A puppet show of Dante’s fucking Inferno performed at the actual dump? That’s the kind of beautiful perversity that makes you realize, Jesus CHRIST, this is IT, this is the whole thing laid bare right here where the seagulls circle and everything smells like what it actually is.
Niki Ulehla (Recology Artist in Residence) gets it. She understands that hell isn’t some abstract theological concept, some medieval poetry-slam championship for academics arguing about terza rima, it’s right HERE, that mountain of discarded lumber and bent metal and leather that used to mean something to someone. The circles of hell rendered in the actual detritus of American appetite. And instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, instead of looking away from the waste we produce like good little consumers, she goes in there, this woman who studied at Stanford, learned puppetry in Czech Republic, learned an art form most people think died with vaudeville, and then what does she do? Does she make cute little shows about rainbows?
FUCK NO.
She pulls Virgil and Beatrice and the whole damned cast straight out of the wreckage. Makes them dance on strings. These marionettes carved from reclaimed wood aren’t actors pretending, they’re the genuine article, reanimated garbage performing a medieval critique of human excess at the very source of our own excess. Those puppets dangling there made from scrap metal and busted wood? They’re us. We’re all marionettes dancing on strings made of consumerism and planned obsolescence, the punishment fitting the crime in ways Dante never imagined.
And at least these honest-to-god trash-puppets have the decency to admit it while acting out the greatest horror story ever written about how we’ve always been this way, we’ve always built our little paradises on mountains of waste and called it civilization.
You want authenticity? Forget the galleries in Jackson Square with wine and cheese. The dump as theater! Not hope abandoned but hope FOUND, in the gutter where it belongs, all shiny and new and pulled from the literal END OF THE LINE for all our precious possessions, resurrected as instruments of medieval judgment.
Using recycled materials, Niki Ulehla created a cast of puppet characters for a production based on Dante’s Inferno performed at Recology San Francisco as part of The Artist in Residence Program at Recology . The cast of marionettes performing in this version of Dante’s Inferno were made from reclaimed wood, metal, and leather, that was then carved and painted. Ulehla, who is also a goldsmith, received her AB in painting and drawing from Stanford University. She studied puppetry in the Czech Republic, and frequently leads puppetry workshops for Bay Area students. Instead of echoing the advice of the famous phrase that appears on the gates of hell in Dante’s story, “abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Ulehla’s puppets and performance inspires hope, and illustrates the potential of repurposed materials.