Double Vision: Puppetry in the Margins (original) (raw)

The Volkenberg Puppetry Symposium in Chicago on 24 January 2015 aimed to establish the puppet as a site for inter-disciplinary dialogue between creative practitioners and academics. Expanding the conventional frameworks which consider puppets as strictly theatrical tools, participants underlined the uncanny nature of puppets as beings that hover between life and death. Puppeteers in turn were shown to occupy a liminal space in which they curate accidents and mishaps in their encounters with non-humans. They embody conviction in the life of things and invite spectators to a way outside of themselves.

This editorial outlines the scope of this special issue on puppetry. The issue editors introduce articles that theorize the use of puppets for a purpose and present dialogues with practitioners working in the field. The authors emphasize the power of puppetry within contemporary cultural systems and the plethora of diverse practices comprising applied puppetry. The lively and developing field of applied puppetry is presented as involving new thinking and methods that have been adopted globally. The editorial argues that applied puppetry, as well as being a set of practices that can affect the lives of participants, is also a robust academic field. The authors hope for a reconsideration of objects in applied theatre practice generally, as a way to further understand networks in socially engaged performance practices.

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries brought heightened visibility of puppets and performing objects in various fields of cultural performance, so that we might call these last decades ‘a puppet moment’ – as Claudia Orenstein points out in the introduction to the book "The Routledge Companion to the Puppetry and Material Performance" (London, 2014). We are profoundly convinced of the truth of this reflection and we see in this point of view an important research challenge, one that leads toward a discussion about the processes, tendencies, and influences shaping contemporary puppetry in different countries. The intention of our monograph is to present theoretical and practical ideas, analyses and questions which have arisen since the turn of the century under the influence of the latest puppet performances and works inspired by puppet art. The collection of articles naturally represents only a few of the possible approaches to these topics, but we hope it provides a glimpse of multidirectional contemporary reflection and different perspectives of research now being applied to (and demanded by) puppet art.

I went to see the political-satire-bunraku-puppet-show “Manufacturing Mischief” on 24th of May 2018 at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre (Canadian Stage) without really knowing what to expect from the show. “Manufacturing Mischief’s” online information gave a crazy sense of what the play might be: “American linguist Noam Chomsky is headed to Silicon Valley to judge a competition of new Artificial Intelligence devices hosted by South African inventor, Elon Musk. Chomsky’s prized student, Millie, has entered a device, called the Print-A-Friend, in the competition. It materializes the author of any book inserted into it. Chaos ensues as Ayn Rand, Tiny Trump, Karl Marx, and others are reanimated - and the Print-A-Friend is stolen! Chomsky, Millie and Marx must fend off the forces of capitalistic evil and the damage they might do with this new AI machine.” After I watched the show I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual charm of the show and how it dealt with so many difficult ideas through the material world of puppets and objects. Show’s maker, Pedro Reyes, has a long and profoundly interesting artistic career where he has used a variety of theatrical mediums, including performance-exhibitions like “Doomocracy” (2016), and other political puppetry pieces like “The Permanent Revolution” (2014), to broaden the political and ethical imaginations of adult participants and audiences through the Americas. The show consciously made the choice of casting women puppeteers for male puppets and the only male puppeteer for the central female puppet (Millie), which not only successfully bended the expectation of gender roles but also very smartly used bunraku’s potential of making characters through superposed elements (such as the material reality of the puppet, its animation and its voice). In this paper I will analyze the show’s technicality, how it merged digital and analog mediums, its allegorical approach to political reality, and its pedagogical approach towards the intellectual accessibility of philosophical and ethical debates that correspond to substantial means in many people’s lives.

In our article (Packer & Moreno-Dulcey, 2022) we pointed out that the use of puppets in Theory of Mind tasks (1) requires young children to pretend, which (2) introduces a confound, and also (3) reflects a failure to distinguish scientific and folk psychology. In their comments Lillard (2022) and Wellman and Yu (2022; Yu & Wellman, 2022) claim that use of puppets requires not pretense but an understanding that they 'stand-in' for people, without explaining how this differs from pretense, or how it avoids a confound. Rakoczy (2022) in contrast agrees with us that pretense is required but argues that it uses the same "code" and "concepts" as "the real world." We recall his earlier appreciation that institutional reality has the logical form of pretense. We suggest that 'mind' is a culturally and historically bound institutional fact, and point out that a typical ToM task involves multiple levels of pretense, games, and institutional reality. ☆ The first author declares that as a graduate student his two cats were named Bel and Des in honor of John Searle's theory of mind, in which Belief and Desire are the two fundamental intentional states.

This article provides an overview of contemporary concerns within puppet theatre, including the importance of practice as research, autobiographical work and extensions of rehearsal techniques and processes; interdisciplinary contexts for puppetry, applied puppetry and the widening perspectives of intercultural studies, including the need for more detailed analyses of non-European forms. The article also highlights the role of the UNIMA Research Commission in pursuing the objectives of contemporary puppetry research. Keywords: Puppetry. Research. Interdisciplinary.

There is a growing awareness of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to performance studies, but little attention has been paid to puppetry in this context. In an attempt to open up the field of puppetry to McConachie’s’cognitive turn’, a cognitive approach is here taken to Blind Summit’s ‘The Table’. The solo puppet protagonist Moses is described here as a ‘brain on legs’, a lively, funny and poignant figure who hovers on the brink of epic greatness but remains forever fixed to his table top. ‘The Table’ is analysed from three angles : firstly the use of environmental ‘affordances’ in James Gibson’s sense ; secondly kinesthetic empathy as described by Antonio Damasio, Shaun Gallagher et alia ; and thirdly,intimately linked to both, emotion. It is by virtue of Moses’s limitations that we are able to glimpse our own potential as human beings, richly embedded as we (and his operators) are in a world of limitless ‘affordances’ or ‘opportunities for action’ in James Gibson’s sense ; and able to grow cognitively and emotionally through our contact with others.