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.

It is the most perfect summers day in the Cape, almost as if a divine hand had wiped the pouring clouds of the previous day into dissipated mist.  Everything is set in place, well as much as it can be.  There has been a lot of rehearsal and set up has been taxing, every element carefully planned with the anxious knowing that it is only in this one performance, this single coming together of all the elements, that the alchemy will and must happen.  I have prepared all the parts, painstakingly, with deft precision and months of praying, organising, giving over to the link between research and people, aesthetics and ritual, performance and vision.  Now the improv must lead the way.  What can prepare you for the live moment?  We had undergone gruelling and intense training, counselling, purging and offering.  ‘How old are you?’  27.  ‘That is a difficult age, an age of great change and indecision.  It’s a difficult time to do something like this.  You must use your gifts, performance and art is your gift.  That will heal you.’

more to come…

Puppetry has come to the fore in the past twenty years in South Africa as a powerful tool of representation and expression in the arts. As well as its widespread occurrence in Africa, puppetry holds a strong presence in much European and Asian theatre, and has led to the establishment of major puppetry and visual theatre companies, festivals, theatres and centres all over the world.

Theorist Jane Taylor says:

Puppets can provide an extraordinary dimension to a theatrical project…because every gesture is, as it were, metaphorized.  The puppet draws attention to its own artifice, and we as the audience willingly submit ourselves to the ambiguous processes that at once deny and assert the reality of what we watch (Taylor, 1998, p. vii).

The inanimate object transforms, through the visible or invisible actions of the puppeteer, from the literal into the abstract and conceptual to which the performers and audience respond on multiple levels. In the abstract transference of energy and rhythm to the object, there arises a complex interplay between meaning and representation. The interpretation of this inheritance of life through the act of performance with and of the object allows the viewer and manipulators to read their own human condition in the animated object.  The puppet always exists through multiple levels of meaning and signification.  These occur in the structure, form and symbolism of the object itself as well as in the performance.  Through Puppetry, deliberate attention is brought to the constructs of the object/symbol/character/performer dynamic. The power of Puppetry production is that all elements, be they set, performance bodies, voice and sound, multimedia or prop, have the ability to transform through performance.

Today the term Puppetry is loosely incorporated into the broad genre of Visual Performance: often a multidisciplinary approach to performance, performance art, movement, theatre, multimedia, video, puppetry, stage design, visual art and others.  Many puppetry companies classify their work in adult Puppetry as Visual Theatre. The potential of Puppetry in contemporary Visual Performance practice relates to its multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to meaning and representation in both its semiotic and phenomenological potential and significance.

South African Puppetry has come to the fore in the global Visual Performance scene largely due to the ground breaking interdisciplinary work of The Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge.  Their contribution to South African Puppetry, over the past thirty years, has been not only to develop an indigenous form of iconic South African Multimedia Performance but also to put adult puppetry on the local map.  Their experimentations in crossover multidiscplinarity have set the standard for contemporary puppetry performance, and in the vaguely documented and defined puppetry traditions of South Africa, their work stands as the canon of South African puppetry.  The question that follows however is, where is South African puppetry heading in the 21^st century and who are the new innovators leading the way?  Past and recent works of South African artists who fall within the large category of Visual Performance, attests to a growing body of multidisciplinary, visually orientated material, Puppetry and multimedia productions that look specifically at South African identity and experiences.

Recently the work of upcoming contemporary puppeteers is being acknowledged at Puppetry and Contemporary Performance festivals around the world. Visual Performance and Puppetry Company, The Paper Body Collective and their highly acclaimed production In Medea Res, which explored issues of Xenophobia and migrancy, performed to sold out performances on the main programme at the world famous Festival Mondial Des Theatres De Marionnette in France in 2009.  They were the only representatives from the African continent at this enormous event in world puppetry that showcased the cream of international talent from Canadian Puppetry Company Turak, to the Netherland’s Magische Theatertje.  In Medea Res subsequently went on to perform at various theatres in Europe and South Africa as well as at the prestigious Harare International Festival of the arts in 2010, attesting to the growing interest in South African women’s puppetry at international and intercontinental festivals.  Puppeteer Janni Younge was also awarded the Standard Bank Young artist award for Drama for her exciting work as a puppeteer and her contributions to South African theatre.

The categories of the South African Theatre stronghold however do not as yet adequately support South African Visual Performance or South African Puppetry. How can Performance platforms (such as festivals, theatres, awards) support experimentation and grow not only upcoming artists but also receptive audiences in order to facilitate the ‘new and radical happenings’ of contemporary Puppetry Performance? Out of the gaps between production, presentation and reception, we see the emergence of a number of new arts festival and awards that seek particularly to defy and define the traditional Patriarchal Western Theatre approach to the selection and endorsement of new works and arts practices.

The Out the Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance, developed by UNIMA South Africa, ran for its fifth year in March 2010 under the guidance of new artistic director Jaqueline Dommisse. Begun in 2005, under the directorship of contemporary female adult puppetry artists, Janni Younge and Aja Marneweck, the festival grew from a one day happening of workshops and performances, to a significant international event that provides a unique arts and culture platform in Cape Town. What makes the festival unique is that it is the only festival of primarily Puppetry and Visual Performance in Southern Africa.   Its missions are underlined by its supportive approach to experimentation and artist and audience development and lead the way in the production and development of local puppetry work and artists.  The ten-day festival, which showcases both adult and children’s performance, has grown exponentially to provide a concentrated programme of high quality, interdisciplinary performances, talks, workshops and happenings.  This programme is intentionally designed to support and expand thinking on experimentation and artistic possibility.   One of the main reasons for this growth is not just the commitment of the festival team, which is comprised completely of working artists, but from the great artistic demand for a platform of this kind that supports the fluidity of categorisation and interdisciplinarity.

Another aspect of the festival that lends it uniqueness, is its incorporation and use of space.  The Little Theatre Complex at the University of Cape Town has provided a mini town atmosphere where artists have access to three different theatre spaces as well as multiple rooms, environments and outdoor spaces in which to create.  This has also supported the growth of its audiences who can immerse themselves in these spaces and travel between multiple performances in an evening.  In this environment audiences are more open to accept the possibility of risk in its ticket purchase and open to viewing something they would not normally go to watch.   This spirit of possibility allows audiences to engage and to open themselves to creative potential and new artistic approaches.

In a bid to put Puppetry Performance even more firmly on the South African theatre map, this year saw the landmark introduction of the Handspring Puppetry Awards.  Company Directors Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, in the creation of these prestigious awards, are acknowledging not only artistic excellence in the craft but also the gaping silences and awkward categorisations of Puppetry in other awards around the country.

This year the festival showed a continuing commitment to the support of professional experimentation in cross-disciplinary performance.

Local highlights included the premier showcasing of a new collaborative work by Mandla Mbothwe and Mwenya Kabwe, 27 Windows, 4 doors & 2 Taps.  The site-specific exploration, created with students from the University of Cape Town as well as various professional performers, used buildings on the Rosedale site as its point of aesthetic and cultural investigation.  It also won the Best Visual Theatre Production Award at the end of the festival.  Runner up Acty Tang moved audiences with his achingly personal piece Inscrutable, and the raucous Erf 81 performance art troupe lead audiences through a dire love story with their audaciously inane and award winning Flowers for my flesh.

This year saw a noticeable lack of local puppetry specific performance on the adult festival with only three Puppetry lead performances.  The children’s festival boasted more than five high quality children’s puppetry performances with Ubom!’s Adventures of a Little Nobody winning the Best Overall Puppet Manipulation Award and Beren Belknap’s Lenny and the wasteland winning Best Puppetry Newcomer. The most invigorating performances of the week, in terms of local puppetry, were the active Puppets performance programme projects, which showcased the remarkable work of young up and coming community puppeteers working with a variety of puppetry mediums from Shadow and Procession to Glove Puppets.

The Moving Things Film Festival, introduced in 2008 to the festival programme, stood testament to the high quality of stop frame animation and puppetry video making in South Africa.  Thierry Cassuto and Jonathon Zapiro won Best Puppetry Design for ZA News, the controversial South African version of the French Puppetry satire, La Vignolles.

The conference at Out the Box this year was the fourth in a series organised by UNIMA SA as part of the Out the Box Festival.    This process of documenting, writing and dialoguing around significant aspects of Puppetry in South Africa has always stood as a vital part of the intention of the programme.

In a detailed empirical study on South African Puppetry since 1975, Zuanda Badenhorst provides a comprehensive list of practising professional and semi professional South African puppeteers in 2005.  Out of this study she listed over 70 puppetry companies/puppeteers.  In this list were thirty female puppeteers, with twenty puppetry companies run by women.  Out of this only four recorded female artists were professional puppeteers working with puppetry for adults/contemporary performance.  The rest worked primarily in children’s performance.  The motivation for this years conference was to document and archive discussions on the role of women in the development of contemporary Puppetry and Visual Perormance.

With speakers including Avital Dvori (Israel), Nandipha Mntambo, Julia Raynham (Resonance Bazar), Mothertongue Project, Mamela Nyamza, Tamara Guhrs (Njala), Mitzi Sinnott (USA), Caroline Calburn (Theatre Arts Admin Collective) and Tanya Surtees (FTHK), the Out the Box Conference 2010 explored the transformative role women are playing in the development and creation of contemporary Visual Performance.  The discussion looked both at the role women play in transforming the creative, social, cultural and political spaces of contemporary performance, the innovation of their craft as well as the development of platforms, programming and production leadership in Visual Performance.

The creation and success of festivals such as Out the Box is testament to the growing necessity of platforms and audience development spaces that support and nurture the burgeoning experimental and contemporary spaces of South African Visual Theatre in the 21^st Century.  The fact that it is an artist-run rather than administrator-run event also speaks to the possibilities of a different apporach to the processes that link thought, practice and producing to public presentation.   The sensitive negotiation needed to create a successful festival that addresses more than just a commercial viability, relies on an intrinsic support for both artist and audience development.  2010 sees the launch of new platforms around the country that seek to bridge the gaps between fringe and mainstream programmes, such as The National Arts Festival Arena programme.   At this point however, Out the Box remains the sole platform dedicated to the development of Visual Theatre Performance. ‘ May Out the Box flourish but never go mainstream and lose its intelligent edge’ declared Adrienne Sichel in a review of the festival 2007.  Let’s hope that it manages to maintain its focus on the artistic development of unique and provocative experimentation, and continue to lead the way in contemporary performance.

What an amazing festival of the arts!  HIFA 2010 was a phenomenal experience and the Paper Body Collective team had a fantastic run of IN MEDEA RES, with standing ovations and inspiring feedback.  After two years of running the show at more than five international festivals from Potchefstroom to Charleville France, performing in Harare was a highlight that brought our work full circle and reminded us of the transformative power of performance, not just for the artists involved but the audiences who help to create the experience.

Thanks to Prohelvetia for their phenomenal support throughout this production’s development as well as Colin Miller and the Swiss Ambassador in Harare. Many thanks to Joanna, Manuel and the HIFA team who were unbelievable – HIFA must be one of the best festivals that Southern Africa has to offer.

Audience feedback from the performances of IN MEDEA RES:

“I loved it…it was really wonderful…”

“I thought it was amazing, the most fantastic thing I have ever seen and I actually couldn’t move out of my seat… I need to get home and just sit with what I have seen”

“It was immaculate… the passion from the actors, you could feel it from the stage…Wow- it truly spoke to me, it touches me personally, that you just need to keep going forth”

‘In Medea Res – a completely innovative piece of theatre, involving video projection and puppetry. The story is about displacement. I won’t go into too much detail but one thing that did affect me was the small puppet of the male character. The way the actors made it seem alive was kind of creepy. From where I was sitting it sometimes looked a tiny, living, breathing man. Not cool. But the show overall was tremendously interesting.’-http://www.zimbablog.com/2010/05/02/hifa-day-5/

www.paperbody.co.za