Puppet Theater: Changes in the perception (original) (raw)
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THE PUPPET AS AN INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT
The art practice of the European puppet theatre in the last decades of the twentieth century up to the present time indicates the exclusive importance of the puppeteer as a performer who is exposed to the audience. This widespread phenomenon required the puppeteer to be an actor and allowed him to create a decidedly new artistic position towards the puppet image. For a while, this new position became the fashion and order of the day, though it also established a new paradigm of the puppet play. The puppeteer stopped hiding himself behind the screen and behind the puppet. As a result, the miracle of animation or of transforming a lifeless object into a living being stopped being the main aesthetic effect of the show, substituted by the magic of double existence expressed in the exposed relations between the puppeteer and the puppet. While in traditional models of puppetry the aesthetic meaning of the events had been based on the secret of transformation, the contemporary practice of puppet theatre highlights the phenomenon of relations as the central issue of the play. In many cases the issue of relationships proved to be the central subject of the play and turned out to be more significant than the plot. 1
Western European avant-garde theatre and puppetry : a reappraisal
Theatralia
The article addresses the question of how much the historical avant-gardes introduced radical breaks in artistic practice and can be considered as forerunners of what would happen after them. If we consider the case study of puppetry, where no homogenous tradition nor specific institutions existed at the beginning of the 20 th century, we can observe that the experiments of the Cubist, Futurist, or Dadaist poets and painters in that field did not radically differ from those of the Symbolist and Modernist circles a few decades before. In many cases the avant-garde artists, when working on puppet and marionette theatre projects, were surprisingly open to collaborate with traditional puppeteers, as well as with theatre and art institutions. The dramaturgy often followed time-honoured patterns, with the prevalence of parody and folk or fairy tales as major sources of inspiration, a focus on artistic circles and children as audiences, and a composition of the show that respected the habits of mainstream marionette theatres. Original subjects are mainly to be found in Pierre Albert-Birot's, Fortunato Depero's, and Kurt Schwitters' plays for marionettes and shadows. Yet, because many of the avant-garde artists experimenting in puppetry were painters and sculptors, they introduced a major change in the composition of puppet plays: visual transformations of the figures marked the steps of the action, alternating biomorphic and non-figurative outlines, images of living beings and of mechanical objects. Thus, they put on stage a drama that was going much further than the conditions of the productions, or the dramaturgy they were using, could do: the drama of entering into a new mechanical age, where the place for mankind had to be re-invented.
The Symbolic Aesthetics of Shadow Play or the perseverance of puppet theatre in the digital age
2013
The puppeteer could be compared to a dualistic god, in-between light and darkness, performing all roles at the same time, able of being everywhere in just one place. In Shadow Theater there is a common flexible dimension, in the space of reality, resulting from the interaction among the unseen one, who is moving the sticks in the backstage, and the audience, standing in front of a sheet of cloth, suspended by the rhythm of a plot where "performers" are made of leather cuts instead of flesh and blood. The history behind the origins of Shadow Plays is not clear but its geographic expansion unites continents into a common fact. Even though puppets have been frequently associated with younger ages, traditional plays in Shadow Puppetry are rather adult in content and this is perhaps one of the reasons why they attract different age groups. Melancholic feelings for a long passed happy childhood or the lack of better activities are also to be considered as good reasons to join the crowd. But while Shadow Plays might lack a full educational concept in its basis they do have a moral dimension presented in a more or less clear way. Performed among different cultures, Shadow Theater seems to have developed distinct regional characteristics concerning the main heart of the narrative, the combination of extra activities complementing the storytelling and the materials used in the construction of visual effects. This paper intends to explore the role of the master puppeteer in this form of theatrical art as well as the use of its image in other sorts of discourses, the puppet's appeal towards the audience as an inanimate object owner of free-will and the influence of puppetry in other media
Theatralia, 2015
Of all the arts that represent humans, acting is the only one that uses for that process a material identical to its object. 1 Sculpture represents the material human in stone or metal; paintings use canvas and colours that capture the human's visual aspect; finally, poetry describes the human in words, and it is up to the reader to create the corresponding picture in their imagination. Only acting presents humans by means of humanslive humans, that is. An actor is naturally not identically coterminous with the dramatic character they are representing, but their dress and their mask [or mien] attempt to delude us into believing that such is the case; and although we never forget that the character we are seeing on stage is an actor rather than, say, Othello, the visual aspect and the acting seduce us into seeing Othello. If we compare this actor performing Othello witha painting representing Othello, we may clearly see how much greater the theatrical illusion is to that of the painting. The theatre, in using live people, thus achieves the greatest illusion of all the arts, and this quality may explain its tendency towards artistic-and occasionally even un-artistic-Naturalism. There is only one genre of theatre art-a small one, though of great interest-in which the situation is different: puppet theatre. Here, dramatic characters are represented not by live people but by puppets, usually made of wood-which is to say of dead matter, just like in sculptures. However, puppets differ from sculptures substantively in that they speak and 1 First published as Loutkové divadlo.
Marionetas de São Lourenço: The puppet as an artistic object, from the stage to the museum.
Dolls and Puppets: Contemporaneity and Tradition, 2018
What is the lifetime of a puppet? Can we consider it only the time it is on stage, interacting with other puppets, actors and the public? The time when the play for which it was designed is being performed? And afterwards, what opportunities are there for it? Often it is in this à posteriori that it can survive, even if only through the weak light of that ephemeral moment that was the theatrical performance – if this is true for the theater of actors, it is even more pertinent to the theater of puppets. Based on an analysis of the works of the theater company Marionetas de São Lourenço this article seeks to explore the potential of the puppet by taking into consideration not only the different aspects worked on by the group but also the possibility of the afterlife – or of “another” experience – of the puppet-object off stage, apart from the time when it comes to life through manipulation.
Móin-Móin: Revista de estudos sobre teatro de formas animadas
Visual theater is an inter-disciplinary art form at the seam-line between performance and visual art. What is the role of puppets, masks and objects in visual theater? Can puppet-theater be regarded as an independent medium that is but a reduced, singular expression of visual theater? Is not all theater visual? In this paper I shall follow the puppet's journey in the metaphorical space and time of theater, from mimetic and narrative functions to the values of matter, shape and medium: in other words-from the theater to the visual. As a language, visual theater generates visual and acoustic images, and an integrative syntax comprised of shapes, materials, color, lighting and projections, voice and sound. A visual performance might represent an emotion or idea through movement, voice or installation-sculpture in space-and not necessarily through the use of words. Moreover, language is another material that can be taken out of its spoken verbal forms: for instance, breaking up a sentence and using its component words and syllables to create new meaning, different from the original content; using the tonal (vowels, consonants, guttural sounds) and visual (relations of printed or projected characters in space) values of language. Such multidisciplinary use of various expressive means in one work requires the thorough study of language and its visual syntax. A circle dance, for example, may correspond syntactically to circular pools of light projected on the floor, to spherical objects designed in space, or even to the vocalise of the vowel 'O'… One could say that, in a sense, visual syntax rejuvenates spoken language and prevents its erosion and atrophy, it seeks to expand its range. Animating the verbal image, or, as French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud suggested, assigning words the same the importance they have in dreams. We can enliven stage language, animate and mobilize it. Artaud returned to the sources of movement (breath, body gesture) and deeply influenced many artists in experimental theater. In his ideas they found justification for enhancing body and voice qualities in the actor's work. Others pursued their journey into visual territories: designing costume out of the bounds of historical or practical norms, venturing into body sculpture, or unconventional use of masks and puppets. American artist Sha Sha Higby combines her body movement with body
The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film
Palgrave Mcmillan, 2022
With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution of several Italian puppetry traditions – the central and northern Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella – this study examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations, linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.
Puppetry in the 21th Century: Reflections and Challenges
The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, Branch Campus in Bialystok, Puppet Theatre Art Department, Białystok , 2019
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.
Edward Gordon Craig's 1908 essay, "The Actor and the Über-marionette," which has become foundational to critical discussions of puppetry, as well as an important reference in the field of theater studies, famously sets up the essential qualities of the puppet in contrast to those of the human actor. In the historically small, but now growing, field of puppetry scholarship, Craig's views have helped elucidate a universal idea of the puppet and spawned a stream of writings that attempt to define the unique qualities the puppet offers to the stage. Craig's essay, however, grows out of a specific historical moment when an unprecedented number of artists, especially in Europe, were enthralled with the puppet (Posner 130). Harold B. Segel's Pinocchio 's Progeny (1995), which reads like a catalogue of modernist playwrights exploring puppets and related figures-as dramatic metaphors and actual performance elements-amply attests to the excitement around the form at that time. Visual artists of the period also engaged with puppetry in their quest to invigorate artistic styles. Paul Klee, for example, crafted around fifty hand puppets for his son Felix. These have recently received critical attention as artworks in their own right and for their role in illuminating Klee's oeuvre (Hopfengart, et al.). Why were Craig and his contemporaries so engaged with and captivated by the puppet? We might further refine this question by asking how the puppet, and particular views of it, addressed the needs and concerns of that moment, searching more for historically unique uses, ideas, definitions of, and engagements with the puppet, over Craig's universals.