Twist and shout.

Basil Twist tells about taking his hit underwater puppet show to the West Coast

Busby Berkeley with shmatte rags. Aquatic art for acid-heads. Fantasia with bubbles. Call it what you will, but with his underwater hit Symphonie Fantastique, puppeteer Basil Twist has turned a long-term dream to liquid gold.

"I'm not the first person to ever use water in a puppet show before," explains the bouyantly boyish 29-year-old. "But I've never seen anything done to this extent. And I wanted to do something new."

Most who've seen it agree that he certainly has. Initially scheduled to run six weeks last summer at New York's Here arts center, Symphonie Fantastique has garnered rapt reviews and word-of-mouth wonder that have kept the show playing to sold-out houses for almost a year. After drawing the likes of Keanu Reeves, k.d. lang, and Debbie Harry, the show has just started an open-ended run at San Francisco's Zeum Theater, It's a decidedly unexpected success for such an unorthodox creation. So what the heck is it?

Well, a puppet show. A classical music experience. An abstract visual collage performed in a television-size aquarium with no plot, no characters, and no script.

If Symphonie Fantastique is so difficult to describe, it's because it's so peculiarly original. Basically a onehour synchronized underwater ballet of fabric, feathers, and fiber-optic tubes of light in a 500-gallon fish tank (San Francisco's will hold 1,000 galloons), it's a dancing kaleidoscope of images choreographed to music.

"Most classical music is essentially abstract," says Twist, who manipulates the "puppets" with three other people. "It doesn't have a story or a concrete meaning. I wrested to re-create that visually. It's been done with animation in Fantasia. And there's the Ziegfeld Follies in film. All of Busby Berkeley's designs are a superabstraction, putting familiar things--pianos, bodies--into these flowerlike shapes. I wanted to see something like that in puppetry, but there was nothing."

Choosing water as the medium, he set out to create it, picking the 19th-century composer Hector Berlioz's 1830 composition Symphonie Fantastique as the sound track. "It works really well with the water because it's moody and passionate, with a kind of lyricism that just swells," he says.

No stranger to theatrical passion himself, Basil Twist comes from a family of puppet fanatics. His grandfather was a 1930s bandleader who used string puppets of jazz greats like Cab Calloway in his shows, while his mother founded a puppet troupe to tour hospitals and schools in their San Francisco neighborhood. Although immersed in it as a boy, Twist abandoned puppetry in high school for fear of being labeled a "sissy."

"It seemed too much like playing with dolls," he confesses, acknowledging a discomfort with a "percolating gay thing" as a factor in giving it up. By his first year in college, however, he was already dating boys and dissatisfied with academics. Seeking internship alternatives, he read about the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. "That was the moment when I went, Oh, of course, that's what I love to do, that's what I know I'm good at, even though I hadn't done it in years."

After quitting school he came to New York and worked with avant-garde director Julie Taymor (later lauded for her puppet-inspired work on Broadway's The Lion King). By 1990 the craft's poor employment prospects forced Twist to reconsider college. Fortunately, France's renowned Ecole Superieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnettes was then accepting students for its three-year puppetry program. He applied and got in--the only American ever to do so. As the sole gay man in a class of 12, Twist quickly distinguished himself with a glitzy cabaret style that was big on sequins and tall on glamour. "I was definitely more camp," he says.

In 1993 he returned to Manhattan, bringing that style to the city's gay bars. "I had a puppet of [infamous New York drag queen] Lady Bunny sniffing poppers," he laughs. "I also made these three sleek and gorgeous black singers that moved in tandem like the Supremes."

But it was a three-minute montage he choreographed to a recording by the high-pitched priestess of lounge music Yma Sumac that paved the way for Symphonie Fantastique. "With the Sumac piece," he explains, "there are curtains that keep opening and closing, different-colored scarves and things, all dropping and falling in time to the music. People really responded to it."

Twist says he plans to keep expanding people's perception of puppetry with his next venture--one animated completely by wind machines. Invariably, the idea of applying his distinctive training to produce new theatrical experiences visibly excites Twist. "With puppetry," he says, "you can create a whole other world of your own."

Bahr writes jot The New York Times, Time Out New York, and New York magazine.