In Persona: Paul Barritt

Paul Barritt takes up his pencil and draws lines connecting lots of twinkling lights: silent film, Krazy Kat, old exercise book, psychedelic design, constructivist typography, digital mapping, Harry Partch… In the resulting constellations, children indulge in their wickedness and real actors in wolf costumes with drawn and animated women’s legs prance around to the “Magic Flute”. With great curiosity, a lust for experiments and animation, Paul Barritt astonishes himself and his audience. The stage is the animation school for the illustrator and author living in London. At first he creates short vaudeville acts for small clubs. Together withhis artistic partner Suzanne Andrade, he links performance, singing, poetry, political attitude, and animation sequences, too. From these individual performances they created an entire show with their production company “1927”. Renowned opera houses are interested in their work, because the bastardisation freshens up the repertoire of an artform living on octopuslike multi-armedness. Paul Barritt himself describes his style of animation as “a little bit wonky“ – above all, he works with great respect for the impulsivity of the creative moment as well as for what has been made by hand and with heart. Polished perfection is not for him, but maximum precision in the right places is. It is exactly this mixture of incredibly precise choreography and casual, imaginative eccentricity which makes the productions by Paul Barritt and Suzanne Andrade so popular with international audiences – and pushes the performers on stage to the limit. The opera world is fascinated. Fascinatedby animation. And Georges Méliès would indeed be very happy about great-great-grandchildren-in-spirit such as Paul Barritt.