Into thin Air.

Two days ago I brought my art folio out of storage to discover 27 years worth of drawing, lithographs and a few paintings had rotted away with rising damp. As I picked through mouldering scraps I was aware that I had two choices – to feel grief and outrage or to graciously relinquish what had been taken. All things are temporary. Perhaps this loss signals a severance; severance from the promising young artist I was ‘expected’ to become, and space to be the artist that I am becoming.

But my loss is miniscule: two weeks ago a close friend of mine who is a sculptor and bush-furniture maker lost her hand-built house, her studio and a lifetime’s work to bushfire in Tasmania.

Such a catastrophe strikes me as a metaphor for our ultimate ‘erasure’ at the time of death – only in this case, the cruelty lies in the fact that my friend is alive to see the treasury of traces she has built up over a lifetime obliterated. A devastating experience.

We work hard over the course of a life, generating and gathering things that are expressions of our existence and the tracery of meaning associated with these objects extends beyond our individual life to touch the lives of others. All the things that we acquire are in a sense, stand-ins for our very selves, souvenirs, transitional objects and prosthetics.

In the meantime, there are future dreams to be apprehended before they evaporate into thin air and for some, the courage to heal and rebuild in the face of what has been lost.

My dear friend standing amidst the ruins of her studio in Tasmania, Jan 2013.

My Puppet, my secret self.

my puppet,my secret self

Please click on the link above to see a short film of a recent project which I facilitated over the course of a year.This gorgeous film was made by Leonie van Eyk to document the process.

“My Puppet, my secret self”, was a workshop-based project which took place at Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists living with a disability. The project was funded through Australia Council and took place in Melbourne 2011-2012.

What you see here is the result of a year of Mondays — of wide-ranging conversation, laughter and experimentation. These are puppets and objects from the heart, that bear witness to the playfulness and inventiveness discovered through puppetry.

A heart-felt thanks to all that contributed.

Rachael

 

my fathers hands, more permanent than flesh.

“Although we are not passive puppets manipulated by our familial histories, the emotional forces constituting this high-voltage system are profound and deep, demanding and unyielding, laden with blessings and curses that infiltrate our ordinary, everyday lives.” Framo (1992, p. 7)

Predictably, I have been shaped in an indelible way by my experience of family. And so of late I’ve been thinking about the way our family of origin underpins so many facets of who we are and what we manifest throughout our lives. Within my creative practice, family directly and indirectly informs and permeates my work and is a puzzle that I cannot resist re-examining and re-telling.

It is through the act of re-telling that the story becomes an exaggeration, a metaphor, extending beyond the perimeters of its original family and coming to encapsulate human experience more broadly.

The family of origin is where we develop our first attachments, inching forward into our humanity through kinship. Perhaps it could be argued that family is original context for the process of autopoesis (self-shaping)  or, in Buddhist terms ‘dependant origination’.  The traumas, joys and mysteries of being are integrally bound up to this most potent and fraught of relationships – the love within family. The ambiguous mirrors that family throws forth constitute our first reflections of self, the original source of information that affirms that we exist.

So how might family relate to puppetry beyond the obvious metaphor? Bound up within this familial tryst lie the permutations of the uncanny; production/reproduction, alike/unalike, expectation/disappointment, attraction and repulsion. The mould from which we are born at once holds us and repels us – we are interdependent yet striving for independence. No wonder then, we create myths and objects that symbolise the perfect, incorruptible family; unfailing in its guardianship, intransigent in its capacity to nurture and protect; glorious by affiliation and similitude.

“It is not easy to love simple, limited, contradictory, oscillating flesh and bone mortals such as ourselves. It is easier to admire distant idols, maybe protectors in their unattainable majesty.”

psychologist, Emilio Romero

Perhaps this is why we make anthropomorphic images, why we are prone to succumb to illusions of sentience, affection or authority within the inanimate. Perhaps we are inevitably attuned to the symbolic possibilities of creating versions of family.

Might I suggest that it is through the original familial relationship we are primed to identify ‘other’ as kin or even other ‘things’ as ‘pseudo kin’. By pseudo kin I’m referring to the emotional investment or attachment that we extend towards living things (animals, plants) and non-living things (possessions, objects) and how we co-opt them to become signifiers of our personal identity or sense of security in the world.

~

Family goes right to the heart of the banal and the uncanny. It presents a set of circumstances we have little control over, hence the old adage ‘You don’t get to choose your family…’

1975 baby brother comes home

BUT as a child you do get to imagine and manipulate a family of playthings, to wield  control over your own doll…

AND as an adult artisan you do get to make your own puppets and play them in scenarios of your own making…

(although, inevitably with any creation there are dimensions that exist beyond your intention and control).

2002 with an early ‘doughboy’ puppet.

Creation and re-creation  – life leans towards life – we are created/we are destroyed, we in turn are makers and collaborators – like Russian dolls self-duplicating, generation after generation, the story is made and unmade – each life assembled, then disassembled.

~

“[The uncanny can be defined as a quality that]…arises in objects, in people, in mirrors, as a minimal difference which causes a tremor in the world as a whole.”

(Michael Kinnucan, The Uncanny and the Rest of the World, The Hypocrite Reader, Issue 12, Home and Pain, Jan 2012.)

Surely then, familial resemblance is a place where we might encounter this sense of  ‘minimal difference’. Within the biological family we witness the peculiar duplication of resemblance as it alters and shifts and replicates itself inexhaustibly across the generations – a transmigration of inheritable attributes. We are all simultaneously replicas and originals.

My father’s hands always disconcert me; they are a masculine version of mine. They move in the same way, make the same gestures (are they our individual gestures or do they belong collectively to the family gene pool?). My hands are ageing the same way and even the whorls of his finger prints are the mirror image of my own. Watching my fathers hands always leaves me with the sense of inhabiting a body that is an assemblage of my forebears and which has an intrinsic will of it’s own, separate to mine, that comes to bear through my living. Which of course leads me to question whether my personality is also an assemblage…

~

It is such a precarious line between the ‘familiar’ and the unfamiliar – this recognition that binds and divides us, that renders us so psychologically prone to be attracted to and disturbed by that which appears to mirror the familiar.

In the world of puppets, dolls and other simulacrum, the benign and the sinister wear familiar masks – and so it is with family.

 ~

Recently people who have visited my house have seen a photograph of my 40-something grandmother and asked “Is that a photo of you in costume? – It looks like you, but not you.” The tone of doubt that accompanies this question is the tone of doubt that arises when we encounter the familial uncanny.

How peculiar it is that as I am writing this I receive an email containing two photographs of my grandmother lying in state in her coffin – I was not expecting these images and it is an understatement to say I got a jolt when I opened my mail. The image was wholly uncanny, for it is my grandmother, but not my grandmother. She wears fierce pink lipstick, a tidy pink floral shirt and a modest cardigan. Her skin is waxen, her hair neatly brushed. Her heavy eyelids haunt me. The intimacy of witnessing her final rest is disconcerting – for it is a profound state of cessation, a bottomless, irrevocable state of permanent ‘arrest’. This was her condition in death and thus the condition we all come to share.

Perhaps this is a good moment to speak about mortality salience.

Mortality salience is a term which describes the awareness of one’s eventual death and is linked to Terror Management Theory (TMT) in social psychology. This theory posits that human behavior is mostly motivated by an unconscious fear of mortality. Thus, it is our inclination to value symbols that create cultural worldviews and to protect these symbols as representations of continuity.

Just as we are unsettled when we view a dead body which resembles the once-living but no-longer-living, we are unsettled by symbolic or literal representations of ourselves made of more enduring material than our own flesh. Mortality Salience explains the sense of unease experienced when viewing anthropomorphic objects such as dolls, puppets or robots. To behold such an image evokes in viewers a reminder of their own mortality.

It interests me that we not only experience strong states of attraction and repulsion towards such objects, we feel to compelled make them. Through the making of symbolic objects as precious ‘stand-ins’ for the real thing, has evolved the notion of ‘sympathetic magic’ – that the image of something can function analogously to the thing itself.

Object and ritual are entwined and I would argue that the definition of ritual includes not only religious practices but also play, theatre and visual art.

As I have probably mentioned earlier in this blog, I think of my own puppetry practice as applied sculpture. My puppets are statues; they are not substitutes or ‘stand-ins’ for something else, they are the thing itself.

Mike Kelley writes of the ‘aura of death’ that surrounds statues:

The origin of sculpture is said to be the grave; the first corpse was the first statue. And early statues were the first objects to which the aura of life clung. Unwilling to accept the notion of himself as a material being with a limited life span, “Man” had to represent himself symbolically as eternal, in materials more permanent than flesh.”

from the essay: Playing with dead things:on the Uncanny

~

As a maker I find the human form an inexhaustible fascination, and to take it a step further and perform with such objects is to further venture into this beguiling tryst between the animate and inanimate. It could be described as another version of ‘dependant origination’ between maker and creation.

And so we arise in an uncanny universe, from a source of which we have no recall, a source before language, an inchoate state from which we are summoned and brought into being by family, coaxed forth and shaped in its likeness.

This could be spoken by a person, but equally it might be spoken from the point of view of a puppet –

or so I imagine.

Discarded, dead or just sleeping?

It’s been a while since my last blog post. Life has its own rhythms and this winter has claimed my much-loved 91-year-old grandmother.  And so my life as a theatre maker and student has been a low priority as I have swum in that strange amorphous space of grief.

My grandmother was an intriguing woman who was very important to me as a child. She lived on an isolated island off the northeast tip of Tasmania in the Bass Strait. Shy and reclusive by nature, she was a farmer. My grandmother preferred the company of animals to people.

At her funeral I sang one of her favourite songs, a song I heard her singing as I trailed behind her in the garden as a child. As I sang, the family cried and the song heralded a new absence. This family has now seen the passing of the older generation and the procession of the generations assumes its new order with the march of time. My parents have become the older generation, there are now grandchildren, and me and my siblings are in the middle.

Mid life is a strange and startling place.

Not only am I in the middle of my life, but I am also in the middle of writing a dissertation about puppetry. By asking questions about animate/inanimate, liminality, and the anthropomorphic instinct – I am also inquiring about the nature of mortality, the substance of life, the vitality and temporality of flesh and the way we recruit objects to symbolise this strange miracle.

At the funeral I was struck by the qualities of my grandmother’s coffin as a ritual object – it seemed both a cloak of modesty, hiding the corruption of flesh and also a peculiar wooden stand-in for her body. I found it curious that the family assembled at the funeral didn’t look directly at the coffin – like the elephant in the room, the mahogany box was acknowledged only by the grandchildren who ran forward to peer over the precipice as the it sank from view on its mechanised platform.

~

It’s ironic that death has kept arising (both literally and figuratively) during this period of my scholarship; as I try to grapple with the phenomenon of life imposed on lifeless objects, some of the loved ones around me (so vital, each in their own way) have ceased to exist. I am confronted again and again by the mystery of non-existence coming to those who once existed as I simultaneously search for answers to questions around why we impose existence onto the inanimate.

Very early on in this degree my first supervisor suggested that the question fundamental to this project is: “what is life?” At the time I recoiled from this idea as it seemed unanswerable and too grandiose, but now that I am further on in my exploration of puppetry, I see that at the core of this or any investigation is always the question of ‘life’. Life and death (the alive and the un-alive) are at the very core of puppetry;

Puppet theatre does not seek a permanent or total evisceration of the lines between the living and the unliving but the blurring of those lines. You are not supposed to think that a bit of cloth or papier-mache is alive; you are supposed to know that it is not alive and yet respond to it with the emotions you ordinarily reserve for living things. Sometimes it is better to weep for a puppet than to weep for a man; sometimes metaphor is more profound than literalism; sometimes art is better than reality…

We need to remind ourselves often that the word ‘to animate’ does not mean ‘to make move,’ but rather ‘to give a soul to,’ from the Latin word ‘anima.

Josef Krofta, founder of Czechoslovakia’s Theatre Drak.

One of the fundamental themes in my recent play ‘Hutch’ was this line between the ‘living and the unliving’ and how far I could go in playing openly with this paradox as a theatrical technique.

In Hutch I experimented with having the puppet both alive and dead on stage. As a series of scenes played out, the puppet character would appear either as an animated figure with a clear emotional relationship to its animator or it would appear as an object, simply as the puppet itself minus animation. Although I intended for this constant switching to be ambiguous and disorienting, it was possibly too confusing for the audience.

What I took for granted was that the audience would interpret the puppet’s changing states as an acknowledgement both of the liminal nature of a puppet and of the process of suspension of disbelief – but this is the approach of a practitioner asking questions, not an audience member experiencing theatre. What actually happened was that people received this duality as a discontinuity leading to confusion. I would argue that this duality is disorienting – but it seems that audience enjoys participating in the illusion as long as there is perceived continuity and they are not reminded that it is an illusion (at least, too often).

The experiment evoked a plethora of responses from the audience, ranging from confusion “why is the puppet now alive when before it seemed to be dead?”, to outrage. One responder implied that to make the audience aware of the puppet as both alive AND dead was to strip the puppet of it’s dignity and make it an object of mockery – “a sly wink between audience and puppeteer at the puppets’ make-believe existence”. Some had no problem with this slippage between alive and unalive and saw it as being in context within the surreality of the show – for them it heightened the sense of dread, of ‘anything could happen next’. For some, this constant transitioning was in part, hilarious.

After analysing some of the feedback I have realised that when the puppet is inert on stage it is not perceived as ‘inanimate’ it is perceived as being dead. And when a puppet moving it is not consciously read as ‘animate’ but alive. To play the character as being both dead and alive may be too much of a stretch of this anthropomorphic relationship if not handled carefully and consciously. Audiences attribute the puppet becoming inanimate not as a reference to its very substance but to the character ‘dying’. We understand its stillness as death – and to have a puppet living, dying then living again in the same continuum makes little sense conceptually. How then do I make this gesture of removing the puppet from my own body, treating it as a separate entity, and then a non-entity make sense? Do I dismember it (there again it is read as a body violated)? Do I deconstruct it, then re-construct it? It is impossible to get away from the analogy of body here?

By having the puppet consistently ‘alive’ you give it the opportunity to die a real death, to die in a sympathetic way. A full immersion in the ‘life’ of the character is invited from the audience. Perhaps this alchemy is broken if the duality of being both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is shown.  If you stretch the trust and preparedness of the audience to journey with your puppet too far, it just breaks, leading to disengagement from the illusion.

Feedback made me aware that there is an intrinsic difference between the position of the artist and the position of the audience (obvious in hindsight) – the artist/maker sets out to investigate, turn the object every which way and understand how it ticks, the audience want to be transported, taken on a journey – to reveal the mechanism, expose the cogs as it were, does not necessarily enhance the journey for audience or allow for deep immersion in the mutual experience unfolding on stage.

Does the fact that we ourselves all die undermine our ability to be immersed wholeheartedly in our own existence?  Does its shake our confidence in the very experience of ‘being’? I think so. We are all wounded by the deaths of our loved ones and by our own pending non-existence. Perhaps to see a puppet die and then come back to life breaks the rules of ‘being and non-being’. It both describes and potentially triumphs over the finality of non-being that we rail against. Perhaps this is where puppetry’s fundamental magic and most wretched transgression lies. The perceived linearity of a life-time – birth/ life /death –  is the template to which we lend story its form. If the order of things does not resemble this template we experience ambivalence and uncertainty.

Through puppetry we play out our “shy-hope of resurrection”  – we weave stories that suggest some continuation beyond embodiment and by making puppets create a ‘simulation device’ which potentially outlives our own physical body, becoming both a creative instrument of celebration and mourning.

All around the world constructed anthropomorphic images have proliferated and been offered in different ways as appeasement against the uncertainty of existence – objects no longer mundane but attributed with supernatural powers ie. idols, statues, effigies.

In a recent radio program about the parallels between superstition and religion, I heard this wonderful quote about the origins of ritualistic thinking and behaviour;

We haven’t invented our existence and here we are at this late date, after 13.7 billion years of the emergence of the universe and the evolution of life, and here we are waking up for these few short years in the midst of an increasingly uncanny cosmos and faced with the mysteries of life, death, suffering, birth, newness, growing old. And it’s little wonder we try to manipulate the scene somehow…

Anthony Kelly, Professor of Theology, Australian Catholic University

The word ‘manipulate’ is pertinent here. As human beings in an uncertain world we try to co-opt reality into a more secure narrative, a narrative we have more control over. As a theatre maker and puppeteer I ‘manipulate’ both the space on stage, the puppet and the audience. I co-opt people to partake in the world I have created. Just like the real world, this constructed world is not secure. It is a heightened version reflecting all the insecurity, instability and unpredictability that we experience and witness as mortal in this beautiful, baffling, uncanny existence.

While visiting New Zealand recently, I ventured into a museum in Christchurch which housed an antique toy collection. At the centre of it’s collection was a Victorian dolls house with an incredibly detailed interior. During the earthquake of 2011 the dolls house was shaken and the objects inside it toppled, creating a miniature version of the terrifying chaos happening outside. The curators decided to leave the dolls house in its post-earthquake state as a memorial to the event. This house of fallen dolls was both poignant and chilling.

Sometimes it is better to weep for a puppet than to weep for a man…

 

Without a face.

“Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I woke up this morning with the question “Why the necessity for a face?” floating across my waking brain. Why indeed? Within my art practice lies a central gravitation towards creating ‘faces’.  All my puppets are anthropomorphic puppets, none of them assemblages or ‘object’ puppets. They are all predictably little people who express my fixation with the human form and the centrality of the human face to my way of working and seeing the world. As a puppet maker I am aware of the potency that an inanimate face commands and the ambivalence it provokes – but ultimately I think of this tendency as a shortcoming. I also acknowledge that as a human being I am hardwired to this orientation and that perhaps some habitual desire for self replication lies at the heart of art making.

Debris in my studio

Allow me to share an experience that has stayed with me for decades. On this occasion my father brought home a freshly caught rainbow trout for the family’s dinner –  I had the task of cleaning it. I began by washing all the viscous slime from its skin into a shallow sink of water. When I’d finished washing the fish I looked down to where a net of slime hung in the water. To my astonishment the slime had reconfigured itself into a delicate filigree replicating the shape of the fish. It swayed in the water, a spectral mass half-articulating it’s fish-ness, while at the same time disintegrating into structural incoherence. It was as if the matter was not-quite dead and the memory of its form, encoded in its very substance, was driving it to cling to a version of its previous embodiment.

Perhaps as people, as artists we are constantly striving to keep re-articulating our being on both a molecular level and through the act of creating. Like the fish slime we keep gravitating towards a recapitulation of the conditions of our existence.

Could this be one of the forces central to the anthropomorphic impulse – an innate desire to repeatedly find reference to our own morphology in other ‘things’, to make inanimate matter perform and re-perform versions of our human predicament? I would argue that puppets, dolls and fetish objects are direct expressions of this tendency and satisfy (or potentially disrupt) this activity.

~

puppet faces hover on stage      dead dancers, pretending life        we laugh, scorn and delight in them       trusting, yet suspicious of their efforts,        for they are our efforts too.

we dignify their charade         we applaud, masking the       same doubt we harbor     in our  heart of hearts,          our own credibility          as alive things,       briefly dancing.

~

I would also propose that any object can be recruited to this purpose and in the process assume a metaphorical or symbolic ‘humanness’.  This is why even faceless object puppets appeal to us and appear to be attempting to communicate something. We attribute movement with intent and intent with a communicable outcome – animation produces signals of signification.

Angela Carter describes it thus:

[of the puppet master]

“He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.”

― Angela Carter, The Loves of Lady Purple, from Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

~

Still from ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ by the Quay Brothers.

~

Allow me to re-examine for a moment the definition of the word ‘puppet’:

n 1. a small doll or figure of a person or animal moved by strings attached to its limbs or by the hand inserted in its cloth body.

Etymology : from Old French poupette, dim. of poupée “doll” (13c.), from Vulgar Latin root *puppa, from Latin pupa “girl, doll”

All these definitions imply a human form, a face – so, based on the common definition of puppet – is it still a puppet if it doesn’t possess a face? And is it capable of provoking similarly anthropomorphized responses even in the absence of familiar human or animal attributes?

The answer is yes.

I would like to cite some examples of ‘faceless’ theatre. that I have encountered.  Recently I attended an exhibition of William Kentridge’s work and amongst the works were two mechanical puppet theatres, Black Box/Chamber Noir  and The Magic Flute 2005. These were multi-layered works combining projected animation, music and simple mechanical puppets. I was deeply struck by the effectiveness of the mechanical puppets and the strange authority that they commanded. Somehow the complete absence of a human manipulator made their appearance of sentience all the more compelling. They were very roughly made yet paradoxically precise objects. Made of torn and rolled paper, sticky-tape, tacks, wire and visible split pins the objects were mounted on delicate jointed metal ribs that contracted, expanded and propelled the objects along tracks across the stage. The whirrings and pneumatic hiss of animating mechanisms were heard, the cables and flywheels all visible, and yet the mechanical puppets wobbled and jerked into view as if propelled by their own volition.  Perhaps ‘will’ is the crucial word here – it was the illusion of will that made these mechanical puppets with their nodding paper heads (actual or implied) and their brittle movements so ‘other’.  As audience striving to understand the life of these assemblages we granted them temporary status as living entities – we read into their actions intention, will and motivation. They seemingly implored us to interpret their actions as purposeful, as meaning to communicate something. This illusion of intent was also informed and supported by the other elements of the piece; the music, animations and  text. The contextualising of content historically (no matter how opaque at times)  also informed our reading of Kentridge’s  mechanical actors and proffered an authority and poignancy to the cast of paper and steel players.

Images from the incredible Black Box/Chamber Noir

~

Another work of theatre devoid of explicitly human presence and which made a strong impact on me in recent years was Heiner Goebbels’ intriguing work ‘Stifter’s Dinge’. The work has been described as a play without actors; read here a wonderful description of the work by Artangel:

From rain and hail to mist and fog, a remarkable indoor landscape gradually awakens… Five hanging pianos, their innards exposed, form a corpse-like backdrop to the unfolding action. The pianos play themselves, advancing as an unlikely and threatening presence over steaming pools of water… In an extraordinary sculptural installation that is part music box and part landscape painting, it is the objects that are the chief protagonists: objects at the mercy of underlying elemental forces.

I vividly recall the final scene where the mechanised structure of upturned pianos began to advance (imperceptibly at first) towards the audience. It was an awful, unrelenting advance, punctuated by spasmodic twitches and hammerings, pneumatic wheezes and a rumbling crescendo of music emanating from the structure from some unseen place of remote control. Just as it loomed hard against the audience almost threatening to crush us – it all abruptly ceased. We were left with an eerie silence punctuated by water dripping and the occasional sound of piano wires twitching, timber creaking. Here was theatre without a ‘face’ in sight – we were confronted instead it seemed, by ‘the ghost in the machine’. As audience we felt as if we’d intruded on the private space of this monstrous machine and witnessed its secret, underlying vitalism.

Stifters Dinge

~

Finally I would like to acknowledge the impact of the The Quay Brother’s short film Das Stille Nact lll, Tales from the Vienna Woods had in awakening me to the intriguing potential of a world ‘peopled’ with metaphorical objects.

This enigmatic work appears to be set in a museum case in which hovers a peculiar elongated table with asymmetrical antlers. We then follow a disembodied hand which seems to orchestrate the recurring sequence of events which follows; a gun is fired and the course of a bullet is traced as it passes through branches of a stylised forest, navigating tree trunks and foliage before coming to rest in the museums interior, lodged within a testicular pine cone which dangles from the table. A long scalloped spoon sprouts like an erection catching the smouldering bullet as it is regurgitated from a small drawer and offered once more, to the hand thus, the whole cycle begins again…

Tales from the Vienna Woods seems to quiver and flash with a vitality that cannot be apprehended or entirely understood. In this world dusty leaves shiver, ornaments hold arcane clues, and bullets shaped like bumblebees wound and re-wound. The claustrophobia of the museum display case holds a muted terror that is acted and re-enacted without human observers. This mausoleum of un-dead objects has its own relentless rhythms, its own irrational rationale.

Here the Quay Brothers describes the objects at play:

The anamorphic table with antlers and multiple legs is one of those “bachelor machines” you imagine exist in some fictional museum. At night, these objects repeatedly dream and replay their former circumstances for having arrived here in this museum…They are only alive at night remorselessly tied to a single dream  –  it’s a permanent death that they rehearse over and over again.

What a poetic analogy for this process of ceaselessly dreaming and reiterating ourselves into and out of existence. The ‘single dream’ to which we are ‘remorselessly tied’ is for the time being, life. And through this process we not only rehearse our death over and over but also our being. We reinstate our sense of self daily through the act of communicating, doing. Through the creative process we find a face to commune with where there is none, a voice where there is silence and audience to witness and bear witness, inanimate or not.

Still from ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’.

Little corpses made to dance – imposters and necromancers.

Yesterday while walking through the city I saw a busker whose work made me reflect on what I find unsatisfying about puppetry. The busker made junk puppets out of driftwood tied together with a crazy tangle of fishing line and suspended from very crude hand controls. Sculpturally they were quite beautiful objects but the man seemed to be abusing them by performing them. He was dragging two of these objects along the street in a mock chase scene –yelling in a strange voice that belonged to neither object but served to indicate that they were ‘alive’. Somehow the brutal style of his ‘puppeteering’ had the opposite effect to convincing me of the ‘life’ of his objects, instead it highlighted the ‘uncooperative’ deadness of his tethered sticks. The sticks rolled and bounced about the pavement, dragged by webs of chaotic, dirty cords like a disarticulated skeleton caught in fishing net.

The whole effect of his performance was oddly mystifying. He appeared a crazy man, dragging a collection of sticks mistaken for bones and trying to awaken them by shouting   and rattling them. I kind of admired the incongruity of his behaviour in the midst of the  lunch-time city rush, but as an act of puppetry his creation was unconvincing. The sticks were not becoming puppets – they remained lifeless, tired assemblages.

When puppetry doesn’t succeed it is absurd and its improbability shines forth like a kind of madness. That derogatory term used for puppeteers, ‘dolly-waggler’ can be a sadly accurate description.

To be honest I have been left with this impression often when I have watched puppet theatre – as if I have participated in a failed séance where we have collectively failed to wake the dead. Sometimes I am more aware of the latent life or vitality of a puppet if it is not manipulated. In quietude and uninterrupted, the puppet’s suspended animation can sing.

It takes a rare artist to really master puppetry – to elevate the craft beyond the visibility of struggle and artifice. (I’m referring to puppetry where the puppeteer is visible here.) If I am to analyse what makes a puppeteer successful I would say it is the ability to appear in two places at once  – that is, within their own body and that of the puppet’s. And further, from this divided place to disappear and re-appear within that charged sphere of the puppet/performer relationship. When the puppeteer masters the art of distanciation between their own body and the puppet’s and is able to shift focus to the puppet, then to back to their own character seamlessly – it is magic. Neville Tranter is outstanding in this regard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0wkSErIUg

See also Duda Paiva (who studied under Tranter)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl1kWP9OnhY

~

When this alchemy is tapped by a skilled performer, then puppetry is sublime – when it falls short, it can be ridiculous. More often than not I am too aware of the ‘effort’ involved in puppeteering – the constant tightrope that is the unpredictability of manipulating dead matter. With their uncooperative joints; limbs that fall back-to-front, strings that tangle, eye-lids that freeze mid-blink and jaws that gape in a rictus smile – puppets are deeply unreliable colleagues.  It can be excruciating to observe a puppeteer’s harried efforts to conceal their technical difficulties on stage. Watching the performer split their attention between the struggle of puppeteering and the illusion of effortlessness can feel disheartening and intrusive. It can appear like a futile excercise in grappling with something dead whilst pretending it’s alive.

I am so familiar with this struggle myself – focus is splintered in multiple directions. First there is the presence and intention within your own body on stage, subtle enough to enable the puppet to live, but vital enough to conjure a relationship between performer and puppet. Simultaneously intention and breath are being directed to, and through the puppet while the technical demands of operating the puppet are also in motion. (Where are the limbs located in space? Where is the gaze directed, is breath present? Is the movement imposed or ‘coming from the puppet’?) While all of this is happening some of your attention is also reading the audience to understand if they are engaged – are they immersed in the world you are creating on stage or are they unconvinced?  All these streams of awareness must flow in a subtle, subterranean way – if one current of thought overwhelms, the balance is lost. You are at once intensely ‘in the moment’ but also inhabiting future moments as you navigate the complex multi-tasking of theatre making. If in one moment the puppet does not co-operate, the next moment must happen regardless – and it must happen in a way that appears fluid and unbroken. It is a path blighted by little ruptures that must be integrated into the whole – and somehow the audience must be protected from these blights to remain there with you in the moment.

In my last post I touched briefly upon Roman Paska’s description of puppetry as a kind of ‘necromancy’, an enlivening of the ‘awful otherness’ of puppets. Puppets, Paska suggests, are little corpses made to dance. I am citing the moments when puppetry fails as the moments when this deadness becomes apparent in its most unpoetic form. When puppetry succeeds and the little corpses do dance, this deadness becomes one of puppetry’s most disconcerting and beguiling qualities. As much as they may be corpses of a kind, puppets are also little prostheses through which we dance our own dance in the face of our own mortality.

I am aware of aspects of  ‘awful otherness’ as I make and perform puppets – but it is also this quality that I am compelled by, even affectionate towards.  Each puppet is a little memorial; memorial to an idea, a moment, an encounter, a likeness. Each puppet I make is an artefact which simultaneously affirms my being but also reminds me that I must die. Watching the documentary about artist William Kentridge recently, I noted his comment on art making as a way of reflecting back evidence of his existence.

There was some part of me that only knew I existed if I made some kind of external representation of it on a sheet of paper.

During the course of an artist’s life we leave behind us a ‘body’ of work. How interesting that we say ‘body’? ‘Body’ suggests a mirror of a kind, at once an aliveness and a dead thing – perhaps a reflection for the living, then stand-in for the deceased artist.

When asked how he views his puppets in relation to himself, Paska says that puppeteers view their puppets as extensions of themselves, almost as an amputee might feel about a prosthetic limb. Puppets function not only as an extension of the performers own body but as an artificially embodied desires that transcend the limits of the human form. Each puppet is a metaphor for the human condition.

Author Robyn Ferrell describes the psychological function of created objects this way:

Objects and graphics function as narcissistic ‘doubles’ as a protection against death: but doubling is uncanny because of a kind of primitive thinking, now surmounted but not eradicated [Freud] says. The splitting into two (e.g, the invention of the soul) was a narcissistic protection against death.

My puppets are my imperfect children, my impressions and ideas made concrete – they are ambivalence embodied, and perhaps, funereal objects of a kind. That is, objects that will endure in my absence and attest to some aspect of who I ‘was’.

~

Empty cradles and phantoms in the awnings.

“When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one’s blood, one’s life, one’s intelligence, and one’s reason, without ever satisfying them”

Eliphas Lévi, 1810 –  1875,  French occult author and ceremonial magician.

~

(adj) Phantom – something apparently sensed but having no physical reality.

I’ve been thinking about the notion of Phantoms; phantoms as phenomena that describe a quality and depth of immersion in an idea.  Phantoms as the acute manifestation of the imaginative function that allows us to engage with life. Our minds generate phantoms that facilitate our belief in a cohesive self.  They allow us to construct and maintain a sense of reality, to animate the inanimate and to materialise the immaterial. Our phantom selves are projected out into the world to commune with others. This incessant dialogue of speculation and invention is a reflex. The body and all it encounters becomes a constantly evolving narrative of sensations and confabulations.

This depth of immersion can also go into strange and uncomfortable places; think of phantom limbs, psychosomatic illnesses, phobias.

The mind is an incessant storyteller and the body is both a map and a stage. As in life and puppet theatre, without imaginative complicity there is no show.

Rodolfo Llinas, the chair of physiology and neuroscience at New York University Medical Centre, states;

“Thinking is internalised movement. …We are emulating reality inside our head. We have managed to generate a dreamlike condition where we actually have sounds and objects that move with respect to backgrounds and all of these things without effort. So that is basically what the nervous system is for. It’s a huge, beautiful device to emulate reality.”

Thinking both emulates and constructs reality. We live in a constantly evolving phantasmagorical narrative. We are inhabited by multiple phantoms – versions of our selves (realised or unrealised), memories, unfulfilled desires, and egos.

The creative process both harnesses and manifests phantoms on a deep level.

Within the world of phantoms the line between what is real and what is not and also what is alive and what is unalive is slippery. Puppetry is a theatre of phantoms which, like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, provokes and relies on the shifting multitude of associations and imaginative tangents that dance momentarily across the maps of our minds and bodies.

I have a personal reason for contemplating the notion of phantoms – in the wake of Hutch I have travelled through some ambiguous emotional and psychological territory.

After a month of development and rehearsal playing within the make-believe world of my ‘Hutch-ian’ nursery I arrived at a confusing place. In order to crystallise my ideas and make that rabbit puppet live I had to go through a strange process of ‘gestation’, birth  and bonding. I spent weeks caressing, feeding, nursing that rabbit puppet – coaxing its awful infancy into being. At first I was really reticent about showing playful, tender aspects of the mother character – I didn’t want to go there and felt afraid and inhibited about exploring my ‘inner mother’ in rehearsal space or on stage. It felt very contrived and excruciatingly private. Any separation that I had created between the puppet and myself felt torn down and I found myself in a naked emotional space ‘mothering’ my puppet.

As rehearsal progresses I found myself more able to venture into these ‘maternal’ spaces –  I rocked, and kissed, stroked and fed the puppet. As long as I could contrast these moments of tenderness with unpredictable changes of mood – little cruelties, moments of abrupt dissociation and absurd gestures and rituals – it was ok and felt authentic to the work. This constant vacillation between conflicting states became the signature not only of the mother, but the underlying theme of the work.

But this process took its toll. When the show was over and the props and puppets were put away I felt a big sense of loss. So much so, that I convinced myself that I was pregnant. It was as if I had so deeply internalised being ‘mother’ that I physically embodied the sensation with a phantom pregnancy. The show may have been over but the nursery remained encoded within me somehow. In the absence of the puppet I had begun puppeteering my own emotions and biology. In the aftermath of Hutch my focus had switched from an inanimate puppet to my own speculative flesh and blood.

What was astounding to me was just how suggestible we are – how pliable our physical matter is as it dances with our thoughts. Through the creative process I could convince myself and an audience of the infancy of a foam rabbit puppet and with that same energy convince myself of the presence of a developing foetus forming within my body.

In some ways Hutch could be looked upon as an extended phantom pregnancy – there was a period of creative gestation that was secret and internal, then the quickening that took place in the rehearsal room and the finally the birth and fruition on stage.

Phantoms are as much about what isn’t there as they are about what is.

Roman Paska (New York puppeteer, director and writer) describes puppetry as a kind of ‘necromancy’, an enlivening of the ‘awful otherness’ of puppets. Puppets are little corpses made to dance. Paska says:

”It’s the absence of the human that is frightening… The puppet is a dead thing and it’s up there moving. If it provokes deep anxieties, that’s why.”

And further:

[Puppets reflect to us that] “our own existence is not so different from a table,”  – in the space of a moment the inanimate can become animate and vice versa .

~

In a sense my phantom pregnancy was born of the ferocious emotional investment that I had made in my infant puppet – and more broadly speaking, the project as a whole. Both my puppet(s) and the speculative embryo were little phantoms dancing briefly in make-believe nurseries – one to an audience of many, the other to an audience of one. And just like the mercurial nature of a puppets life, in the blink of an eye my phantom child was gone.

My Puppet is dead and I’m in suspended animation.

Every time we finish a project we are facing multiple endings. You are no longer the performer who existed momentarily in the eye of the audience, the show which lived for a season no longer exists and the props and costumes lie inert in boxes, stacked in a pile in the shed.

My Masters supervisor Peter asked: “And what happens to the puppets between shows?” Well, some puppets die while others continue to live.

Upon reflection I build two types of puppet – there are those that are purpose-built specifically to express a particular idea within a show and those that I consider to be ‘alive’ in their own right. I have very little attachment to the purpose-built puppets once the show is over. With the other kind of puppet the relationship is more complex – I perceive them as a sculptural beings that emanate a vitality that is not reliant solely on my manipulation and continues beyond their ‘life’ on stage. These puppets live in my space and I regard them as entities that grace my life with their uncanny presence.

Am I conscious of which category these objects will belong to at the outset of creation?  – it depends on the role that they have within the work. Sometimes I am building a puppet with the intention to fulfil a specific role – that is, I am not creating an object that aesthetically or philosophically engages me beyond the performance, I am simply making a prosthetic performer.  Other times I am creating a sculptural entity that demands to be made and continues to resonate beyond its life on stage. As I make it, I come to meet it; it engages me deeply as an object and begs to be performed. With this class of puppets the performance gives voice to the subtle inner life I believe to be latent there, whereas the prosthetic actor exists only for the sake of lending form to an idea specifically within performance. One is a colleague, the other is akin to a prop.

The puppets in Hutch fell into these two categories. The miniature puppet of me is a sculpture, a solemn little effigy. The rabbit puppet is a cartoon – a giant sponge rabbit that encapsulates cuteness with all its accompanying layers of repulsiveness and vulnerability; sweetness and cruelty. It is literally and metaphorically a ‘sponge’, soaking up the audiences’ expectations and turning them upside down. At once, full of bouncy promise and yet utterly vacated – a grubby foam head lolling on an empty infant jumpsuit.

I have no desire to share my space with this creature! After Hutch I deconstructed the rabbit puppet; his eyes were removed for mending, his head and buttocks (both made of carved foam), were put through the washing machine. Imagine the eyeless face pressed against the glass during the spin cycle, its ears painting brisk arcs with the spin…His body was then un-stuffed and his flensed skin also washed. So in my backyard the rabbit’s head hung from the washing line, pegged at the ears while his buttocks dried amongst the parsley and his pink, newly washed skin shivered in a light breeze. Once dry, the rabbit was packed in pieces and consigned to the shed.

The little effigy (or mini-me as she was dubbed) lives in an alcove in my studio. I look at her daily  – she is me, but not me. She is an enigmatic ‘other’ – her stillness and composure fascinate me – her qualities are distinctly her own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the shelves of my studio some puppets ‘live’ quietly in a kind of suspended animation, while in the shadows of my shed others lie ‘dead’ and forgotten.

Of late, I too have been in a state of suspended animation, a post-performance fog.

After months of focused and intense work with the show’s development, the build up to opening night and the tightrope walk of each performance with it’s new audience and unforeseen contingencies, I am disoriented and empty.

Theatre making is hard; you strive, sweat – you work. Sometimes you marvel, sometimes you cry – you definitely don’t sleep much and there is a certain delirium that begins to envelope your life. Then it’s all over and you wonder what all that intensity was about.

For me, these past two months saw every waking hour (consciously or un-consciously) infested with Hutch. I was profoundly disengaged from ‘real life’ and simultaneously engaged with a kind of ‘hyper-real life’. I both resented this period of creative ‘infestation’ and was relieved when it was over – but at the same time, I never wanted it to end.

Now it’s over, the production feels like a mirage – the fatigue, excitement, successes and failures have come and gone. Such is the transitory nature of this art form – the very thing that I love about theatre, is the very thing that leaves me in a void every time. The future looms like an empty storyboard waiting to be filled and I wonder if I can possibly summon the energy to do it all again.

But I also know that like the puppets in my studio, I am only hibernating for the time being.

The Vanity of Star-dust

Figuratively and literally I have been down a mine. In March 2012, three performances of Hutch took place in a disused goldmine in the Central Victorian town of Maldon. The making of Hutch has been a slow burning process with many unexpected micro destinations along the way.

Did I stay true to my original vision? – Yes and no. Through the process of redeveloping Hutch (and considering the work in relation to my research question centering around anthropomorphism and transgression) the piece enlarged in the scope of its themes. In the original work in progress 2008, Hutch was a deeply personal, simple and straightforward expression of the associations I have with an episode of my mother’s life and the reverberations it had with my own upbringing.

My program notes read:

As an empty nester my mother bought herself a rabbit. Within weeks, her care had become so obsessive that her house had been transformed into a rabbit hutch. Watching this relationship unfold prompted me to think about how in the absence of human company we create substitutes. As human beings we ‘anthropomorphise’ companions into being whether they be inanimate objects, utensils, a doll – a rabbit.

As imagination and anthropomorphism are the animating forces within puppetry, puppetry seems an ideal place from which to explore this territory, to watch this story unfold.

And so it began –  a woman, a giant infant rabbit, a disused mine and the desire to tell. In this most recent re-iteration the initial compulsion to tell (which teetered on the verge of catharsis) cooled and the work opened up to delve into more layered psychological territory. The show investigated slippages and thresholds – the slippage between innocent/malevolent, alive/dead, and intention/distraction, humor and dark. And the thresholds of tenderness/ brutality, animated/inert, hilarious and tragic. The work also played with the alive/dead paradox – the way in which something can be suffused with vitality one moment and in the blink of an eye, utterly vacated – it’s meaning or identity turned upside down.

In the rehearsal room we spent quite a bit of time playing with the qualities of different objects – the material properties of the props; the squeaking wheels of the dilapidated pram, the prone and upright positions of the antique toileting chair, the diaphanous billowing of a yellowed nightie and the inert greasiness of an old chopping block.

I spent time responding to these objects gesturally, emotionally and theatrically – playing with shapes, moods, the details of little interventions i.e. passing my arms through the bars of a cradle, imitating the scoop of its architecture with my body, perching, rocking, wheeling, circling. At the end of each day I would write-up a map of gestures or discoveries.

The alive/dead paradox came into play as I really pushed the boundaries of the puppet’s use. Both the rabbit and the little ‘mini-me’ puppet went from being animated and then abruptly de-activated, abused, tossed lifeless to the ground or dangled by one arm. The puppets also transformed from being infantile characters that the audience sympathised with to more ambiguous figures – the rabbit with aggressive and sexual overtones, the mini-me moving from a doll-like quality to the deathly impermeability of an effigy.

In playing with my own body too, I investigated ways of being fiercely engaged (animated) and then illogically disengaged (inanimate). I used my body like a puppet and developed a gestural language with the encouragement and guidance of director Nancy Black. Through improvisation we teased open the possibility of lyrical movements, irrational gestures and inexplicable ‘collapses’.  We also investigated the notion of a life or will being focused in one part of the body but not the whole i.e the right hand investigating or seeing the space around it while the rest of the body lay collapsed and unresponsive.

The activated/ de-activated and nurtured/abused cycle with the puppet and with the body was certainly a vocabulary for describing  the way we move in and out of states of awareness and empathy for others, and also a way of exploring the nature of anthropomorphism and its fluidity as we move between states of belief and disbelief in relation to the inanimate.

Working with the puppet in the studio Nancy and I spent a lot of time examining the shifts of tone within the relationship between myself and the puppet – I imagined the whole play to be an extended examination of the fluidity and changeability of the “mother’s” engagement, imagined/or real with the object of her obsession. This constant slippage was played out not only through the alive/dead ambiguity but through the guises that the relationship seemed to move through i.e. rabbit as infant, lover, dead thing, live thing and the mother’s sense of compulsion to re-engage with and re-animate this creature to whom she is mother/lover/,abuser/abused. The flip-side of this compulsion to animate is the unacceptability of, or revulsion we feel towards an insentient thing, something dead.

Throughout the rehearsal period Nancy kept emphasizing the idea of polarities – the polarity between light and dark, between ambivalence and certainty, tenderness and brutality.

Humour became a potent ingredient within this mix – though I am witty and playful by nature, I am also grimly analytical and serious. Initially I had reservations about allowing playfulness to surface in this piece – I felt it would play down or trivialize the darkly ambivalent tone that I wanted to convey, but as the work-shopping progressed the humour of the piece found its way irrepressibly to the surface. This was a huge learning curve for me – a liberation. In hindsight Nancy was right – the humour and playfulness served to heighten the transgressive elements of Hutch.

Audience members reported enjoying the wit within Hutch and the exquisite discomfort of wondering if their laughter was illicit or permitted.

˜

During the rehearsal period Nancy and myself frequently forgot that the rabbit puppet was not ‘actually’ alive  –  Nancy would ask impossible things of the rabbit forgetting that it was attached to my body and in the improvisatory process I often felt like the rabbit was leading the actions. In order to get to this state I had to be deeply immersed – in a subtle state of mind. Was it the  transference of my own energy into the puppet that I was sensing in this state of mind, or was I simply more awake to resonances inherent in the object itself?

˜

Over the next few posts I will continue to examine this process and will have some film and photos of the actual performance to share.

But right now in the wake of it all, I am tired! I have been struck by that strange emptiness that is the post-project come-down – it all feels strangely illusionary. Just like life with all its creative fury, inconvenience, joy and bother, theatre too is a passing phenomena. Just part of the exquisite ambivalence of being momentarily in this place as animated star-dust. What are the chances? Sometimes I wonder what it is that compels me to make theatre, to make a spectacle of myself – is it a desire to commune with others or is it just my vanity ?- the vanity of star-dust.

Hutch is coming.

Hutch is currently being hatched in the rehearsal room under the wonderful guidance of director Nancy Black and with the superb music of Kristin Rule. I am most grateful to these two talented women for their contributions so far.

Hutch can been seen as part of the Tarrengower Puppetfest in March 2012. For more info follow this link:  http://tarrengowerpuppetfest.org.au/index.php

More to come.