INTERVIEW: Distance, a common theme today, also inspires ‘9000 Paper Balloons’
Photo: 9000 Paper Balloons, by Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott, is available to stream through Dec. 31. Photo courtesy of HERE / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott have been busy during these pandemic months, trying to find a proper outlet for their theatrical collaboration. As COVID-19 kept delaying their plans for an in-person show, they decided to produce a work that could be accessed on streaming platforms and available to audience members around the world. The result of their efforts is 9000 Paper Balloons, a puppet and animation work directed by Aya Ogawa that is now available virtually through the end of the year, courtesy of the HERE Arts Center.
In 9000 Paper Balloons, Kikuchi and Lott’s family histories are shared with the audience, and there’s time to reflect on the distance between two friends, two cultures and two sides of a common story. Both performers had family members who were involved in World War II, with Kikuchi’s grandfather serving for Japan and Lott’s grandfather serving for the United States. This theatrical piece, named after the surreal secret weapons that floated over the United States during the global conflict, describes their ancestral ties to the war, but also how in contemporary times they have banded together around peace and collaboration.
“I heard a Radiolab story all about these paper balloons,” Lott said in a recent phone interview. “I was vacuuming my living room, and I just stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn’t believe that it was a true story. I knew that its history is a shared American / Japanese history, so it felt like the perfect excuse to ask Maiko to collaborate on something. I didn’t know any more than the Radiolab story at the time, and I did know that Maiko’s grandfather served for Japan. So it was early, but it felt like it was such a tragic but also inspiring story, so theatrical and surreal. It felt like something that puppets might be able to do well.”
Kikuchi said that her grandfather was in training during the war years. In fact, at the end of the conflict, he was still in training and far from his family home. Eventually he was sent away as a prisoner and served a sentence of four years.
“So that made [for] him a huge trauma,” said Kikuchi, whose credits include Daydream Tutorial, Pink Bunny and Daydream Anthology. “He hated America until he died, and then Spencer’s grandfather was a navigator in the Army Air Corps. So our grandfathers did not actually [fight] in the battles, but they definitely served in World War II.”
9000 Paper Balloons took Kikuchi and Lott approximately five years to complete. Throughout that time, there were many news stories that impacted the development of the piece.
“There was a lot of political upheaval,” Lott said. “There was a ton of anti-Asian sentiment, and we would always say, ‘Should we be more on the nose in our show? Should we be more political talking about [this]?’ We said, ‘You know what, this collaboration is the message in itself — the fact that we are friends, artists, collaborators, and we are finding ways to work and to look toward our past.’ But then also as we look to the future, we’re much closer together than our grandfathers were. … It’s a turbulent time right now, but we hope that this piece can be a moment where we can collapse the distance between us.”
9000 Paper Balloons was supposed to premiere in December 2020, but that obviously was pushed back because of the closing down of theaters around the world. Then, the team started talking about a premiere in spring 2021, but that couldn’t happen either. Ultimately, they decided an in-person staging was going to be too difficult at HERE.
“It was kind of devastating after having worked on it for five years, so we decided that we would pivot,” said Lott, whose credits include A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Sesame Street and The Relationship. “We would at least have a version that was accessible and could be seen both in the United States and in Japan, and so we went to this pre-recorded [version]. … Hopefully it still feels like we’re making a theater piece, with theater artists and theater techniques, and so hopefully it feels like that even though it is captured on film. We worked really hard to make sure that you feel some momentum is there. There aren’t internal cuts within the scene and that kind of thing, so we did our best to try to adapt to what we could pull off.”
The collaboration between the two artists is a key part of 9000 Balloons, and they did bring their individual expertise to different parts of the development process. “Animation is all made by myself,” Kikuchi said. “I have the experience as an animator, but all the puppet design, especially three-dimensional puppets … that’s designed by Spencer. I do more the visual, two-dimensional visual art.”
Kikuchi said the piece starts quite simply, with two-dimensional images and closed spaces that continue to expand and eventually incorporate puppets and three-dimensionality. This structuring is important for the work because it speaks not only to the theatricality, but also the journey that the two collaborators have been on.
The puppetry and animation allow for Kikuchi and Lott to symbolically tell this story of their family’s histories in a most powerful way. “Puppets can do and say things that people cannot, and so you use the puppet as a symbol,” Lott said. “We wanted a world that felt like ours, but wasn’t. It was heightened and surreal and fantastical, and so we felt like animation was the perfect background for that kind of thing.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
9000 Paper Balloons, by Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott, streams through Dec. 31, courtesy of HERE. Click here for more information and tickets.
