The story of Ambiguous Mirrors

Ambiguous Mirrors is the first collaboration between myself and my partner Andy Jackson. The work, a puppetry/poetry collaboration is a response to Andy’s poem ‘9/10/1973 M3’ which explores the emotional and physical legacy of the poet’s deceased father.  Andy shares the rare genetic condition ‘Marfans syndrome’ with the father who he never came to know. For Andy the condition has meant living with an unusual physical embodiment – a theme that he evokes and examines in his poetry. In his own words:

The body I inhabit, or perhaps I should say, the body that I am, is visually extraordinary, due to a condition known as Marfan Syndrome. I am six foot three, and weigh around sixty-five kilograms; I am slender, with long limbs. My spine curves dramatically from side-to-side and front-to-back; I would be perhaps six foot six if my spine were straight. In a way, my body has easily adjusted to this shape. But in another way, this is the shape of my body, and it is normal. I do not experience pain or physical difficulty, as some people have assumed. My body experiences its shape in much the same way as any body experiences its shape.

 Andy’s incredible poem ‘9/10/1973 M3’,  is a meditation on loss, familial similarity and emotional absence. Reading like a poignant conversation with his unknown parent the poem begins:

Knowing only your earth-gripped body can accept this

wreath of questions, I call the Cemetery Trust. 

 

I clutch, for the first time, the date you died, a grid position.

The gates are held open by sleepless weeds,

 

their shadows unseen, locked inside by the sun.

It’s hot.  Removing another layer, I sift the crunch

 

of dry earth for sympathy in the sound, for some hint

at how I’ll feel when finally face-to-stone,

 

though I know every echo is open to interpretation.

When I reach your section, I find

 

it barren, abandoned by flowers and rain.

So many unmarked plots in this desert, no oasis.

 

The gardeners drive past, trailing boredom and dust. 

I walk the aisles until I become just one

 

more sigh in a crowd of upper-case names.

Grief is not a hand but an absence –

 

it flies in the breeze echoing in the curves of my ears

and reveals as much of what the grave knows

 

as the magpie eyeing me from a mute monument.

The portrait puppet I created for this work is a response to both the poem and to Andy’s striking physical presence. Like poetry, puppetry is a rich forum for exploring issues of embodiment and identity – curious about the potential ‘conversation’ between our art forms we collaborated, uncovering connections between object, word, physicality and memory. At times this was a disconcerting process for both of us. For me I was aware that I was dealing with an incredibly sensitive area of Andy’s life and also working directly with his likeness (a process which is never easy , but is particularly heightened for Andy who lives with a visibility that few of us have experienced). For Andy, he expressed the anxiety of opening such a personal poem to the act of collaboration – and also to be faced with a tiny emergent ‘Doppleganger’ in clay was at times harrowing and highly emotional. 

Like a hall of mirrors this project began to unfold – the puppet coming to represent both Andy (child and adult), his deceased father (with whom he shared an uncanny likeness) and an entity in it’s own right. 

 

In the shadow of the Ring Road overpass,

I wait at the bank of the creek for your image

 

to appear, your arms to reach out and around me. 

Apart from death, movement is the only constant. 

 

Ducks glide past rubbish – this is the consolation. 

You don’t keep the appointments I make, you slip in

 

through fissures between thoughts that collapse

as I catch myself in shop windows and see

 

your nose, your hairline, your spine…

My dead father, the roaring trucks overhead

 

couldn’t care less, and the neck of the youngest

swan is strong enough to break a human arm

 

or heart.  I want the texture of feathers to speak

to this skin, to smother my fear I will never be held. 

 

 

The result has been a simple, but emotionally charged and visually arresting work which has captured audiences at various literary festivals across Australia. Now we have been invited to share this work with audiences in Cork, Galway and Clifden. We are incredibly honoured to have been invited and are intensely curious to experience audience feedback in another country. Andy and I are currently planning to work up triptych of poems into another visual theatre collaboration – this process has been deeply rewarding and held rich revelations along the way.

 

As you know we are currently raising funds towards our tour – please consider pledging to this project. There are rewards associated with your pledges – yes, we will gift you with poetry and your own cast of the puppets hands or head depending on your donation.

To donate click on this link, any contribution will be deeply appreciated:

http://www.pozible.com/project/27597/

I will finish this post with Andy’s beautiful words  – on seeing a photo his late father -the poem concludes:

She hands me a photo. 

Sense-memories I’ve wanted so much erupt in my skull. 

 

In a cigarette-scented black suit and tie, salesman-like,

you sit solid on the porch.  I rest on your lap, gazing away,

 

my child-face vague and adrift as if already swimming

the channels within.  Are you in here?  Your big hands

 

and slim fingers close around us like unsaid things. 

You are looking into the camera, into her I guess. 

 

In this shot, I can’t see the unnerving curve

of your back, but I know.  You didn’t talk about it,

 

your body a vault that ran out of air.  Later,

different times brushing against each other, 

 

a thunder in my head, I trace the lake slowly,

my bones resounding.  Your mother was born

 

in the century before last.  You just got on with it. 

Why can’t I?  A moorhen senses my feet

 

crush the grass, signs himself against the sky,

trailing the long red legs he inherited.

 

 

 

To read more about Andy and his poetry go to: amongtheregulars.wordpress.com

New Trailer for Hutch

Hutch

Here is the fabulous new trailer for Hutch, music composed and editing by the extremely talented Kristin Rule.

Enjoy!

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.

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’.

~

On motherhood, monsterous rabbits and dim tunnels.

Let me tell you a little more about the puppet play I am creating. ‘Hutch’, a brief synopsis: Underground somewhere, within the grubby confines of a strange nursery, a mother attends to the object of her maternal affections, whose insatiable appetite cannot be satisfied…

Using live music, song, puppetry and objects ‘Hutch’ will take you into disquieting territory, where the dynamics of complicity and co-dependency play out in unexpected ways.

 ˜

Fundamentally Hutch is about ambivalence – the ambivalence that occurs within any dysfunctional love relationship, in this case the mother /child relationship. And within that relationship what I perceive to be the terrible and wonderful bond between parent and dependent infant with all its drudgery, exhaustion, intensity and terrifying, acute love.

There have been incidents in my life that have informed this piece, here are two;

My mother had a mid-life baby – I was 21 when he was born. Once, when he was toddling, we went for a walk at a wild surf beach, which had dunes, cliffs and a pounding ocean. At one point my infant brother ran on ahead into the tussocks and out of sight. My mother, panic-stricken, began to call and break into a run – the tone of her call was so distraught that it has remained indelibly etched into my memory. Her urgent, awful cries were carried off on the wind and as she too, vanished from sight running toward the dunes. In that moment I comprehended the depth of the mother/child bond and the all-consuming responsibility that accompanies it. Suddenly the landscape seemed full of threat; every rise, crevice and waterway spelled potential harm. Motherhood suddenly seemed like an imprisonment, a wearing down of the soul with its endless hyper-vigilance and unceasing protectiveness.

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 After my little brother left home part-time to attend high-school 100 kilometres away, my mother bought a black rabbit. Somehow the rabbit ended up living on mother’s sofa. It urinated copiously, was highly territorial and aggressive, but at the same time, dependent on my mother to feed it. The lounge room became a sort of hutch with my mother perched on a bare wooden chair waiting, as if in service to feed the rabbit at regular intervals while it reclined upon and despoiled her only sofa. The rabbit frequently bit the hand that fed it. It seemed to me that my mother had substituted the rabbit for my absent brother – the situation struck me as a bizarre and potent expression of the intensity of my mothers’ dysfunctional nurturing style. It was as if all those years of mothering had worn her into an emotional shape she could not shift, whether projected onto a child, a pet, a plant or another adult.

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 I have never had children – instead, I make things.

 So now you know where this work is coming from. It is a passion play involving a Mother, a giant despotic rabbit and the rituals of nurturing an infant. It is autobiographical; it is also an exploration of my intense ambivalence towards motherhood.

Hutch will be played in a disused gold mining tunnel known as Carman’s Tunnel in the Central Victorian town of Maldon.

I have chosen this location as it is structurally a ‘warren’ and thus plays into the emotional claustrophobia of this scenario and compliments the nature of the ‘infant’ giant rabbit.

Carman’s Tunnel, Maldon

Carman’s Tunnel provides a fascinating space to work with, in terms of design. It has major constraints; there is no electricity, all lighting will have to be candle and torch.

In terms of lighting I plan to evoke the sense of ‘nursery’ using the shadows cast by miniature mobiles suspended before LED lights. I have long admired Christian Boltanski’s shadow mobiles – such a simple idea but so compelling! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPHlI4wg1s8

Christian Boltanski shadow work.

I have begun my own process of making spontaneous paper cut outs as I think about the songs and associations with the space of a nursery that will be used in Hutch.

A friend made an interesting comment that the shadows cast upon the wall are like the child’s disorienting view of the objects swirling above him in the cot – the shadows connect us to the eye of the infant.

See below some of my paper cut experiments:

All the Pretty Horses

In addition to these paper-cut mobiles, it is possible that I will involve the audience by giving them torches and inviting them to ‘spot-light’ the performance – which is both a fascinating notion, given the unpredictability and a potentially unsettling prospect!

Music will also be a crucial element to this work. There will be live music, a song cycle. I have spent some time in the last three months at the home of composer Kristin Rule, http://aprincipledcellist.blogspot.com/ working with her on concepts for the show’s music. The music is as much a ‘voice’ or emotional informant as the puppets, choreography and the environment.There will be some pre-recorded music played via laptop and the rest will be live cello and voice. Kristin is exceptionally talented and so far I’m enthralled by the music she has created – it’s as if she has tapped straight into the heart of the piece. Our process together began with a handful of traditional nursery rhymes as the starting point for the song cycle. I have a fascination for old, obscure nursery songs and riddle songs and had initially thought that the work might showcase some of these lesser-known and remarkable songs (they are miniature social and historical commentaries). However, once we started to tease out the ideas behind Hutch we came to the realisation that the better known tunes (i.e Hush ‘lil Baby, All the Pretty Horses etc) work precisely because they are well-known and loaded with associations from both childhood and the experience of parenting. These songs set up an emotional expectation that can then be manipulated and taken to unexpected emotional places.

After all –  acts of emotional subversion are all the more unexpected if you have a familiar and trusted guide.

My pretty new puppet is a little cadaver.

It has been a while since my last blog entry – the 1^st day of January seems a good moment to resume.

I have been unable to write for the past three months as I have been immersed in making elements for my forthcoming show ‘Hutch’. Somehow in the process of puppet building and devising, I lost all desire to write. I was dwelling in a wordless space of sculpting, designing puppet joints and visualising spaces, music and gestures.

The past three months have been a long, mostly solitary slog – alternating between long hours in the studio, cups of tea, rumination in the garden, acute highs and lows and then back to the studio. I’ve been working on a small self-portrait puppet, which will be birthed from an empty dress in the final scene of ‘Hutch’.

Puppet head in progress.

Reproducing one’s own likeness in the form of a puppet is no easy task on a number of levels. It confronts you with your own mortality, as it is the act of suspending a moment of time.

I am aware that this puppet is a version of my 42-year –old self forever trapped in paper-mache repose. This miniature self, is something at once inert, yet charged with the capacity to receive a borrowed vitality. I have created a little cadaver who dances at my touch.

Another aspect of the difficulty of puppet self-portraiture is the elusiveness of what it is that constitutes ‘likeness’. In portraiture we talk of capturing someone’s ‘essence’ – to merely describe the sum of their parts does not guarantee a depiction their ‘likeness’. It’s really hard to identify what it is that constitutes our own likeness, as we never see it objectively. My puppet is a caricature I suppose – yet it goes someway towards expressing the experience of my own embodiment and perhaps my speculation of what I must look like to others (which is it’s own form of auto-biographical disclosure).

In the studio, comparing likeness.

There has also been a comical aspect to this process; during the building of this puppet, I’ve also been trying to re-build my own flesh and blood body. Due to a back injury I’ve been doing Pilates and physiotherapy. While packing my puppets midriff with rolls of baby fat foam to create softness and describe ‘she-ness’, I’ve been working hard to whittle away my own softness. I have spent hours designing joints that rotate and flex, while my joints are stiff – I’ve created a spine that bends gracefully in all the places mine won’t. I will continue to age while she will remain impassive and smooth under her mask of gesso. There is something disconcerting about the durability of her materials compared to the perishability of mine.

The act of making such an artefact (or indeed, any piece of creative work) seems to lead inexorably back to the unanswerable mystery, “What am I?” “Why do I exist?”

The puppet, being a liminal object, suspended between ‘thing-ness’ and a borrowed subjectivity, does indeed reference our own finite time as subjects before we return to  incoherent stuff, to elements.

Many years ago I heard a French Philosopher (whose name I can’t recall) talking about the transition of the body from a condition of desirable self-hood (he/she, I/you), to a repulsive, decomposing thing – an ‘it’. It becomes a thing that we reject, distance ourselves from, try to forget. A puppet also shifts between these two poles – its life comes and goes; we pick it up (he/she), we put it down (thing/it).

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This new puppet is a self-portrait but primarily she’s an actor – she represents me as my character in Hutch. How well she performs is yet to be tested! Though she is mute, I’m certain she has something to say.

The new puppet near completion.

First encounters

Joss House

Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston 1979

Behind the crimson door,

a darkened glass booth.

A young girl hovers –

 

the light switch is pressed, the display illuminated

 

Inside, a crowd of eight figures,

almost dolls,

 yet so much more than dolls –

 

How she loves the women’s white faces, the texture of eggshell

and the rigor mortis of tiny limbs,

twisted in enigmatic gestures.

 

The men wear slim braids of human hair

so black and rudely alive against the flat hues

of inorganic skin.

 

Everything’s brilliant with scarlet and turquoise –

gold shimmers on the cascading head-dresses

and on the pendulous sleeves of embroidered costumes.

 

Chrysanthemums and dragons,

Peonies and white cranes

adorn the awnings of the spirit house.

 

Between incense urns and sprays of peacock feathers

The suspended motion

of a flea-bitten rocking horse.

 

The vitality of banners, muted behind glass

awaken this young girls’ mind

to the possibility of worlds unimagined.

 

The timer whirrs and clicks, the light goes out –

 

a ghost image of small white faces

hovers.

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As a child encountering the Weldborough Joss house displayed at the Launceston Museum in 1975, I became intuitively aware of some distinction between ‘doll’ and ‘puppet’, or ‘plaything’ and ‘ritual object’. The figures in the Joss House held an authority that dolls did not. They seemed to be made with a different sense of intention – the intention to ‘house life, to receive or mirror something of significance. They were objects charged with the paradox of an alive/dead intensity. The grotesque beauty of their unalive faces, poised on the brink of possibility, held the allure of the ‘uncanny’ – riveting in both its unfamiliarity and potential. After this encounter I was forever attracted to objects made in the image of the human form and curious about their function.

Of dolls Rilke said,

“They did not make any effort of their own…as they were accustomed to be lived tirelessly through someone else’s power during the day.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Some reflections on Dolls” 1913.

Though the same could be said of a puppet, I believe that there is a distinction in the ‘intention’ of that borrowed ‘power’ and the context in which the resulting ‘life’ is played out that gives puppets a different quality from dolls. Rilke, who despised dolls, saw puppets as potential ‘soul vessels’. He writes:

 I don’t want these half-filled masks.

I’d rather have a [puppet]. That’s whole.

I’ll put up with the empty body, the wire, and

The face that’s only surface.

Angel and [puppet]: a real play at last.

Then what we continually divide

By our being here unites there

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( Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy (trans: A Poulin, Jr, Mariner Books, 2005)

So what is the nature of this ‘life’ that a puppet begs to receive? From childhood play to the archetypal pull of the religious or ritual object, why do we seek a simulacrum to house and mirror the enigma of our own existence? What is it that compels us to imbue these inanimate, material, non-entities with life? – to engage willingly in the three-way imaginative tryst between puppeteer ≈ puppet ≈ viewer. Or the private and communal rituals of worship and play?

Perhaps as human beings we are highly attuned to perceive ‘animation’, to imbue what is outside of ourselves with life. Perhaps to believe in our own life, we must be able to identify or empathise with another’s.

Standing beside the body of my deceased grandfather recently I kept imagining life. The stillness of death had my mind somersaulting, it was as if my grandfather was an unreal, inert thing that had never lived – or perhaps his deathly stillness was a mistake, a trick of perception. I kept seeing phantom breath rising in his chest, kept seeing the muscles of his face twitch and move – it was as if I was attempting to puppeteer life back into my lifeless grandfather by force of will.

Just as the cessation or absence of life perhaps evokes a desire to imaginatively reinstate it, it could be argued that the pre-formed personhood of the newborn infant evokes a similar psychological impulse. That is, we imbue the newborn infant with a degree of complexity that it does not yet possess, or it cannot yet communicate. By privileging the newborn as a fully formed person – we make a commitment that ensures that the infant’s nascent identity is fully realised over time;

 “Irresistible, it seems for the human, is the imperative to project human attributes onto non-human entities…. this instinct seems strongest with things or animals close in appearance to the human infant…’

‘Perhaps it is our species’ instinct to parent, or to take care of, which predisposes us to project human capacities onto a puppet…”

‘The puppet is an infant who relies on another’s recognition of its humanity in order to survive. It can not live without us and, if it is to live, must manage to persuade us to believe in its potentiality.’

(Taylor, Jane, Handspring Puppet Company, David Krut publishing 2009, pp.28)

And so, anthropomorphism, it could be argued is the essential ingredient to the psychological alchemy that has enabled the evolution and persistence of the puppet across ‘eons and continents’.

This question of ‘what is the nature of a puppets life?’ is so elusive – the further I climb down this rabbit hole, the more chambers I find! The more I question my own impulse for making puppets – the more improbable it seems as an activity. I guess this is the conundrum of creativity, the irrationality of it – its lure and it’s curse.

Scene from ‘Hutch’ a work in progress I developed in 2008

Precarious subjects, liminal spaces – an enquiry into Puppetry.

This year I have begun the process of studying for a Masters Degree in Theatre Performance – my enquiry is titled ‘Transgressive Infants, precarious subjects – playing the anthropomorphic instinct in adult puppet theatre‘.This blog will be an attempt in some way to share my thoughts, reflections and process, provoke a wider conversation and invite  the insights, opinions and experiences of others.

I have arrived at Puppetry after many years performing as a singer in experimental music-based theatre, as a visual artist fascinated by the human form and writer. Puppetry seems like the logical place of convergence for all these creative expressions.

Puppetry is not simple – in beginning the process of research and writing on the psychological, cultural and dramatic meanings of puppetry I have found myself in strange and beguiling territory. Definitions slip just out of reach, meanings are multiple and the line between what is animate and what is inanimate seems at times, disquieting permeable. American academic Kenneth Gross in his wonderful essay ‘The Madness of Puppets‘ says;

‘Puppet theatre is a highly refined art, but depends on something like a child’s, a clown’s, or a mad person’s relation to objects…They are dead things that belong to a different kind of life.”

Why Puppets?

I make puppets because I am compelled by their ability to express the sublime and the grotesque. Puppetry can say the unsayable, explore unexpected places of beauty and disquiet. It is a precarious medium that invites risk and absurdity in equal parts.

Puppetry is visual poetry, a quiet song in the dark.