An Interview with Brunskill & Grimes

2019

This chapter addresses how critical analysis might describe and evaluate non-human “performances” in television fiction, and how they affect distinctions between actor and role, and between character and narrative function. Across the history and genres of television, there have been very many “objects” that narratives make expressive but that are not human, nor even, in some cases, alive at all. The chapter considers the balloon-like Rovers of "The Prisoner" TV series, the kangaroos in "Skippy", and the puppets and models in "Thunderbirds", arguing that if they are to play their part in the fictional world, each of these things needs to function as an expressive “performer”. It argues that the boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, are thus destabilised and reflect on the work of creation in television.

Humanimalia

Vous êtes en Picardie," reads the signpost as we drive through northern France. Every time I pass it, I think about the wars which savaged the Europe I later grew up in. They cost millions of lives: but not all of those lives were human. Untold numbers of horses, dogs, and pigeons were sent off to "take part" in these wars of human making. One estimate for the number of horses killed in the Great War of 1914-1918 is eight million, approximately a million from Britain alone. My thoughts about the agony and death of these animals is made more poignant because my usual reason for driving in France is to transport my own much-loved horses to competitions. Being a horse-lover, however, meant that as a child, I tried to avoid seeing pictures illustrating the carnage of the fields of Flanders and the Somme during the Great War. I had seen enough bomb sites when I was growing up in London after the second war, and could not bear to think of the misery of the animals forced into battlefields. So it was with a little trepidation that I went, the evening before Remembrance Day, to see War Horse performing in that same city. "You must go", advised horsey colleagues-"but take plenty of handkerchiefs." I did. And I needed them. The children's novel on which the play is based is a story told through the eyes of a horse, who finds himself facing the horrors of 1914 Europe. Narration as though through the eyes of an animal is not new-think of Black Beauty, for example. But converting that story into a production for the theatre is a much bigger challenge. Although a number of "equestrian dramas," featuring real horses, were staged in the early nineteenth century (Hartnell and Found, 1996), real animals are rarely used on the stage now. How, then, to tell the story, when the main protagonists are equine? And how to tell the story through the horse's eyes? War Horse brings the horses to life through puppets-and not only horses, but also crows, a goose, and flying songbirds, as well as some of the soldiers. The Handspring Puppet Company 2 , from South Africa, had been involved in producing lifesize animal puppets before, starting with a depiction of the rehabilitation of a chimpanzee to the

Edward Gordon Craig's 1908 essay, "The Actor and the Über-marionette," which has become foundational to critical discussions of puppetry, as well as an important reference in the field of theater studies, famously sets up the essential qualities of the puppet in contrast to those of the human actor. In the historically small, but now growing, field of puppetry scholarship, Craig's views have helped elucidate a universal idea of the puppet and spawned a stream of writings that attempt to define the unique qualities the puppet offers to the stage. Craig's essay, however, grows out of a specific historical moment when an unprecedented number of artists, especially in Europe, were enthralled with the puppet (Posner 130). Harold B. Segel's Pinocchio 's Progeny (1995), which reads like a catalogue of modernist playwrights exploring puppets and related figures-as dramatic metaphors and actual performance elements-amply attests to the excitement around the form at that time. Visual artists of the period also engaged with puppetry in their quest to invigorate artistic styles. Paul Klee, for example, crafted around fifty hand puppets for his son Felix. These have recently received critical attention as artworks in their own right and for their role in illuminating Klee's oeuvre (Hopfengart, et al.). Why were Craig and his contemporaries so engaged with and captivated by the puppet? We might further refine this question by asking how the puppet, and particular views of it, addressed the needs and concerns of that moment, searching more for historically unique uses, ideas, definitions of, and engagements with the puppet, over Craig's universals.

The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, Branch Campus in Bialystok, Puppet Theatre Art Department, Białystok , 2019

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries brought heightened visibility of puppets and performing objects in various fields of cultural performance, so that we might call these last decades ‘a puppet moment’ – as Claudia Orenstein points out in the introduction to the book "The Routledge Companion to the Puppetry and Material Performance" (London, 2014). We are profoundly convinced of the truth of this reflection and we see in this point of view an important research challenge, one that leads toward a discussion about the processes, tendencies, and influences shaping contemporary puppetry in different countries. The intention of our monograph is to present theoretical and practical ideas, analyses and questions which have arisen since the turn of the century under the influence of the latest puppet performances and works inspired by puppet art. The collection of articles naturally represents only a few of the possible approaches to these topics, but we hope it provides a glimpse of multidirectional contemporary reflection and different perspectives of research now being applied to (and demanded by) puppet art.

Applied Theatre Research, 2020

This editorial outlines the scope of this special issue on puppetry. The issue editors introduce articles that theorize the use of puppets for a purpose and present dialogues with practitioners working in the field. The authors emphasize the power of puppetry within contemporary cultural systems and the plethora of diverse practices comprising applied puppetry. The lively and developing field of applied puppetry is presented as involving new thinking and methods that have been adopted globally. The editorial argues that applied puppetry, as well as being a set of practices that can affect the lives of participants, is also a robust academic field. The authors hope for a reconsideration of objects in applied theatre practice generally, as a way to further understand networks in socially engaged performance practices.

Puppetry International Issue 35, 2014

Review of the 17th Edition World Festival of Puppet Theatre, Charleville-Mézières, France held September 20 – 29, 2013.

Contemporary Theatre Review, 2017

The Volkenberg Puppetry Symposium in Chicago on 24 January 2015 aimed to establish the puppet as a site for inter-disciplinary dialogue between creative practitioners and academics. Expanding the conventional frameworks which consider puppets as strictly theatrical tools, participants underlined the uncanny nature of puppets as beings that hover between life and death. Puppeteers in turn were shown to occupy a liminal space in which they curate accidents and mishaps in their encounters with non-humans. They embody conviction in the life of things and invite spectators to a way outside of themselves.

2018

This article provides an overview of contemporary concerns within puppet theatre, including the importance of practice as research, autobiographical work and extensions of rehearsal techniques and processes; interdisciplinary contexts for puppetry, applied puppetry and the widening perspectives of intercultural studies, including the need for more detailed analyses of non-European forms. The article also highlights the role of the UNIMA Research Commission in pursuing the objectives of contemporary puppetry research. Keywords: Puppetry. Research. Interdisciplinary.

exhib. cat., Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 19 March – 23 June 2019, 2019

Asian Theatre Journal, 2018

This article looks at the production Shank's Mare, a collaboration between North American puppeteer Tom Lee and Nishikawa Koryu V, master of the Japanese kuruma ningyō or cart puppetry traditions and shows how the production and creative process blended different models of puppet performance, while also contributing to Nishikawa's greater project of finding new ways to invigorate and preserve his traditional art. It offers a brief history and understanding of kuruma ningyō, a puppetry form less well-known nationally and internationally than Japan's bunraku tradition, and an account of Shank's Mare's creation process and international tour to New York and two venues in Japan. It invites consideration of a tree as a model for understanding traditional forms and how they might maintain a recognizable core while also drawing from various roots and giving birth to new works.