On an afternoon in late July at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, buffalo body parts were everywhere: legs, bellies, heads. What looked like hides were hanging to dry on lines strung across the brick-walled space, and 10 bulky bodies \u2014 without fur or skulls \u2014 dangled from a metal truss.<\/p>\n
If it was a tiny bit unnerving, it was glorious, too. These bison were in the process of being created, not dismembered; on the floor, at a safe distance from the action, several nearly complete animals rested peaceably. As Jim Findlay, the theater\u2019s producer, said, \u201cWe\u2019re kind of an abattoir in reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Making, that is, not actual buffalo but magnificent life-size puppet versions \u2014 a 40-strong herd, designed by the South African company Ukwanda Puppets<\/a> and hand-built in New York of steel, plywood and burlap, with paper ears and horns. (The stuff that looked like hides? Just burlap, bathed in glue and coloring.)<\/p>\n This week, those puppets will stampede on the streets of New York in \u201cReturn of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi<\/a>,\u201d a free public art spectacle slated to wind through Lower Manhattan on Friday and Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday, with each bison operated by three puppeteers: two inside, and one next to the head. At fixed points along the routes, celebrities \u2014 including Sam Waterston, Rosario Dawson, Laurie Anderson and Susan Sarandon \u2014 will be among the performers taking part in pop-up artistic events: readings, music, dance.<\/p>\n Projects that ambitious, created from scratch, tend to have long gestations. But \u201cReturn of the Buffalo\u201d was a gleam in no one\u2019s eye until January, when Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann\u2019s, and Karen Brooks Hopkins, the former longtime president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, were casting about for possible ways to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States.<\/p>\n Then they talked with Amir Nizar Zuabi, the Palestinian artistic director of the Walk Productions, known for the peregrinating 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee puppet Little Amal<\/a>, who charmed New York in 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd he just goes, \u2018How about 50 bison?\u2019\u201d Feldman said.<\/p>\n She and Hopkins were instantly smitten with the idea of creating a herd of those massive animals \u2014 tens of millions of which once roamed much of North America before their numbers plummeted close to extinction. Having been nurtured into a comeback, they are now the United States\u2019 national mammal<\/a>.<\/p>\n After momentum around the semiquincentennial fizzled, Feldman and Hopkins abandoned the project\u2019s conceptual link to it. Instead they focused on giving the city a big, non-ticketed, open-to-everyone arts experience to finish a summer that\u2019s seen plenty of prohibitively priced marquee events, including the Knicks\u2019 championship run and the World Cup.<\/p>\n They also scaled back their goal of building 50 buffalo, Hopkins said, when their budget (which they declined to disclose) and their timeline got uncomfortably tight. Anyway, she noted, the puppets are \u201cvast\u201d: 6 feet tall, 9 to 10 feet long. Forty is a lot.<\/p>\n Zuabi told me that the number 50 had never been about having one buffalo for each state. He just wanted to have enough of them to make an impact.<\/p>\n \u201cI really hope we\u2019ll be able to capture the awe, the majestic-ness, the size, you know, and the sheer mass of a herd,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Like spectators at a marathon or a parade, the audience at \u201cReturn of the Buffalo\u201d (whose subtitle is the same phrase in Lakota) can stake out a spot along the route if they simply want to watch the herd pass by. Unlike a marathon, or a typical parade, they can also follow the herd the whole way.<\/p>\n As with Little Amal and the Walk\u2019s climate-action public art piece, \u201cThe Herds<\/a>,\u201d which last year traveled from central Africa through Europe to the Arctic Circle, the buffalo puppets can be enjoyed on an aesthetic level with no deeper meaning attached. Gazing at them can be about wonder as much as anything else.<\/p>\n But Zuabi is an explicitly political artist, and his idea about the buffalo was rooted in history that predates the country\u2019s founding, and encompasses what followed in the 19th century, with the wanton slaughter of the buffalo that Native people depended on for survival. Zuabi considers the animal\u2019s extreme overhunting<\/a>, as white settlers continued their westward expansion, \u201ca political act of man-made starvation, of ethnic cleansing, of pure violence on man and nature and land.\u201d<\/p>\n Notions of reckoning and repair, then, are central to \u201cReturn of the Buffalo.\u201d So is the reset, or the healing, that the return of the buffalo is meant to bring.<\/p>\n Still, Zuabi absolutely wants the wildness of the animals to be apparent. It is important to him that the puppets stampede, and not only because it\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about negotiating space, right?\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you take a herd of animals and smash them through a city, there\u2019s a lot of questions of ownership, of right of passage \u2014 who needs to move out of the way for who.\u201d<\/p>\n In the making of an artwork that draws on specific cultures, there can be a similar need to make way, in this case for elders of the Lenape and Lakota tribes, who are among those credited with conceiving \u201cReturn of the Buffalo\u201d with Zuabi, who created it.<\/p>\n JJ Lind, the artistic director of the New York collaborative Immediate Medium<\/a> and a Cherokee Shawnee artist who has been involved in the piece\u2019s creation since the spring, said that the respect is genuine.<\/p>\n \u201cI really do hope that it doesn\u2019t come across as appropriationist because I don\u2019t feel appropriated,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel heard and I feel like I have helpers. Who are helping tell an important story that is not their own.\u201d<\/p>\n Last weekend at St. Ann\u2019s, all 40 buffalo were present and accounted for. The artist Robin Frohardt<\/a>, who oversaw the building of them, was part of the team making adjustments and repairs to puppets hanging from a truss, their butts facing the rows of theater seats. The other buffalo lay on burlap stretchers along two walls, looking, with their glossy, fur-fringed eyes, alive and individual, if maybe a little forlorn.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything has been touched by hands in, like, a very obsessive way,\u201d Frohardt said back in August, and that is a significant part of these puppets\u2019 appeal: that they are so very human-made.<\/p>\n Like \u201cThe Herds,\u201d which tapped locals to operate the animal puppets wherever it went, \u201cReturn of the Buffalo\u201d relies on scores of volunteers to spend several days learning how to make the puppets breathe; how to respond to commands \u2014 such as gallop, gentle stop, regroup \u2014 given in Xhosa and Arabic, two languages of the spectacle\u2019s creators; and how to move as one buffalo and as part of a herd. And then, with their 80-plus-pound puppet, to do it all publicly.<\/p>\n The South African puppeteer Craig Leo<\/a>, who stilt-walked to operate Little Amal, is the puppetry director of \u201cReturn of the Buffalo.\u201d From \u201cThe Herds,\u201d which he also puppet-directed, he knows that the objective is not really to turn civilians into trained puppeteers. The more vital point is the experience the volunteers take away.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not every day you get to be part of an entire herd of bison and charge through the streets of New York and bring awareness to, you know, the meaning of it all,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it happens once in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n What lingers for onlookers, though, with all potent public art \u2014 like Little Amal, or Christo and Jeanne-Claude\u2019s \u201cThe Gates<\/a>,\u201d or Basil Twist\u2019s flock of grazing puppet sheep<\/a>, or Tatzu Nishi\u2019s \u201cDiscovering Columbus<\/a>\u201d \u2014 is the ghost image in a landscape permanently altered.<\/p>\n For some of us, buffalo puppets are about to be stampeding through Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On an afternoon in late July at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, buffalo body parts were everywhere:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[131253,98,18041,100,99,85512,131254,131255,28924,9,24,56,63,116472,131256,85505,25625,905,21485],"class_list":["post-351396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-bison","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-nyc","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-feldman","tag-hopkins","tag-karen-brooks","tag-manhattan-nyc","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-puppets","tag-return-of-the-buffalo-tatanka-owe-akupi-exhibit","tag-st-anns-warehouse-brooklyn","tag-susan","tag-theater","tag-vis-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}