Basil Twist

Do you get offended when people say “Basil” with a long “a” instead of with a short “a”?
Basil Twist: [Laughs] No, it’s very common. I’ll answer to it.

But you’ll secretly resent it, right?
Basil Twist: If they keep doing it, yeah.

Who are your favorite New Yorkers?
Basil Twist: Joey Arias, who I’m working with now, Hanne Tierney, Lee Nagrin: They’re artists who inspire me. I just love those strong women in New York who make so much happen. Joey’s not biologically a woman, but he’s possessed of the goddess spirit.

What is the biggest thing that’s happened to this city in the last 13 years?
Basil Twist: Obviously, 9/11 was a big thing that happened….

Other than 9/11?
Basil Twist: It’s hard to tell. I’ve been here for 15 years so I’m now at the point I could say “Oh, New York isn’t what it was.” But New York is always changing; I’ve been here long enough now to know that that’s just the way New York is, that it’s always changing.

What’s your favorite place or thing in New York?
Basil Twist: I love my neighborhood. I live in the West Village, right near Bleecker and Sixth Avenue, and I love the street life, I love walking and rollerblading in New York. I like being on the street.

What’s your personal favorite moment in New York? Where were you, and what was happening?
Basil Twist: I don’t have a number one. I’ve got many. But I remember being on the piers off the West Side Highway, when they were still decrepit and people were voguing and looking at the World Trade Center. It brought tears to my eyes to be in New York, because that only happens here, that moment.

What is the future of New York? What are your hopes, and what needs to happen?
Basil Twist: I don’t know. These are big questions for a puppeteer. More puppet shows! I don’t know, New York is just going to keep changing. The part that I love about New York—the alternative New York, the arts part of New York, the young part of New York, the vibrant part of New York—is always going to find its way through the cracks of the monolith of the real estate and the business of New York. So I can’t offer any advice on how that’s going to happen. I don’t think you actually can make that grow. It probably thrives on being suppressed! But I want that to happen.

If you could have a drink with anyone else on this Top 40 list, who would it be?
Basil Twist: Oh, I love Amy Sedaris. I’d like to have a drink with her.

What does Time Out mean to you?
Basil Twist: Time Out feels like it’s my audience. It feels young and smart.

So is your audience young and smart?
Basil Twist: I hope so.

Complete this sentence: New York is….
Basil Twist: New York is change. New York is energy.

Some of the puppets in your current show were used by your grandfather. Were your parents in the business as well, or did it skip a generation?
Basil Twist: No, my mother was a puppeteer too. So I’m a third-generation puppeteer.

It’s almost like a medieval guild. You don’t see family artisan traditions like that very often anymore.
Basil Twist: In a way, that’s true. But in puppetry there’s still that kind of apprenticeship. I did go to a puppetry school, in France, but there isn’t much of an education program for puppeteers. So you need to just find your heroes and sidle up next to them. For me, early on, that was Julie Taymor. That’s how it works. It’s an old-world, marginal, low-tech art form.

It seems like in every issue of TONY there are at least three or four puppet productions somewhere in town. Do you feel like the puppet culture is growing?
Basil Twist: I came here when they were talking about a puppet renaissance, so it’s always been that way. It’s such an ancient old-world form, but we love that it’s still around, and we need it even more as we get more digital and disconnected from each other. It’s a primitive form of magic that people are perhaps more thirsty for.

Many puppet shows in New York take on surprisingly dark material—a long way from Punch and Judy or The Muppet Show.
Basil Twist: Puppetry is about life and death. It’s about things being alive or not—in the ancient, primitive sense of animism, where you actually believe everything has a soul. It goes back to when we were cavemen, and it speaks to things that you imagined in the flickering of the firelight. It’s really heavy. Children have access to that: They’re open to part of their souls that adults have frequently closed their minds to.

Is there a future for the downtown performance scene, now that most of downtown has become so expensive?
Basil Twist: That scene will always find its way. There will be young people who will connect to that legacy and it will just happen. And where it will happen is New York, even if that means Bushwick, or whatever. It’s still New York.

Maybe not Staten Island.
Basil Twist: Maybe not. [Laughs] But I recently have a new faith in New York. That energy is persistent and continual, and it’s what makes New York. No matter how much it gets squashed, it’s still going to bleed out and re-form.

Next: Jonathan Lethem >

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