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| Children’s Emperor & The Pianist (FIMFA Lx11, CAMa – Centro de Artes da Marioneta, 2011) |
What sorts of awareness come to us through puppets? What kinds of experience, of understanding and feeling? In a world in which the know-how associated with making things is mostly given over to machines – in which the proletarianisation of experience includes that of the imagination – is our enjoyment of puppets due partly to our sense of the skill of the puppeteer? In a world in which the autonomy of things exceeds that of persons, the work of both becomes reduced to criteria of “performance” in which they may be simply replaced (or “upgraded”) once deemed redundant.
Paradoxically, a commercialised, corporate puppet theatre is upon us, as the so-called inter-active “internet of things” is set to overtake even the voice-activated appliances of today, in which algorithms already define modes of attention. The particular relation between object, image, and word in puppetry, however, resists this degradation of life. Beyond simply the transmission of kinetic energy, the relation between these three elements here is one of motivation, of animation, by both hand and breath, as also by affect and narrative. In puppetry, these relations express a creative imagination – in which objects may speak, even to wonder in whose image they are made. Of course, words are not necessarily voiced and what is voiced is not necessarily verbal – but this is already an example of metaphor, enacted in puppetry through the metamorphoses of object and image. Between memory and intelligence, imagination and technique, arises a care for existence, expressed in this creative animation of objects as images – an experience of empathy with the inanimate; an anthropomorphism not simply of form but of feeling.
Neither religious icon or idol, nor commodity fetish, puppet theatre’s evocation of relations between object, image, and word is not one of economic “productivity”, valued only by money. In a world in which animation and motivation are continually degraded by consumerism, the example of the Tarumba festival becomes all the more vital – especially when politics fails to protect civic space (including the imagination), whether in education or the arts. What kind of knowledge of objects, images, and words, comes to us, after all, from this disenchanting economics – especially now in the name of “austerity” for the many, protecting the privilege of so few?
BIO
Mischa Twitchin (UK): Designer, director, lighting-designer and performer. Founder member of the Shunt collective. Professor in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths College (University of London). He holds a PhD in “Theatre of Death: the Uncanny in the Mimesis”.
He played in FIMFA with The Children’s Emperor & The Pianist (CAMa – Centro de Artes da Marioneta, 2011), The Field of Memory - The Zone of Stones, with the collaboration of Penny Francis (São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2012).
