Basil Twist is an American puppeteer whose work strips puppetry down to movement, material and light — often with no character or narrative at all.
Symphonie Fantastique
is the piece to know. Performed inside a thousand-gallon water tank, it consists of fabricFabric is the outer surface of a puppet — the skin, the cl... More, feathers, glitter and abstract shapes moving to Berlioz. There are no figures, no faces and no story. It has been revived repeatedly since the 1990s and is widely regarded as a landmark in American puppetry.
Why that matters to a builder
Everything else in this glossary assumes you are making a character. Twist’s work is the proof that the underlying craft is not about faces at all — it is about controlling movement so precisely that an audience reads intention into an object. A strip of silk can be alive. That is a genuinely useful thing to know when your first head is not working.
He is a third-generation puppeteer
, and trained at the École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France — one of the few formal puppetry conservatories in the world.
He builds for others too
, designing puppetry for opera, dance and theatre productions, which is one of the more realistic professional paths in contemporary puppetryContemporary puppetry is the body of work made since roughly... More.
He runs the Dream Music Puppetry Program
at HERE Arts Center in New York, which develops and produces work by new puppet artists — an unusual amount of institutional generosity from a working artist.
He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015
, a rare recognition for the form and a reasonable marker of how seriously puppetry can be taken.