The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance

Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, John Bell, Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, John Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317911715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance offers a wide-ranging

perspective on how scholars and artists are currently re-evaluating the theoretical, historical,

and theatrical significance of performance that embraces the agency of inanimate objects.

This book proposes a collaborative, responsive model for broader artistic engagement in and

with the material world. Its 28 chapters aim to advance the study of the puppet not only as a

theatrical object but also as a vibrant artistic and scholarly discipline.

This Companion looks at puppetry and material performance from six perspectives: theoretical

approaches to the puppet, perspectives from practitioners, revisiting history, negotiating tradition,

material performances in contemporary theatre, and hybrid forms. Its wide range of topics, which

span 15 countries over five continents, encompasses:

• visual dramaturgy

• theatrical juxtapositions of robots and humans

• contemporary transformations of Indonesian wayang kulit

• Japanese ritual body substitutes

• recent European productions featuring toys, clay, and food.

The book features newly commissioned essays by leading scholars such as Matthew Isaac

Cohen, Kathy Foley, Jane Marie Law, Eleanor Margolies, Cody Poulton, and Jane Taylor.

It also celebrates the vital link between puppetry as a discipline and as a creative practice

with chapters by active practitioners, including Handspring Puppet Company's Basil Jones,

Redmoon's Jim Lasko, and Bread and Puppet's Peter Schumann. Fully illustrated with more

than 60 images, this volume comprises the most expansive English-language collection of

international puppetry scholarship to date.

Part I

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Edited and Introduced by John Bell

Puppetry, which allows a performer to create the illusion of life by combining objects with motion and sound, is an art form that raises many fundamental questions. What exactly is life? How is it created? Who creates it? What, in fact, do puppets actually do? How should we think about and respond to our experience of puppetry? Such basic questions about the nature of human and material existence constantly wait beneath the surface of puppetry’s benign or seemingly inconsequential existence and inspire performers, audience members, and scholars to engage in theoretical thinking, some of which we present in Part I of this book, “Theory and Practice.” The first section, “Theoretical Approaches to the Puppet,” presents the work of three scholars concerned with the meaning of different kinds of puppet practices; while the second, “Perspectives from Practitioners,” offers writings by nine puppeteers who analyze the form from the viewpoint of their own experience. These two perspectives, from both sides of the puppet stage, complement each other by investigating what it means to make puppet theatre and what it means to experience it.

Puppets and performing objects have been part of global culture since its beginnings, but theoretical writings about the form began to constitute their own field only relatively recently. Puppet theory first existed as observations puppeteers shared with each other, and it seems to have been only in the modern era that theories of puppetry have been written down for more general audiences. Perhaps such thinking emerges with an understanding of the form as art, more than ritual or popular performance. In Japan a brief record of playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s thoughts about meter, nonrealism, and the articulation of pathos through words and objects in jóruri puppet plays appears in a 1738 memoir, Naniwa Miyage, after the playwright had established puppet plays as serious theatre. In Europe, the modern engagement with puppet theory could be said to have begun less than a century later with Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theatre.” Kleist’s unassuming text (a dialogue, really) analyzes the connections between movement and consciousness in dance, everyday life, and with animals and marionettes. However, like much of puppet theory to follow, it expands itself into a contemplation of identity and being which embraces metaphysical issues and conundrums in an epi-phanic style befitting Kleist’s Romantic bent. Although not all the essays in Sections I and II here strive for epiphany, their subject matter forces the authors to engage in stimulating thinking about the nature of humans, life, and inanimate matter in the context of often-humble performances with various combinations of wood, metal, plastic, leather, and papier-mâché.

The three essays in “Theoretical Approaches to the Puppet” reflect the expansive and heterodox range of contemporary puppet and object theory in the early twenty-first century. Margaret Williams’s investigation of the “death” of the puppet marks a particular moment of expansion from traditional notions of puppetry into the “theatre of objects” movement that began in Europe during the 1980s, placing both on a continuum of manipulated materiality. In his chapter, Paul Piris asks basic questions about new forms of puppet and object theatre from a phenomenological perspective, attempting to understand how the simultaneous presence of manipulated puppet and manipulating puppeteer creates ontological ambiguity. Finally, my own chapter argues that puppets are always “uncanny” and that our modern sense of that sensation as a problem connects to the metaphysical complexity of puppetry’s consistent resistance to modernity’s attempts to separate nature and culture.

Puppeteers always have to think about the nature of their medium in a kind of applied theory. In purely practical terms and for wholly practical reasons, they figure out how to move the puppets; what kinds of objects, settings, sounds, and texts to add to them; and what makes for the most effective means of communicating with and through them. Some puppeteers have been further inspired to address issues of puppet theory on the page as well as the stage. Theorist/practitioners Edward Gordon Craig and Alfred Jarry set the tone for such writings about puppetry, establishing an audacious and willfully shocking attitude befitting the avant-garde desire to redefine modern culture. In the century that followed, puppetry has become a complicated mix of practices encompassing old traditions, new aesthetics, and technological innovations that have intertwined it deeply with other strands of contemporary culture. The various “Perspectives from Practitioners” in Section II express differing combinations of theory and practice as experienced in each author’s work and show that the artist’s need to articulate puppet theory offers vital insights applicable to a broader understanding of the field.

Considering the increased importance of the body in contemporary performance, Sandglass Theater founder Eric Bass argues for a similar awareness of the puppet’s function, pointing out that, although when an actor appears onstage she or he needs to make a statement, the appearance onstage of a puppet already is a statement – a dynamic principle with profound implications for all types of performance. Basil Jones, co-founder of South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, pursues similar goals on a different path, describing the independent “Ur-narrative” of the puppet as a “dignified hunt for life” that exists almost independently of story, in the “micro-movements” that give puppets life. Moscow puppeteers Alexander Gref and Elena Slonimskaya, who work with the archetypal Russian glove puppet Petrushka, examine the function of the noise instrument known as a swazzle in order to interrogate its function for modern audiences and consider the semiotics of such music-making in international contexts. German puppeteer Rike Reiniger explains the development of a different kind of contemporary puppetry: the invention of object performance for very young audiences by artists inspired by the “live-art” experiments of Bauhaus and other avant-garde traditions and informed by contemporary early-childhood education theories. New York puppeteer Kate Brehm links her own process of creating theatrical structure and dramatic affect to theories of the cinema and the comic book articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Scott McCloud, thus discovering a means by which critical theory can have practical value for object performance. Chinese Theatre Works co-founder Stephen Kaplin looks at the nature of shadow theatre – one of the oldest idioms of puppetry – as a practical technique that, even with the new technological possibilities of image projection and performance that saturate our environment, inexorably leads to mystical phenomenology by means of its essential dependence on the elusive properties of light. In “The Third Thing,” puppeteer and director Jim Lasko follows the development of applied theory by Chicago’s Redmoon Theater as it creates participatory spectacle in public spaces where puppets and objects become essential mediators between people, creating what Victor Turner termed “communitas.” Finally, Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann – who has long shared the proclivity of avant-garde artists to use the manifesto as a modern literary form that declaims, proclaims, teases, and provokes – provides an enigmatic and evocative analysis of the ordinary life of the capitalist system in which we live, calling for a revolution against “the holy cathedral of our civilization” by means, of course, of puppet theatre.

While the practitioners of Section II have been compelled by personal experience to explain how puppetry manages by its very essence to address larger questions of human existence in the material world, the theorists of Section I have made a conscious decision to examine puppetry as a legitimate field of inquiry that embodies multiple theories of performance and modes of existence. Both perspectives illuminate the work examined in the following sections of this book.

Note

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Chapters in Part I by Bell, Gref and Slonimskaya, Jones, and Lasko are edited by Dassia N. Posner.

Section I

Theoretical Approaches to the Puppet

1

The Death of “The Puppet”?

Margaret Williams

In his message via the Internet to puppeteers for World Puppet Day on March 21, 2011, Henryk Jurkowski celebrates the vitality and diversity of international puppetry today. Yet he suggests that “from now on the object will replace the figurative puppet,” and ends with the hope that “the tradition of the figurative puppet has not disappeared over the horizon” and “will always remain as a valuable point of reference” (Jurkowski 2011). If it seems a rather wistful conclusion, it echoes a concern shared by some devotees of the puppet theatre. Many people at festivals of “puppetry and related arts” still complain that there weren’t any puppets. That might not trouble many of us, but the complainants do have a point – is it puppetry if there are no puppets in it? And just how are the “related arts” related to puppetry?

Three classic short performances in which puppets or objects seem to commit suicide might serve to illustrate the “death” of the figurative puppet, perhaps even of “the puppet” as a concept, in the contemporary Western puppet theatre. The death or suicide of the puppet is a recurring theme in puppetry, since it exposes the problematic nature of the puppet’s “life.” There is a parallel theme of the death of the puppeteer at the hands of the puppet, but it’s the puppet’s potential demise we’re concerned with here.

In Philippe Genty’s famous short untitled piece, a Pierrot marionette becomes aware of the strings connecting it to its manipulator and asserts its independent life by breaking them one by one until it falls “dead” when finally detached from the puppeteer.¹ It’s the classic metaphor of puppetry – the godlike puppeteer both gives life to and withdraws it from a creation made in his/her own image. Genty, a black-clad figure manipulating the controls high above the Pierrot, is an impassive superior presence whom the puppet resists, only to invite its own destruction. When the last string breaks, Genty simply picks up the puppet and walks off with it, now just an object. But its reduction to object status is incomplete; even as it is carried offstage, it still retains that “after-life” that lingers around any figure with which an audience has emotionally identified. It remains a human form, able to be empathized with and to be revived and to “die” all over again at the next show. The piece has reduced many audience members to tears, yet it demonstrates, quite literally, that the puppet’s “life” exists only as an effect of the puppeteer’s control.

Figure 1.1 Pierrot (1973). Photo courtesy of Philippe Genty Company

In the French puppeteer Yves Joly’s Tragédie de Papier (Tragedy in Paper), the puppets are animated drawings rather than lifelike figures, two-dimensional cutouts with stylized facial features and arms painted onto them. The physical properties of paper (in fact, light cardstock) are exploited in the portrayal of the two lovers’ deaths: the female figure is brutally slashed by a large pair of scissors wielded by a jealous villain, and the male figure is set alight and reduced to ashes. It remains ambiguous whether this apparently spontaneous combustion of grief is to be read as suicide, since, unlike Pierrot, the figures can seem to take only limited action by themselves. Both the slashing of the first figure and the setting alight of the second are performed by the puppeteer’s black-gloved hands, visible at times, which must substitute for the puppets’ painted ones. If, as Victor Molina (1998: 177) writes, a puppet cannot be called dead until its body has completely disappeared – “as long as we can see the smallest fragment of its destroyed body, there is a potential puppet” – Joly’s paper figure consumed by fire can truly be said to have “died,” reduced to matter that is impossible to revive or re-create. The audience is denied even the semblance of a human form to empathize with, the figures reduced to a formless materiality that it is impossible to revive and re-personalize. The puppets are shown to be simply matter in a quasi-human form, and a temporary and unstable form at that.

Gyula Molnár’s tabletop show Piccoli Suicidi (Small Suicides) is an early example of the Theatre of Objects in which everyday objects are substituted for humanoid figures.² In such performances there is no attempt at visual illusion – the objects are moved about by a visible manipulator and imaginatively transformed into notional characters suggested by their sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Kenneth Gross
• Introduction
• Part I: Theory and Practice
• Part II: New Dialogues with History and Tradition
• Part III: Contemporary Investigations and Hybridizations
• Index