Jessica Krueger has performed throughout the country as a dancer, acrobat, gymnast, martial artist, clown and improvisational actress. But, until May 19, South Floridians will have the best chance to see her as a horse.
The Detroit-born artist is a proud to be a puppeteer in the first national tour of “War Horse”, now playing at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Four teams of three performers rotate in bringing the titular character, a colt named Joey, to life. Krueger controls the hind legs, portraying the wild animal in a highly believable, artistic way with a sophisticated puppet that bears no resemblance to a cheap cloth found in a children’s show — or likely any sort of puppet you’ve seen before.
“Handspring Puppet Company, the guys who designed and built all the puppets for the show and helped create the show — one of the more unique aspects of their puppetry is breath,” said Krueger. “They like to say that actors, when they go out on stage, they’re automatically living. And a puppet, by nature, is not alive. A puppet is always struggling to live. And so, what Handspring likes to do, is to always give all of their puppets breath. And that’s super key in how we operate the puppet and how people are able to look at these puppets and interpret them as real.”
The performer in the middle of the horse simulates the animal’s breathing, in a way that sounds rather simple.
“All he really actually does is just kind of bend his legs up and down, and it allows the cage to rise and fall, much like how a horse would breathe,” said Krueger. “And he syncs up his personal breath with what the horse’s breath is and therein, the head and the hind performers can sync up with him, so that we’re always breathing together. And that’s a huge component of how we work together and how we move together and how we listen together.”
“War Horse” has been a children’s novel and a Steve Speilberg film, but in between the production of those two, came the Tony Award-winning stage version, which has played in London, Broadway and Toronto, among other international locations. It focuses on contradictory themes: friendship and war, as a newborn Joey forms a tight bond with a young British boy and later gets caught up in enemy fire of World War II.
In order to portray a horse, the puppeteer team had to better understand the animal. Just as an actor may head to a courtroom and talk to lawyers before appearing in a legal drama, Krueger and her cast mates visited stables and interacted with horses, among other methods of research.
“We watched a lot of YouTube. We still watch a lot of YouTube,” Krueger said. “Something about horse owners is that they really like to post videos of them, which is fantastic for us. It’s an ongoing thing. We like to check out live horses whenever possible, whether they be police Mounties or we’re able to go to stables that are nearby whatever city we’re playing in. It’s definitely a very helpful thing to say hi to horses whenever possible.”
Krueger and her team also like to change up their performances, much as a real horse would act differently each day.
“There is a certain amount of choreography and we certainly have to get from point A to point B at certain points during the show, but how we do that is completely and utterly up to us,” she said. “One of things that we were told right from the beginning of our rehearsal process is that we were to always, always be a horse. That means if somebody steps to close behind us, feel free to flick ‘em with our tail, make a noise or stomp on the ground.”
The puppeteers are not only encouraged to act animalistic; they’re also required to be athletic. Krueger calls her team “an eclectic group of very physical people.” Their role — involving running around the entire stage, while manipulating a 120-pound puppet — demands strength and stamina.
“It’s a physical challenge for us to operate the horses and to do it well and to do it as many times as we do it per week,” Krueger said.
Yet, it’s clear that she finds the tough task incredibly rewarding.
“That sort of the great thing about puppetry is that the 3 of us are obviously pretending 150 percent that this is a horse and that we are a horse,” she said. “And we invite the audience to pretend also that it’s a horse. And they can choose to or they can choose not to. We are seen in the puppet and it’s not unobvious that we exist with the puppet, but we invite them to pretend with us. It’s a wonderful thing to sort of sense the moment in which the entire audience is also pretending with you. That’s really one of the most phenomenal things, I think, about working on this show.”
The Kentucky Derby may have recently ended, but to score tickets to a different sort of equestrian spectacle, visit browardcenter.org or call the box office at 954-462-0222.
