Spare Parts Puppet Theatre presents world premiere of Level Up! at Centenary Pavilion, Claremont Showground

Yvan Karlsson might be making his directorial debut with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre for the world premiere school holiday season of Level Up! but his association with the renowned puppetry company dates right back to childhood. As a 10-year-old, Nedlands-raised Karlsson sat in the Fremantle rehearsal room playing on his Game Boy while mum Sally Richardson created her new Spare Parts production Splat! — a high energy fusion of circus, puppetry, dance, digital animation and paper-play — featuring his dancer dad Stefan Karlsson in the performer trio. After the junior Karlsson left John Curtin College of the Arts, he became a trainee in the company’s 2015 FirstHand Emergent Puppetry Artist program — now known as the Artist In Residence program — where he trained with artistic director Philip Mitchell, Michael Barlow and legendary Japanese Australian puppeteer Noriko Nishimoto, before she died the following year. He would go on to perform in Spare Parts’ 2016 remount season of Splat! before moving to London at age 19 to discover his own artistic voice, away from his parents. “I went to London and lived there for two years, and that was when I feel like I found myself in a way,” Karlsson shares. “I think puppetry has been that for me too, because my dad was in the dance world and my mum was more in the theatre world, and so puppetry from a very young age felt like it was my kind of thing.” Karlsson’s puppetry resume includes working on Disney’s Frozen The Musical for seasons in Perth, Singapore and Germany, where he puppeteered reindeer Sven. “I entered the big Disney machine and loved every second of it,” Karlsson says. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, being that reindeer, but I still loved it. “As Sven, you’re on four stilts. So, there’s two stilts on your hands and two smaller stilts that come out of your sort of toes, and then you’re in a kind of plank for a lot of the show. It’s physically incredibly demanding, but as someone who came through circus and gymnastics as well as puppetry, it was the perfect combination for me. Challenging, but seeing those children’s faces whenever you came on stage, made everything worth it.” Returning to Spare Parts Puppet Theatre now in the capacity of writer and director for Level Up! sees Karlsson highlight the parallel he noticed between manipulating a puppet and controlling a character in a video game. As someone who grew up as a gamer, who added puppeteer to his talents, Karlsson says it was easy to find that correlation and he had thought there was a show in it for a long time. “There’s a show in seeing the puppeteer be the person playing the game, and the puppets representing the game itself,” he explains. “I also wanted to change the narrative a little bit on video games and virtual worlds, because we’re constantly told about how bad it is . . . Yes, there should be warnings about unregulated spaces, but I feel like we should also be promoting healthy play in virtual spaces, promoting kindness online, promoting connection and friendship. “I wanted a narrative through line with the characters of ‘what makes a connection real?’ because that was something I experienced when I was younger. I would play games with someone online, and would be constantly told that that’s not real, that connection is not real. Why isn’t that as real as a penpal or friend who might live overseas? I was in a long-distance relationship that is, thankfully, not long distance anymore. We would spend time online together and that was real to me.” The result is Level Up!, an action-packed new puppet show about gaming, friendship and growing up, for families navigating play and screens in the digital age. Karlsson says the production follows two people who form a real connection in a virtual world when they team up inside the latest video game, Z, forming a strong bond in trying to complete the game. Along the way, the real world starts to entwine, and they end up playing for the wrong reasons, which pulls them apart from one another. “It’s about how they could reunite after having conflict,” Karlsson adds. “So, yes, it may be set in a video game, but at the end of the day, it’s about friendship and it’s about learning to say sorry, and knowing that you can always say sorry. Apart from a lot of fun and laughter, there is a real heart at the core of it, which is about friendship and what it is to form real connections.” Billed as a tribute to gaming’s greatest hits, Karlsson says to tell a story about games, it was inevitable to include a range of different games, and a variety of puppetry. “There are different genres of game represented by different genres of puppet, which I think is a really fun thing to play with,” he says. “I hope that no matter what kind of gamer you are — you might play games on your phone, or you might be a really intense strategy gamer, or you might have just played Mario when you were younger — that it will speak to all of these different kinds of experiences.” Level Up! is at Centenary Pavilion, Claremont Showground, April 6 to 18. Tickets at sppt.com.au.