桜丸 切腹
Yesterday I witnessed my first puppet ritual suicide. It had been a long day. By the time Sakuramaru emerged from an inner chamber, soon met by his father carrying a silver knife from the side room and his young wife crying in short bursts of disbelief, some members of the audience had fallen asleep. Those of us who had come for the entire day’s performances were into our seventh hour of puppet theatre. I was tired, too. My right leg had fallen asleep and the already compact Japanese theatre seats seemed to grow more cramped every fifteen minutes. Yet it all melted away as the show built to its climax.
The stillness of the Sakuramaru puppet, matched by the face of its lead puppeteer in poise and resolve, spoke volumes in silence. The Tayu— the man responsible for narrating the story as well as voicing all the characters— turned on a dime, steering his performance from role to role, his voice bouncing in rhythm and tone while his face passed from one extreme emotion to the next. The puppet of Sakuramaru’s father, who had been striking a bell while repeatedly chanting in prayer for his son, begins to miss the bell with his mallet, unable to fight off his tears any longer. At the last moment, Sakuramaru’s wife tries one last time to stop her husband but Sakuramaru, in a display of intense resolve, manages to pin her down with one knee while still finding the strength to plunge the knife deep into his abdomen.
With the puppet flesh pierced, no blood followed, nor trick lighting, red fabric, or surprise transformation; there was just a lifeless doll, still tucked in the seiza seated position, his torso now collapsed upon his knees. Animated materials turned inanimate once again. And meanwhile we in the audience sat and seeped in prolonged silence. I noticed the woman sitting next to me wiping tears from her eyes and then realized that I, too, was crying. I did not blubber, nor was I struck by overwhelming, uncontrollable sobs. Instead, I felt the slow growth of a few tears in each eye, culminating in one brief bout of blurred vision— certainly a smaller display of empathic response, but somehow one that felt more appropriate for the such simplicity and restraint.
The Bunraku I witnessed effortlessly blended rigorously methodical compartmentalizing with a collective purity of purpose. It was logical yet also improbable, distancing yet also overwhelming, light yet also exhausting. It was something I need to see again.
In The Valley of the Snow Monkeys (feat. Mechanics, Marionettes, Minds, Men and more Monkeys)
Happy New Years!
To welcome in 2012, I was lucky enough to travel with good company into the mountains of Japan. After settling into the tiny, snowy town of Yudanaka, we trekked even higher in search of a particular group of Japanese Macaque monkeys that spend their winter days bathing in a natural hot spring. It was such a treat to see! We had been told beforehand that the monkeys would remain uninterested in befriending or attacking us so long as we didn’t make direct eye-contact with the them, but it was still surprising to see them walk right past us along the path en route to the hot spring. As upwards of 10 to 15 people gathered around the water to take their pictures, the majority of the monkeys appeared completely indifferent to the photo shoot in which they all were starring.
However, there were a few monkeys— typically older ones— that seemed to know what was going on. One elder was particularly photo-shy, holding her baby so that both their faces could remained turned away from all the cameras. As when I shoot photographs for my Cats of the World pet project, I held my camera on these two for quite some time, waiting patiently in the hope that they would eventually turn towards me. After a lot of nothing but progressively more frost-bitten fingertips, I finally turned away, only to look back one last time and discover the two monkeys staring right at me. As soon as I lifted my camera again, they turned away once more. Here’s the best shot I could manage from the duo:
It’s been said that the only thing separating a normal human from a human pretending to be normal is an audience— the idea being (first) that as soon as we become aware that we’re being watched, a least a little bit of us starts performing, and (second) that this self-awareness inevitably gets in the way of said performance, mucking up our ability to just be ourselves. So long as we’re telling ourselves to just act natural, we just can’t seem to act natural.
According to the Monkey park website, people have been coming to see theses monkeys bathe since 1964. That’s a lot of photographs. And yet, despite their years of modeling, these Macaque monkeys still feel to me anything but posed— a far cry from the majority of photos taken of their human counterparts.
Cameras are everywhere these days, and even though their utter ubiquity has successfully reduced such a statement into an absolute truism, it hasn’t rendered their impact meaningless. Saying cheese for the camera might no longer feel like a performance, but think back to that time your mom took forever to figure out how to work your new digital camera, leaving you and your friends stuck in photo-ready limbo with frozen smiles drooping; or think about how everything becomes much funnier right before a picture’s taken, when everyone is willing to laugh too hard at dumb lines in an attempt to grab hold of a more authentically joyful face; or even think about that one person you know who always brings a camera along to document and upload evidence of last night’s great time on Facebook— and who once might have even made a half-ironic joke along the lines of: “if it’s not on Facebook, it never happened" before chuckling a little too loudly (or perhaps not loudly enough). Just because photographs serve as such accessible and ready-made relics of our actual experiences doesn’t mean they always fulfill a purely documentarian role. Instead, they often corroborate with our desires to present what we wish had been in lieu of what really was, a carefully tailored image of our own pasts.
But while posing for photographs has become a universally experienced form of performance, it’s still one that I— for one— am somehow not very good at. I’ve gotten better over the years, no doubt, but whenever I smile for the camera I am returned to an uncomfortably familiar territory of trial and error. My eyes get too squinty or my mouth spreads too wide, and please don’t let me wax about that perfect balance of gum and teeth, which I almost inevitably overshoot. Once, in trying to understand the art of the photogenic phenomenon, I read that Science (with a capital S) has proven that the facial muscles used for voluntary and involuntary smiles are controlled by different parts of the brain. This left me with two thoughts— either some deeply insecure scientists went to extreme lengths to soothe their sore egos, or our bodies seemed to have doomed us from the start.
So then what about those lucky people who just always look good in pictures? Out of more than pure resentment (I swear!), I just don’t believe that they’re always that happy, that joyful, that put together. If you buy my earlier claim that photography is performance, then you might also agree that, like all forms of performance, photography will have its share of better and worse actors. If so, please allow me to offer one last conjecture: while idiosyncrasy always lies somewhere within the best performances, the people who typically seem most convincing have usually put in the most rehearsal time, as well.
I can’t think of a better example of this than an ancient (by online standards) internetmeme dating all the way back to 2005. Through a somewhat cruel-hearted gag involving the repetitive and accelerated digital flip-books, the internet may have revealed the greatest secret of photogenia; not only do these celebrities look good all the time, they look exactly the same all time, too. And therein lies the almost sinister paradox fundamental to photographic performance: those who look natural on camera are in fact, quite artificial, and those who look artificial are usually being quite natural. Tellingly, when this meme quickly and inevitably yielded its more ironic and self-knowing parodies, the featured human figures all fell away, replaced by legos, muppets, and finally, Han Solo frozen in carbonate. Such parodies make for a fitting conclusion to the joke; by excelling at producing a single, identical face on command, Lohan and Hilton become almost inhuman, dolls trapped in a lightning round of dress-up.
Aside from some good old fashioned celeb-bashing, the artifice highlighted by this meme is a testament to the fact that Naturalism is performance style— some would even say technique— like any other. It requires practice, training, and thoughtful preparation. Unlike various other acting styles, however, it places a far greater imperative upon hiding these facts from its audience. Rendering such facts visible again requires additional, alien stylistic elements and/or twists— see, for example, Juxtaposition and Repetition, illustrated digitally in the links above and in a live performance below. Check out this brilliant clip from Zero Degrees, a duet by two of my favorite contemporary dancers/choreographers, Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.
Yet in spite of what I’ve written about naturalism as a performance style, a few quick glances at these monkeys is all it takes for me to relapse into a gush over their nonchalantly photogenic look. Try as I might, I just can’t shake how natural— in the absolutely real sense of the word— these monkeys appear on camera. So what gives? I’m won’t go so far as to suggest that they lack self-awareness, but if the Macaque monkeys do become self-conscious, they certainly don’t seem to be expressing it in the same way we humans do.
Now is probably a good time to note that I am far from the first person to make these observations. In fact, when pondering over the state of humanity, this apparent gap between man and monkey— and by extension, between man and theoretically every other animal— has oft-served as rhetorical imagery. For centuries now, whether humans are receiving praise for their higher intelligence or critiques of their consciousness, you can bet that some animal is waiting in the wings to perform the role of “natural" foil, and this can yield some curious results.
Take for example Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre," a fictional dialogue between Kleist and an interlocutor who sings the praises of marionettes over men. “In the organic world… as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly," writes the narrator’s conversation partner. Enter the marionette: an figurine that may possess all the movement range of a human being without being burdened by thought or consciousness and the troubling distance effect thus felt between one’s mind and body. To elaborate, Kleist asks his fictional friend:
‘And what is the advantage your puppets would have over living dancers?’
‘The advantage? First of all a negative one, my friend: it would never be guilty of affectation. For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or moving force, appears at some point other than the center of gravity of the movement. Because the operator controls with his wires or thread only this center, the attached limbs are just what they should be… lifeless, pure pendulums, governed only by the law of gravity. This is an excellent quality. You’ll look for it in vain in most of our dancers.’
From this claim, the interlocutor casually offers a grand thesis: “Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness of an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god." It’s strong stuff, but Kleist’s character isn’t entirely convinced, so his partner provides a few examples to fortify his argument.
First, we are told the story of a beautiful young man whose grace meets its match in the form of an even more beautiful statue. Consumed by his inability to replicate the statue’s poise and position, the young man reportedly begins to spend entire days in front of the mirror practicing. Although his best efforts are to no effect, the man presses on and, in doing so, further fixates on his problems. As he comes to understand the nature and limits of his own grace, he loses all traces of it. “An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures," our interlocutor continues. “One year later, nothing remained of the lovely grace which had once given pleasure to all who looked at him."
To better drive his point home, our marionette praiser next recalls a story from his own life, the (slightly improbable) time he challenged a bear to a fencing match. As you might expect, this is where the aforementioned curiousness emerges. From the get go, our champion is clearly outmatched by the bear’s strength and size. Skilled fencer that he is, however, he attempts to overcome these disadvantages with his skills of deception, throwing out a series of feint attacks meant to trick the bear into letting his guard down. But lo and behold, the bear sees right through these feints and does not budge. “No human fencer could equal his perception in this respect," our man notes. To its credit, the bear “stood upright, his paw raised ready for battle, his eye fixed on mine as if he could read my soul there, and when my thrusts were not meant seriously he did not move." Unsurprisingly, the human loses the fight.
Like the marionette and statue before it, this bear appears to be unburdened by the troublesome mind/body disconnect that has cursed his human foil. Even more so, Kleist’s portrait of the bear suggests that its gracefulness is so pure that it can immediately sense the inauthentic struggles of its human peers and act accordingly. A strike is a strike, a fake is a fake, and there will be no confusion of appearances. Here Kleist fairly explicitly suggests a connective link between the living, breathing bear and its two frozen counterparts. Each possess a purity of purpose that appears to be lost upon we humans.
But for this logic to stand, the bear— like its marionette and statue’d counterparts— must be entirely without consciousness. This is, after all, the crux of Kleist’s argument. It’s not as though marionettes have resolved the mind/body problem through a harmonious synthesis; instead, they wind up bypassing it entirely by simply removing one of the two incongruous components. Simply put, nothing stands in the way of their physicality because there is, in fact, nothing standing in the way of their physicality. Marionettes are all body and no mind— and so too must be the bear; anything else, and it would flinch.
This chain of reasoning might sound strange (or flat out wrong) to a modern reader, but it’s rooted in the works of some heavy hitting thinkers. Back in the 1600’s, Descartes lays down much of the necessary groundwork for Kleist’s logic in his treaties on the mind-body dichotomy. “The body," Descartes writes,
is nothing other than a statue or machine made of earth, which God deliberately makes as similar to us as possible. Consequently, he not only gives it the external color and shape of all the parts of our bodies, but also puts in all the components necessary to make it walk, eat, breathe, and in short imitate all those of our functions that can be imagined to come from matter and depend only on the disposition of our organs.
Here, Descartes has effectively leveled the physical playing field. While bodies may come in different shapes and sizes, whether you are animate or inanimate, human or animal, all material selves are designed to competently exist without the need for free-thought. The primary functions of all creatures run like well-oiled machines, following “naturally from the disposition of organs alone, no more and no less than those of a clock or automaton follow from that of its counterweights and wheels."
When this mechanic body meets its rational mind, however, things change. The ship gets its captain. Assuming command of the entire system, the mind reigns over this previously empty vessel. The once automatic body is now subjugated, piloted to always answer to the whims of its new master. Descartes again: “When the Rational Soul is in the machine, it will have its principal seat in the brain, and there it will be like the person in charge of the fountains, who must be in the control pit (where all the pipes from the machines come together), when he wants to set them going, or stop them, or change their movements in some way…"
Unfortunately, this newfound control comes at a price. Movement spurred on by rational command somehow comes out slower than automatic instinct— not to mention how often it’s flat out wrong, a unsuccessful attempt to live out a unreasonably perfect image crafted by a mind unconstrained by physical reality. And by the way, this is all just one task we’re currently considering, and when, if ever, can you remember having the ability to truly focus all your thought into one single action? The more tasks get juggled, the further things fall from the mark. Rare is the the mind that may guide its body without complications.
Say what you will about free-will, but as pure automata we certainly were efficient. Now guided by a master that is, itself, guided by complicated self-interest, said efficiency begins to decline. Rational thought, it would seem, comes at a price, trading grace and ease for choice and self-knowledge. Or, in other words: Machine 1, Human 0.
But can we extend the score to: Bear 1, Human 0?
Descartes claims so, offering little more than the observational logic I’ve already outlined. In a letter to the Marques of Newcastle, he writes: “I know that animals do many things better than we do, but this does not surprise me. It can even be used to prove that they act naturally and mechanically, like a clock which tells the time better than our judgement does. Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks. The actions of honeybees are of the same nature; so also is the discipline of cranes in flight, and of apes fighting, if it is true that they keep their discipline." He concludes the letter with an impressive lumping and jumping in logic, conclusively writing:
The most that one can say is that though the animals do not perform any action which shows us that they think, still, since the organs of their body are not very different from ours, it may be conjectured that there is attached to those organs some thoughts such as we experience in ourselves, but of a very much less perfect kind. To which I have nothing to reply except that if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us. This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.
Clearly, Descartes has a strong dichotomy in mind: humans on one side, and puppets, automata, fountains, bears, birds, bees, clocks, and everything else on the other. Why an oyster and a monkey, animals who share far fewer similarities between them than monkey and man, should be so easily lumped together has never been entirely clear to me. The answer to which I find myself continually return has more to do with Descartes’ ego than anything else— as if he was unwilling to award anyone but his own species the final prize of a soul. That is to say that, while we may have lost our grace to self-awareness, so long as this self-awareness originates from our soul then its very existence proves our ethereal immortality. Bear 1, Human ∞.
That is all, of course, assuming you believe in immortality, the soul, and plenty of other things I dare not dive into now. Heinrich von Kleist, for his part, does appear to believe in the soul— or at the very least, some sort of divine absolute— but it is worth noting that he also believes we will never reach this absolute during our material lives. Thus, his thesis— Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness of an infinite consciousness— and his suggested course of action, towards the puppet. I enjoy the grounded quality of Kleist’s perspective here. He manages to uphold the idea that soul-borne self-awareness might serve us well in the long-run, while openly admitting that, in the day to day, we’re still stuck as clumsy as ever.
But perhaps there is hope for our material selves, after all. Recent research that certain qualities we’ve long held as fundamental to being human might not actually be as exclusive as we first thought. Take, for example, the fairly recent discovery that Chimpanzees, our closest link to that vexing other side of the Descartean dichotomy, can recognize themselves in a mirror.
Among other things, this degree of awareness suggests that Chimpanzees possess a far greater sense of self than Descartes had ever imagined. To my knowledge, the Japanese Macaque snow monkeys have not yet undergone such a test, so the jury’s still out on just what makes the original simian culprits of this too-long post seem so natural in camera. Should the study ever come out, however, I’ll be sure to let you know.
As we all wait (with baited breath, I’m sure), may I recommend re-watching Spike Jonze’s 1999 film, Being John Malkovich, with this post in mind? In my opinion, it’s no coincidence that a film so playfully engaging with people and puppets would feature a monkey, as well. Catch John Cusack’s character Craig Schwartz— whose very name is a composite from the names of American puppeteer Bruce Scwartz and "friend of the blog" Edward Gordon Craig— at the very beginning of the film when he turns to his wife’s chimpanzee, Elijah, and mutters with no less Ego than Descartes, “You don’t know how lucky you are being a monkey, because consciousness is a terrible curse. I think. I feel. I suffer."
Or, if you’re understandably done with the whole thing, maybe it’s best to give your gears a rest and just enjoy hot springs. Either way, cheers.
So Many Benkei
I found this little guy about one week ago while exploring a once-a-month flea market that sets up around Toji Temple in southern Kyoto. Among a sea of Japanese snacks, kitschy tourist souvenirs, old cameras, and fabrics stood a pleasant old man selling his own puppets. Speaking technically for just a moment, this dude is defined as a rod puppet due to the thick stick that shoots from his trunk down to where you hold him below. “Rod" is a bit of a misnomer here, though, because his rod is actually a piece of bamboo that’s had a portion split in half so that a marionette-like string system could be run through the rod at the bottom. Ingenious construction!
I’ll admit, I might have wound up paying the Gaijin price for this puppet since I made no attempt to hide how excited I was to discover him. I was just so taken by its charming simplicity, not to mention impressed by the attention to little details. For example, the string that attaches his left arm is slightly longer than the one that attaches the right so that the poses his arms make when the strings reach either extreme vary and appear similar to actual Naginata stances, as evident in the woodblock print below—
My puppet and the the Naginata wielding gentleman you see above are in fact one and the same. This woodblock print depicts the famous showdown on Gojo bridge in Kyoto between warrior-monk Benkei (left side) and the young general Yoshitsune (right side). As the story goes, Benkei had positioned himself on this bridge with the expressed intent of defeating 1000 consecutive warriors. After 999 victories, Benkei faced Yoshitsune who, despite his much smaller size, manages to overcome the warrior-monk. Accepting his loss, Benkei swears loyalty to Yoshitsune, becoming his companion and sworn protector.
The stories of Yoshitsune and Benkei— particularly those from Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees)— are especially dear to me because they served as one of my first entries into the world of Japanese theatre and the relationship between puppets and people in performance.
Senbon Zakura was a play originally written for the Bunraku puppet theatre but soon adapted for the Kabuki stage. This was not at all uncommon at the time; for an extended period the Bunraku puppet theatre, a form of puppetry so complex that it requires three manipulators per doll, was arguably the most popular form of theatre in Japan. In a bid to hold onto its audiences, Kabuki actors began to perform the plays first written for puppets. These Kabuki actors would often deviate from the written story, however, embellishing particular scenes and ad-libbing references to contemporary culture. Some of these Kabuki versions became so famous in their own right that Bunraku puppet companies began to perform the Kabuki versions of the original puppet plays. So began an ongoing feedback loop that, while not so active these days, has strongly shaped both forms of theatre today.
Below, you will see an interpretation of Benkei in both Bunraku puppet and Kabuki actor style from another story of Yoshitsune and Benkei, called Kanjincho—
Lot’s more to write about all of this, but I’m going to stop here for now. Thankfully, I’ve only just began my time here in Japan. I felt I had to start here, though, out of loyalty— after all, you could say that Benkei was responsible for the very first ideas behind my Watson.
I’m leaving London tomorrow morning, thereby concluding the “Blogge" portion of the blog. I am flying to Puerto Rico to perform my solo mime show, “See You Soon," at the 9no Festival Internacional de Mimo y Teatro Físico en el Caribe. Since the entire show, save the bench, fits into the suitcase, I decided back in July to carry “See You Soon" with me during my Watson year. I’m so glad that I did, as little bits and pieces of my adventures in the Czech Republic and London have been slowly trying to wiggle their way into the show for months now. Thanks to my friends at Energinmotion, I was lent a steady rehearsal space throughout November to investigate how to best integrate these new sparks into the piece. Nothing looks drastically different— in fact, more often than not I wound up returning to the original material (if I can call it that?)— but the process was worthwhile and there are a few little things here and there that I think hope add to the overall cohesion and dramatic drive. So here’s to a good run, ya?
(and to a neat second poster)
Ahoj and also Na Shledáno
I suspect that this post will conclude the Blague— that is to say, the Prague section of my blog. Thursday morning I’m catching a plane to London where I’ll be starting at it again. Round two. Like anyone who has ever been anywhere always says, my time here has felt highly compressed and at the same time abnormally stretched. That rainy mid-afternoon in late July when I first arrived here in Prague feels like yesterday, but that yesterday feels forever ago.
I’ve just returned from the final performance I’ll see in Prague. Tonight I got to watch people sweat and it feels good. At the final bow, I caught eyes with one of the female performers and I felt her exhaustion. I noticed myself slightly bowing my head down and forward in time with her bow, as if I’d left all I had to give out there on the bare stage just as she did. I didn’t; I watched from the second row. As she performed, I shifted around in my seat because of a bit of lower back pain I’ve been feeling for a few days— probably (and hopefully only) the result of too much time spent lately carrying a three-year-old czech boy on my shoulders, his six-year-old sister on my back, and one or two of their friends in my arms or around my legs or et cetera. I fidgeted in the dark while she sweated, sang, breathed, and moved in the light, yet somehow I felt we had done it all together in the end.
The word ‘empathy’ comes up a lot in my Watson proposal. If you go to the Watson website and read the abstract of my proposal you’ll see it’s there, too, sitting at the very end of a lone paragraph that tries to contain far too much material within far too small a character count. It’s the final word of that abstract, sort of the punchline for my whole project— How do you relate to this person? How do you relate to that puppet? What are the differences in these encounters? What do you think the differences are in these encounters?
A term that doesn’t appear but would have if it had been in my lexicon at the time is ‘aesthetic distance’— one’s ability to recognize a work of art as such. In a performance, your empathic response to the work is counter-balanced by your aesthetic distance from the work. Both are necessary elements for artistic engagement. Without aesthetic distance you’d probably call the police the moment Othello kills Ophelia. Without empathy, you probably wouldn’t care in the first place.
Before I began my Watson, I was of the tentative opinion that because puppets begin from a place of obvious aesthetic distance, their capacity as empathetic entities was greater than that of their human counterparts. Because the spectator recognizes the puppet as something wholly other, s/he ultimately embraces it more easily. Whereas a human performing before an audience is both him/herself and a character, a puppet is only what it is; The puppet is trustworthy because it has no ulterior life— offstage, it is but lifeless material.
My experiences here in Prague have confirmed and complicated this theory. After I had conceived, carved, and created Old Mr. Nik Nobody, I experienced a newfound empathic connection for all things wooden and hand-made. I would cringed whenever a marionette was accidentally dropped. I cringed again a few weeks later when the three-year-old czech boy tripped off of his scooter and fell onto the pavement. If you were to compare my reactions, you might think that these two collisions triggered equivalent responses in my gut— and you might not be fully wrong on that one, either. Of course, I knew they weren’t identical, but I cringed all the same. When a marionette fell to the ground, I saw days of hard work and inexplicable inspiration unjustly thrown into harms way. I cringed not because I imagined the puppet feeling pain, but because I imagined my own pain had it been my puppet.
Earlier on during my time here, I was told that every marionette carver puts a part of him/herself into each of his/her puppets. This concept took on a new meaning for me when I saw the marionettes fall to the ground. Suddenly, these figures didn’t seem like mere inanimate material when they left the stage; instead, they became concrete testaments to skill, artistry, love, and dedication.
It’s worth noting, however, that I’ve only created one puppet for myself, and so my relationship to these marionettes is no doubt too precious and miraculous. I look at Mr. Nobody and still can’t quite believe I made him myself. I would guess that by the 100th marionette, my relationship to these figures would evolve. I suspect that over time, the unavoidable immaterial origins of these puppets would take on new meaning— not necessarily diminishing their individual importance, but putting it all into better perspective. After carving 100 marionettes, I suspect I might better understand the paradoxical fact that these puppets are more than just wood and wires and strings, and yet, at the same time, are also just wood and wires and strings.
From what I’ve seen, I think Czech puppetry lives within this duality. At the interval of a puppet theatre recreation of the film Jaws I saw recently, it suddenly hit me: none of puppet shows I have seen here have ever asked of me to believe that these puppets are real people. I wrote this revelation down in my notebook and then almost erased it immediately because it felt like such a stupid observation afterwards. But I think there is a nuanced point in there; true, puppets come to life in the minds of their audience, but that doesn’t mean that they have to come to life as human beings. As the Mexican puppeteer Roberto Lago once said, “the puppet’s only real limitation is the imitation of the flesh and blood actor."
A few days later, I found a Czech friend restating Lago’s words without ever mentioning the man. She said that she felt Czech puppeteers were more interested in what the puppet can be than in forcing it to become a re-creation of a person. Czech puppetry (all puppetry?) is a form of performance more closely affiliated with representation than simulation.
Perhaps this explains the little girl who came up to me after a performance of “Tři Zlaté Vlasy Děda Vševěda,” insistent on explaining to me that Plaváček should not have married the princess at the end of the show because the princess was too pretty and too smart for Plaváček— all this, despite the fact that the princess appears in the show for only three minutes as a dress on a hanger, animated by a manipulator who sways the dress with her own hands. If I had to guess, this young girl’s reaction stemmed more from her strong identification with the concept of ‘princess’ than with our character of the princess. As a result, the character of the princess came to life in little girl’s mind not because she empathized with the princess’s situation, but because she had projected herself into that dress. The princess was too pretty and smart for Plaváček because the little girl felt she was too pretty and smart for Plaváček.
And yet, perhaps because of this representational relationship with the puppet, most shows I saw here in Prague were at least slightly winking at their audiences. I always delighted in the ingenuity and the construction and the imagination of the work, but I often struggled to fully immerse myself. Looking back on it all, I think that the work of art that hit me hardest was neither a puppet or person play, but a piece of mobile statuary created by the contemporary Czech sculptor, David Černý. His work is all over Prague and it’s usually a little cheeky, itself (see: the giant babies climbing the TV tower, the two peeing statues outside the Kafka Museum, or the Sigmund Freud hanging on for dear life over the Old Town Square). But at the Meet Factory, a contemporary art space on the outer side of Prague, I got to see one of his most recent works, titled “The Freedom." In a room so dark you can’t make out the walls, three (possibly four?) almost human figures hovered barely above the ground in strained positions. A giant cylinder stuck out of each of their heads— almost like the thick bar coming out of the heads of wire marionettes— and disappeared into the darkness. These cylinders rotated the statues like chickens on a spit, but the statues were too close to the ground to make a full rotation without scraping against the cement floor. The sound was horrible. Sometimes, the figures would get caught and stall, unstoppable force meeting unlovable object, leading to even deeper scraping and breaking. As my ears were filled by these sounds, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I began to make out a dim but deep red color emerging from wherever the statues’ first layer of black material had been ripped off by the incessant collisions with the pavement. Concrete skin revealing vulnerability beneath. It was too much for me: the sounds, the darkness, the bodies, the space, the experience. In that room, my visceral reaction overwhelmed any normal balance between empathic response and aesthetic distance. It didn’t seem like torture. It was torture— even as I knew they were nothing but statues. I had to leave the room.
Moments later I wanted to go back in.
I’m not sure where all this leaves me— and of course, that’s fine. I don’t think Černý’s “The Freedom" would have been so impactful had the rotating sculptures not felt so humanlike. Yet I find myself wondering how often anything— puppet or person— is ever truly a real human being inside another’s imagination. I don’t have an answer to this question. I’m going to keep looking. I’m going to get on a flight to London tomorrow and go from there. I think it’s a good plan.
Čau.
Every Hero Needs an Origins Story
As I’ve already mentioned in the blog, my Watson project was born from my time spent exploring the theatrical metaphor of ‘Man as Marionette’ from various practical and theoretical perspectives. But there was a major hitch in all my efforts— I’d never actually worked with a marionette before. As I delved deeper into the subject matter, I discovered that a great number of the thinkers and artists who furthered the ‘Man as Marionette’ concept also hadn’t worked extensively with marionettes. On one level, this is understandable; essays like Heinrich von Kleist’s On The Marionette Theatre, Edward Gordon Craigs’s The Actor and the Uber-Marionette, or Roland Barthes’s Essays on the Bunraku Theatre suggest that these authors were more interested in what the marionette did to the spectator (i.e. to the people, i.e. to them) than the mechanics of performance. But on another level, this is unfortunate; anyone who has been onstage can tell you that there is a large gap between concocting ideas intellectually and actually realizing them in performance.
My decision to make the Czech Republic the first stop of my Watson was born from my desire to start filling in the experiential gaps in my relationship to the ‘Man as Marionette’ metaphor. So the first big ‘Watsonian’ thing I did after arriving was work with Mirek Trejtnar, Leah Gaffen, and all the folks at PiP (Puppets in Prague) in a two-week Marionette Carving workshop. Which brings me to the aforementioned “hero" of this post: my marionette! He doesn’t have a name because I’m just no good at coming up with names. (Anyone who saw my mime show might recall that this character is nameless, as well.) But this puts him in good company as far as I’m concerned— Odysseus, Clint Eastwood, and one of my favorite Spaghetti Westerns, My Name Is Nobody. At the very beginning, however, before this nameless octogenarian had a three-dimensional life, he was just a drawing:
This was the sketch I sent to Mirek in Prague before I began the workshop to give a general sense of what I had in mind. I was kind of thinking of Jacques Tati when I was drawing him, and I had just come off of a performance of my mime show in San Diego (hence the suspenders), so I was basically dreaming of an ideal me at 80. Here are a few other sketches:
Although I had initially thought that he would be a wire puppet, with a large rod going through his head and neck and into his trunk, after trying out a bunch of different marionettes I decided to make him a string marionette instead. This gave him a greater range of mobility (and the hunch and waddle). At first, it made him a bit more unwieldy than his wire brethren, but I’d like to think I’ve begun to compensate for that as I’ve gotten better at manipulating. Suffice to say: I’ve yet to have buyer’s remorse. In fact, I absolutely love the way his limbs relate to gravity.
Once the details were more or less squared away, I drafted a to-scale technical drawing that would serve as a guide through the carving, as well as a useful stencil for eventually drawing the shapes onto large blocks of wood. Here is the technical drawing:
Then, using the front and side profiles drawn onto a block of wood as a guide, Mirek cut out a 2D/3D version of his head on the band-saw:
Which I then began to carve…
…and carve…
…and carve…
…until more and more details emerged from the wood…
…and it started to really look right. I should add that I didn’t do all this alone, and was quite fortunate to work under the watchful eyes (and sometimes hands) of a couple wood-carving professionals and all around wonderful people.
Following the head, I turned to the body, the arms, hands, legs, and feet:
It was now time to connect the majority of the parts together. For his legs, I opted for the traditional style of hinge joint formed through connecting two wooden parts at the knee. For the arms, I went with a newer style of construction, connecting a long piece of circular leather into each shoulder and then nailing into place a mid-arm piece and the forearm/hand piece so that his arms can bend at his ‘elbows’. A more traditional technique involves connecting a tubular piece of textile at the shoulder and at the forearm. You can also use wooden hinges similar to the legs. It ultimately depends on aesthetic preferences, what actions you envisioned for the puppet, time, money, and available materials (and not often in that order). And of course, the same goes for the legs.
Here is Mr. Nobody in all his headless glory.
I couldn’t attach the head and neck yet because they connect to the body through another piece of leather and without their strings, they would just flop over.
Following this, we moved to painting and costume. Because these really are hand-carved, individual marionettes, we tried to showcase the technique as much as possible. I kept my costume to a bare minimum and painted in thin layers that wouldn’t gloss over the carved wood. This, of course, isn’t mandatory, but I quite like the wooden look so I tried my best to respect it.
Pants can be tricky because if they fit too tight they’ll get in the way of the leg movements. Fortunately for me and my guy, I always pictured him with too-big trousers, so we were okay.
It was at about this point that I finally gave him eyes. I would say that my marionette’s eyes wound up looking exactly like how I never realized I’d imagined them. I knew I didn’t want realistic eyes, but that was also because I just hate drawing eyes. So I was kind of stuck one day while fretting over how/what his eyes would look like when suddenly Zdar, one of our professional overseers, quietly came over and put two green beads in my hand. They were perfect! Just what I would have envisioned, had I known something like that was possible.
Actually, I experienced this moment many times throughout the process— since this was my first time carving a human figure out of wood, I would often struggle to see what needed carving next, only to exclaim a big “Duh!" to myself whenever one of the professionals pointed to an area that needed more rounding or more depth. In the end, it wasn’t so much the carving technique that eluded me (though that was hard) as much as it was possessing an eye for global shapes and little details.
Anyways, here is my guy pre and post optic surgery (as you can see, I painted the beads black).
And here he is all put together!
The suspenders are hand-sewn into the pants, but the pants are held up by a nail in the front (covered by the button) and a nail in the back. There’s also a nail hidden behind the first layer of bow-tie fabric. Special thanks to Dana for help with the pants pattern and the front pleat, and the Pomona College costume department for teaching me all I know about sewing!
Once done, all that was left to do was string the little dude.
He has nine strings. Two for the head, two for the shoulders, two for the hands, two for the legs, and one in the back. If he were a wire puppet, he’d only have four strings for his hands and legs. The head and shoulder strings collectively distribute the weight and upright support that the wire provides all by itself.
My marionette’s leg strings are mostly hidden by his pants, as you can see in this rather inappropriate photo of my guy remembering his younger days when he really could rock shorts like that. Also, he’s letting the glue I put around his eye-hook knots dry so that they’ll stay fixed for (hopefully!) a long, long time.
And that about wraps it up! Once the glue dries, he’s all set to go. I was caught off guard by how quickly the process accelerated. One day he was just a head and then suddenly, he moves! I hope that my quick account of the process didn’t further accelerate things too much. While writing I was reminded of those cooking shows where the chef puts a pre-baked casserole into the oven and immediately pulls out a finished one to save time, so I apologize if there appear to be large jumps in process or (dare I say,) logic. The work took somewhere around 10 to 12 days, including lectures on materials, aesthetics, functionality, and history.
But I’d be remiss if I ended with a picture of his pants up, so here’s one last photo from my marionette’s performance debut, playing a Czech professor who teaches rather boring English:
Since this show, Old Mr. Nobody has already made quite the career for himself. You might have seen him most recently playing Děda Vševěda in a production of “Tři Zlaté Vlasy Děda Vševěda" (translation: “The Three Golden Hairs of Grandfather Know-It-All.") in and around Prague. I couldn’t be prouder of my little guy!
Yesterday I was reminded of this performance by a new friend I made here in Prague. It felt like the perfect follow up to my post about strings and gravity from a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d share it here. This piece was created and performed by the wonderfully inventive french puppeteer and performer, Philippe Genty.
It reminds me of a quotation from Etienne Decroux, father of Corporeal Mime, who once wrote:
“A revolution is not a liberation from chains, it’s a changing of chains. It consists of breaking with obligations that seem bad, and adoptting other obligations that seem better. I would even say that liberty is the right to choose one’s restraints. That’s what liberty is.”
Fun (okay, nerdy) side note— In the 1945 French film “Les Enfants du Paradis," Decroux played Anselme Debureau, a boisterous actor whose son, Jean-Baptiste Debureau, becomes a famous performer for his portrayl of Pierrot, the archetypal pantomime figure depicted as a puppet in the Genty video above.
Here is a scene from the film featuring Pierrot (played by Jean-Louis Barrault).
And here is part of another Philippe Genty show, Voyageurs Immobile, that I saw last summer in Paris while assisting in a Mime workshop. It combines puppetry and mime with a particularly inventive theatricality to create quite a show.
I’m on my way to finishing my first carved marionette. In the meantime I wanted to share just a few of the hundreds of marionettes I was lucky enough to see last week at Mrs. Vorlova’s house.
Mrs. Vorlova and her husband began collecting marionettes while the Czech Republic was part of the Soviet Empire (and was not called ‘the Czech Republic’ but ‘Czechoslovakia’). In an effort to unify the artistic output of their entire country, the Communists consolidated the Czech marionette tradition into a national theatre, shutting down all other marionette theaters in the process. At this time, the Vorlovas were saving up to buy a car, but when they heard that an accomplished marionette maker was being forced to throw out all of his marionettes, they decided to use their savings to buy the marionettes instead. This began a decades-long effort to rescue soon-to-be-discarded marionettes all through the Czech country.
Now these marionettes— some over 150 years old— all reside within the Vorlova residence and their next-door additional storage space. Some hang from the ceiling, some from the walls, some in display cases. It’s as if you’ve stumbled into the most remarkable private museum— and indeed, various museums have expressed interest in buy some of these marionettes, but Mrs. Vorlova isn’t interested in selling.
Some appear to be too fragile to use in performance, but we were lucky enough to watch just a few from her collection in action including an acrobat who could do handstands on his hand-carved chair and a swamp creature whose head was covered in a myriad of strings that could move his mouth, bulge out his eyes, and articulate individual eyebrows.
There’s so much more to mention here, but I’m afraid that it’s 12:30 here and I’ve got another full day tomorrow painting and clothing my marionette. In any case, I’m happy to report that Prague is beautiful, charming, and already proving to be a fantastic first stop on my Watson adventure.
An Introduction
If you will be an actor in such a day as this, and if you are an English man, take but one model, …the masked marionette.
— Edward Gordon Craig
Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Sam Gold. Trained as an actor, Corporeal Mime, and (sometimes) dancer, I aspire to become a Theatre Practitioner, pushing the boundaries of live performance through new work and research. Recently, I had the honor of being named a 2011/2012 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, receiving a one-year stipend for independent study and travel outside the United States. My project, titled: “Performing ‘Model’ Humans - What Puppets Can Teach Us About Empathy," will use the inanimate performer brought to life onstage as a vehicle for exploring contrasting concepts of the actor/audience relationship, divergent experiences of the body, and differing cultural relationships to the animate/inanimate divide.
Phew! That is a lot to say in a short a paragraph. As you might expect, I will be going into much (much) more detail about all this and more in the coming months. For the time being, I would just like to say this project is as much about humans as it is about puppets. I consider theatre, at its bare essence, to be rooted in the relationship between two people, performer and spectator, as they come together to realize something far greater than either individual alone— an imaginative yet palpably real world shared between them. Although this world tangibly exists for only a few hours a night, it owes its origins to developments from years before the first curtain rises and it can continue to find a life in the minds of all who held a stake in its creation far after the last curtain falls. This ability to both reflect and shape culture in real time is special to the theatre. It is the reason why, regardless what a piece of theatre is “about", it is also about people— at least this is what I believe, and I’m going to get to put this belief to the test in the coming year.
As for the puppet, the marionette, the mannequin, the mask, the robot, the automaton— these figures have sprinkled their influence throughout time periods and cultures both on and off the stage. They have served as problematically concrete manifestations for the abstract ideals of various thinkers and their visions of grace and the grotesque. They have served as mouthpieces for radical politics during times of censorship and oppression. They have served as metaphors both troubling and beautiful for their detachment from consciousness, elevated like Gods and decried like zombies. And, amidst all this seriousness, they have managed to always entertain, captivating the imaginations of children and adults alike.
This blog will ham-fistedly attempt to chronicle my evolving take on all this stuff, as well as the experiences that shape it. Although an actor for far longer, I first became interested in these specific aspects of performance during my freshman year of college when I first discovered Corporeal Mime. Corporeal Mime has since propelled me to a whole slew of experiences such as work with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and experimenting in human statue posing. I have yet to receive any practical training in manipulating and performing with puppets, however, so my first stop is Prague for a crash-course immersion in marionette theatre. After that, all bets are off, as I continue around Eastern Europe before heading to various parts of Asia. My official itinerary includes the Czech Republic, Poland, Bali, Japan, and Singapore— but we’ll see what comes as the year develops.
If you’re at all intrigued by this, I encourage you to reach out in whatever way you like, be it reading and commenting, writing me with questions, thoughts, and suggestions, or even— dare I say— putting me in contact with friends or friends of friends who I might run into along the way. Like the theatre that inspires me, I hope for this to be as collaborative an experience as possible. You can reach me at automatravel {at} gmail {dot} com or by heading to the Contact Me page of this website.
Until next time, cheers!
— Sam
(A special shout out to Prof. Juliet Koss at Scripps College for suggesting the name Automa.Travel. If any of what I’ve written sounds interesting to you, you’ll probably love her book, Modernism After Wagner, far better-written than anything you’ll find here on this blog. Also, if you’re still in college and think that a year of world-travel and adventures sounds too good to be true, check out The Watson Fellowship Website for proof that it really exists, to learn all about how to apply, and to check out current and former Watson Fellows’ projects.)