Pupppets, Porn and Patriarchy
29 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
in Transdisciplinary R-Evolutions in Puppetry and Performance
Chronicles from the Interior: The Paper Body Collective on Puppets, Porn and Patriarchy. A paper by Aja Marneweck given at the Pre-Post- Per-Form Arts Colloqium held in Cape Town in 2010.
When I thought of South African Puppetry in the last century, I used to imagine these odd Afrikaans children’s tv shows like Liewe Heksie and Willie Walie with these velt marionettes or bad children’s theatre I was forced to sit through as a child. So how do contemporary puppeteers such as myself try to change stereotype of puppetry for kids?
When I ran the Out the Box festival we decided to call it adult puppetry, or puppetry for adults. In Prague five years ago I had my first taste of real adult puppetry- a midnight show of bawdy Spanish burlesque with a red dressed transvestite ken doll singing on top of a piano and a stripping baby doll with pert breasts swirling round a pole . Typical of European burlesque review or cabaret puppetry for adults which is purely about pleasure and adult entertainment.
My artistic passion as it were always returns to the representation of the feminine, and the power of feminine sexuality and desire, the power inherent in the female body as a site of subversion, of transformation and re defining perceptions and limitations on the experience of what it is to be a woman and a female artist.
My first love in multimodal performance began with video dance. And I was very influenced by the work of Lloyd Newson and Dv8 physical theatre. Strange Fish. 1992. Video not as capturing performance but being the performance. Strange Fish mixes humour, religious iconography and physicality, taking it beyond the boundaries of traditional dance and bringing video into the realms of performance. I began to investigate Video and its incorporation into performance as what I term ‘living multimedia’. That to watch the video is as alive and immediate as theatrical performance, that there can be breath in it.
My first multimedia collaboration was with Fnb award winning choreographer Gladys Agulhas in 2001 in the piece Meetings on the Edge, in which solo dance performance was combined with giant projections. Understanding integration, scale and life. The cinema of live performance is as immediate as the performance of video.
So beginning with an obsession with layering it was a natural step to puppetry: my first experience with puppetry began 10 years ago with puppet master Gary Friedman. I was introduced to many methods of puppetry techniques including marionette traiangle and shadow puppetry, but also to an object manipulation technique called brown paper puppetry. The object does not require features, it is movement, breath and energy transference that creates life. Still his object of fascination, Hanus Hachenburg- young Czech playwright killed in terezin, we used a sheet of brown paper that was transformed into a living breathing boy on stage. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to attend a professional workshop with French company Au Cul du Loop, exploring the interface between object, sound and movement. I began to develop an approach to puppetry through object manipuilation working between the literal and the abstract. Abstract performance that holds most exciting potential for me. In it there can be no presuppositions or impositions, a state of trance, reaction and intention is required of the performer and the director. Another love of mine is the work of Phillippe Genty – French puppetry that blends the landscapes of the Freudian mind and dreamscape Jungian archetypes, playing with scale and dance and illusion and magic. Also the work of the Handspring puppet company whom i first encountered in 1994- who really form the canon of research on adult puppetry work from SA.
For me puppetry is a multimedia element, and when working with any multimedia in performance, it is about breathing life into the inanimate. Understanding that every element on stage operates on the same mechanics as puppetry- puppetry is life and death, puppetry plays with destruction, creation, violence and chaos, the sacred and spiritual, animism, anthropomorphism, breath, intention, transference, response, muksho (which is void) and energy. Layering of performance happens instantaneously with puppetry. It falls naturally into the realms of the abject, the profane and the inappropriate and the spiritual and the sacred. Ironically a conservative audience is more willing to watch puppets enact scenes of sex and death and illness and violence, the safety of artifice. Likewise the act of transference and life can hold in it the most moving and gentlest of human qualities and draw in the spectator in to the world on stage. I enjoy playing with abjection and the monstrous feminine, Desire and Pathology in the Representation of the Feminine, ‘where the true fragility and lawlessness of the human body exposes itself- this is the place where…the self as a secure and integrated thinking subject faints away because rational identity, system and order are disturbed, and borders, positions and rules for daily living are no longer respected.’
In my recent show In Medea Res, one of the characters was a woman who couldn’t keep herself together through a messy divorce. Medea is a woman falling apart- literally, her arms keep shooting off, she cant keep her legs attached. Every part has its own mind. The archetype of the disembodied or detachment of the physical surfaces. In Residue which toured to Prague in 2006 the central narrative follows the story of the handless maiden – a woman who has been dismembered by her parents, she searches for her hands which have been severed from her body and given to the devil. I always work with myth and archetype to tackle the joys of genetic and ancestral karma, the inheritances of history, body, mind and spirit. Performance becomes a Purification of these inheritances and histories for me. The exploration of sexuality becomes an empowerment and release.
Sexuality is at the heart of the dynamic/dilemma: problematic sexuality, need to move beyond duality and pain of separation to arrive at sexlessness and immersion. Abajo which i created in 2007, explored the trauma of sexual violence and its after effects on memory- a puppet manipulated by multiple performers has the movie screen of her experience pulled out of her stomach and we witness the ironic tragedy unravel on her insides. In my world tragedy is synonomous with self induced irony, pain with humour, heaviness and lightness, huge and tiny, fantasy and reality, the sublime and the mundane can occupy the same universes. such as the character of laloba, a paper puppet who dreams herself so fat that she pushes an elephant into the sky and breaks her fathers legs when she sits on his lap, but her mother who is as light as a feather can swing her on her back and carry her for miles. Intertextuality and magical realism dominate my work. The Goddess of migrant identities, Leto who can transform men into frogs or the African Mami Wata snake charmer Maladamatjuate who warns ‘as your lover describes you so you become’ and turns into a giant viper that swallows her husband whole!
Jeanette Winterson writes:
Here in this place she holds all the clues she needs to recognise that life is for a moment contained in one shape, then released into another. Monuments and cities fade away like people who build them. No resting place, no palace, no temple can survive the years that lie ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten and what would history make of tonight? Tonight the stars show her how to hang in space supported by nothing at all. Without medals or certificates or territories she owns, she can burn as they do, travelling through time until time has no meaning any more. She is trying to find out what it is that has brought her here. What is it about herself? All she knows is that she has arrived at the frontiers of common sense and crossed over. There is no safety without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
