Saul Aroha Nui Tea’s path to healing through puppeteering
BY JAKE MAHER
jake@streetsensemedia.org
Saul Aroha Nui Tea describes himself as a
“climate refugee:” He recently moved to D.C.
after forest fires in California and a dispute with
his landlord, a former friend, persuaded him that
it was time to leave the West Coast.
The move to D.C. was just the latest in a life
of frequent change. Tea, born in 1975, says he
spent about 20 years hitchhiking across the country and has
been to D.C. and every one of the 48 contiguous states state
except Delaware.
“The guy in that old song, ‘I know every handout in every
town and every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around,
king of the road?’ That was me,” Tea said.
The cartoons from his childhood have become some of his
most important influences. “It was Jim Henson that saved me
all this time,” said Tea, referring to the creator of the Muppets
and Sesame Street.
Tea had an abusive childhood. He has lingering PTSD from
being physically beaten at a Catholic school in his hometown
of Milwaukee. “The only place I had safety in all that time,”
he said, “was watching the Muppet show, Sesame Street, all
that stuff.”
Since 2016, he’s been channeling those comforting memories
into his own puppetry as a form of therapy. His latest work is
a multi-part folk opera featuring a cast of the “Hell’s Bottom
Congress of Puppets.”
His first work for Street Sense Media was based on a Street
Sense Media writers’ workshop prompt asking writers to
reflect on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Tea gathered his
notes and ideas for certain puppet characters and wrote a song
celebrating her life.
For this project, he’s taken a step back to create a collection
of Weird Al-style parody takes on popular songs for the
puppets to sing, centered around his observations on the
experiences of poor people. The folk opera will also provide
more background information on the characters he’s been
working on for some time.
His first draft of the project, he acknowledged, lacked in
accessibility for the audience. “For me, as a childhood PTSD,
active schizophrenic trying to get things to make sense using
seven-dimensional media like print and puppets and music
and stuff like that,” he said, “that’s a whole lot for someone
to take in at first glance.”
Part of the challenge is that Tea’s work draws on a personal
mythology built on a wide range of experience and thought.
Tea developed his puppetry working as a camping outfitter for
a program for veterans with PTSD in California. He would put
on puppet-emceed talent shows for the community when they
went on a camping trip to enjoy a fireworks-free Fourth of July.
“The drum circle until you’re tired around the fire, and then
when everyone’s exhausted they take turns off of the drums,
and then you can sit and talk comfortably in the middle of the
drum circle around the fire — the PTSD scenario that comes
out of that is incredibly transformative for a lot of veterans, and
that’s what I focused on for my adult life,” Tea said.
Animal rights is another of the themes in his work and
the inspiration for the character LMNOP Soup, an elephant,
based on his time working for the Barnum and Bailey Circus
in the early ‘90s before an experience with a member of PETA
persuaded him to leave the organization.
But the most important foundation of his puppetry is his
favorite Muppet, Oscar the Grouch.
All of his puppets are made from material he’s found
scavenging in garbage cans. The puppets in the Hell’s Bottom
Congress of Puppets are made from trash from the Logan
Circle area, known in the 19th century as Hell’s Bottom, then
a notoriously dangerous part of the city.
Tea prides himself on working with recycled materials
and rejects a culture of disposable goods, which he considers
to go hand-in-hand with traditionally European values and
specifically land-use practices. He drew parallels between the
gentrification of Hell’s Bottom — the District refused to renew
the liquor licenses of any bars in the area in 1891 leading
to an increase in the value of the neighborhood — with the
more recent gentrification of Logan Circle and the District as
a whole. D.C. was ranked as the city with the 13th highest
proportion of gentrifying neighborhoods by the National
Community Reinvestment Coalition this year, a drop off from
2019, when it was the highest ranked.
“All the real trendy white people have moved there now and
it’s a real nice place and everybody loves this neighborhood
on 14th and U — and man, are there a ton of people just
dying outside their doors,” he said. “Oscar the Grouch is
crawling out of garbage cans around here and his goal is to
tell everybody, ‘Guess what? You’re false, you’re freaky and
you’re fraudulent.’”
A concern for marginalized people is at the core of his
puppeteering. He said that the basis of the folk opera would
be the experiences of poor people, and he is outspoken about
his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The Black Lives Matter movement is very, very simple,”
he said. “It’s because for 150 years, the people in this country
weren’t allowed to get loans if they weren’t standard colonial
white people.” The Federal Housing Administration refused
to offer mortgages to Black people from its founding in 1934
until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
Indigenous cultures are also a major source of inspiration
for Tea, who said he identified with the protagonist of Aldous
Huxley’s “Brave New World.” He said he has camped
extensively with members of the Hopi and Dineh nations and
derived his puppets in part from Hopi kachina dolls. Kachina
dolls are figures that represent spirits of animals or ancestors
or of deities and elements that are part of the Hopi religion.
Tea is at a time of transition in his life. He legally changed
his name in January of this year to Saul Aroha Nui Tea, after
realizing through therapy that his given name triggered flashbacks
to traumatic incidents from his childhood. “Saul Tea” is meant
to sound like “Salty,” and Aroha Nui is used as a greeting and
pleasantry by the Maori people, the indigenous people of New
Zealand. Tea said he spent a year in Rotorua, New Zealand, in
1992 with a half-Maori family as part of a high school student
exchange that had a profound impact on him.
He recently began wearing an eye patch over his right
eye because after an injury to it he’s suffered persistent
hallucinations of children being abused, part of the trauma
from his childhood.
Part of his reason for coming to D.C. was hearing the NPR
program Studio 1A, broadcast by local station WAMU, housed
in American University in D.C. From being chosen to read
the rules and policies to the room at various 12-step program
meetings, he discovered he had a natural voice for radio, and
was encouraged by people he knew to pursue a career in
broadcast journalism. Hearing the broadcast from D.C. was
the push he needed to move to the District.
After moving to D.C. and chatting with a Street Sense
Media vendor, Tea realized that the writing, podcasting and
film classes offered were a good opportunity to expand his
work in puppeteering. Broadcast journalism is the long-term
goal, but for now he’s focusing on perfecting the Hell’s Bottom
Congress of Puppets. He relates them to a metaphor he heard
while camping with the Lakota and Blackfoot tribes, when he
was told that if promoting understanding and harmony and
other Native American values were “gloves” that fit his hands,
he should wear them.
The puppets, Tea said, “are things that are clearly good
gloves to my hands as therapy tools.”
8 // STREET SENSE MEDIA // OCT. 21 - NOV. 3, 2020
VENDOR PROFILE
STREETSENSEMEDIA.ORG // 9
Real Talk About Truth and Deception
BY SAUL TEA
Artist/Vendor
This is page one of a 12-part song book accompanying the “Hell’s
Bottom Congress Of Puppets” folk opera,
created by Saul Aroha Nui Tea.
The song is loosely inspired by The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Look for the rest of the opera in future editions of Street Sense and find music videos made with puppets of the characters, along with more information about the project, at
CongressOfPuppets.blogspot.com
10 // STREET SENSE MEDIA // OCT. 21 - NOV. 3, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment