Conversation with the dead object: an engagement with post-traditional puppetry, archive and practice

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This five-year, part-time Fellowship examines relationships between the 'live' and the 'non-alive' object or puppet in performance. The title refers to an immanent potential for animation within non-living objects and puppets, while 'intervention' is the interruption that an animator (human or otherwise) makes elicit an illusion of life. Exploring fundamental precepts of object animation, I look at memory, tradition, archiving and the threshold where the lifeless becomes animate in puppetry and object-theatre. The central questions are: to what extent does -an object or puppet have immanent characteristics that determine the animation (or 'life' of the object)?-the animating force determine the animation?-the context of the spectator determine what is experienced via the animation?The general questions above will be addressed in the final phases of the Fellowship through three distinct and specific practice enquiries.Phase 1: The late Joe Beeby and Punch and Judy An investigation into Punch will form a case study of the relationship between tradition and contemporary practice (in animation) and between the puppet and puppeteer using a set of puppets from a deceased Punch and Judy practitioner named Joe Beeby. I intend to master a number of Punch routines and to uncover Joe Beeby's last year through work with photographer Rosy Martin.Phase 2: Private Ritual The goal of this phase is create a series of performative encounters that are 'private' (but observable via film/webcam link and streamed live) in order to analyse the role of audience as collaborator in the illusion of the puppet's 'life'. Drawing on Japanese ritual (which provides a specific model for the systematic manifestation of the private) and working with a colleague, Rachel Cooper, who has learning disabilities and does a great deal of 'private' artistic work, I will compare the public relationship of audience to puppet with the private one between animator and object. Phase 3: Exhibiting the Dead ObjectSupported by the Puppet Centre Trust, this phase looks at the threshold between 'liveness' and 'death' in relation to puppets and objects, when animation is absent. It will negotiate creating momentary fragmented memories of performance within the exhibition of figures and promote a notion of an 'active' archive: viewing the creation of an exhibition as a 'performative' act so that object placement is as important as the choice of objects. As curator I will ask: how do 'lifeless' figures hanging within a museum display honour memory of their past 'liveness'? And how does the implication of the puppet's death or 'deadness' bear upon our sense of its (previous) life?I draw upon the approach of Bourriaud - particularly his assertion of the 'figures that oppose the 'universe of the root', most strongly, the nomad, the wanderer, the refugee.' Positioning this description alongside the figure of the puppeteer provokes questions of groundedness set alongside those of transience and (literally) animation. Puppetry thus becomes a field on which to negotiate wider concepts of manipulation, transformation, (re)presentation and performance