UNISA. Prior to that, Esther van Ryswyk directed their puppets in a play called Episodes of an Easter Rising (1985), based on David Lyttons's radio special of the same name. It premiered in Charleville-Mézières, France.

In 1997, they worked with William Kentridge on Ubu and the Truth Commission. It premiered in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 26 May 1997. Kentridge had been working for some years with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg, most notably on Woyzeck on the Highveld in 1993 and Faustus in Africa in 1996. The latter, according to Kentridge, was "a huge undertaking", after which he and the company were on the look-out merely for something small to "do and survive". Starting on 18 September 1998, Ubu and the Truth Commission played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for four performances.

Yaya Coulibaly's play Tall Horse (2006) toured Africa under the supervision and direction of the company. On 1 March 2011, Kohler and Jones demonstrated a hyena puppet used in Faustus in Africa (1995) at the TED 2011 event in Long Beach, California.

The Handspring Puppet Company achieved critical acclaim when War Horse premiered in South Bank, London, on 17 October 2007. For this show, Kohler and Jones worked with directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris and choreographer Toby Sedgwick to design and construct life-sized horse puppets, controlled by three actors – two to operate the legs and one to control the head and neck, with all three actors providing a variety of sound effects. The company won an Olivier Award, Evening Standard Theatre Award and London Critics' Circle Theatre Award. The show transferred to the West End on 28 March 2009, and on 15 March 2011, the show premiered on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

The company collaborated with Neil Bartlett on Or You Could Kiss Me, which opened at the National Theatre in London on 5 October 2010, following previews from 28 September. The show has been described as "an intimate history of two very private lives, lived in extraordinary times." It closed on 18 November 2010.

For the Broadway production of War Horse, the company has received an Outer Critics Circle Special Achievement Award for "Puppet Design, Fabrication and Direction for War Horse", and they are also a recipient of the 2011 Special Tony Award.