Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández
2023, Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art. Edited by Isabelle Wallace and Jennie Hirsh. Routledge. ISBN 9781032304762
1978 marks a critical moment of human rights violations and institutionalization of state and social violence in Colombia. The newly elected president established the Security Statute, which gave judicial powers to National Police and followed guidelines from the National Defense Doctrine aiming the survival of the nation against internal enemies, including leftist students and performing artists. This specific statute was part of a complex local and regional modernity marked by extant colonial, economic, and moral structures; the rise of drug trafficking; and the growth of national army and guerrilla groups, in addition to a long, social history of exclusion and marginalization that allowed elites to affirm their immunity from vulnerability and precariousness.During this time, María Consuelo García studied plastic arts at National University (the largest public university in Colombia) and produced her installations Game No.1 (1978) and Game No.2 (1979), which she latter presented in the 28th Artist’s National Salon (1980) at the National Museum, founded in 1948 in a former fortress-like prison. Thanks to a foreign jury, Game No.1 won first prize. Yet, these works has been largely ignored by art history, even though they were the first to include video as well puppets (made with techniques typically used for making Catholic sculptures) in the history of the Salon. Both works were placed one next to one another against a wall. The winner included a super-marionette’s wooden torso-and-limbs structure, five super-marionette’s heads representing figures of national political and military elite ready for connection to the torso, and a wooden open structure within which heads and a torso hung, recalling ‘lockers’ where students would hide when the military entered public universities’ campuses, capturing and eventually absconding students. On the right of this “closet,” there was a television monitor on a white pedestal, reproducing an edited video showing the artist’s friends and classmates playing with the super-marionettes in an art-architecture studio at the university. At the end the video, a head rolling on the floor signaling “the death of the farce”, as the artist described it . Game No. 2, installed to the left of Game No.1, included ten ventriloquist dummies representing figures from parliament and political life in an open chest. Next to the chest, a chair, where a spectator could sit and play with a puppet in front of an oval mirror. The play in front of the mirror revealed to the spectator (now puppeteer) a lack of total control on the puppet and the figure so represented, an awareness of “how the puppet’s structure determines movement” (Lewis quoted in Bell, 2008), and the fact that one breathes life into and with the puppet: co-presence. There was also a black pedestal on the right with box on top, which contained a parchment-like manuscript with a set of puppeting rules. Significantly, as the chapter discusses, both works invited participation and “mirrored” each other: marionette and puppets, an open chest and closet, a black and a white pedestal, a mirror and a TV monitor. In this way, the works proposed several historical and conceptual key links, for instance, between tele-theater and modern puppet theater in Colombia, John Logie Baird’s Stooky Bill, and TV-monitor as teatrino. The effect was political satire. Yet, the works did more than just repeat Fernando Botero’s satiric depictions as Aguilar’s criticism has suggested). For García, who was familiar with collective creation theater, it was not be enough to reveal the imperfections of politicians. Instead, as I will argue, she intended to exempt us from the cruel influence of the sentimental confessions and ideological narratives in melodramas, TV news, and violence stories to which the public attended in a regular basis. Her puppets were not safe entertainment for children, education, and propaganda. Rather, her installations offered a theater of death and life that recast strategies of immunization and called for appropriation of the magical and the sinister for working through collective trauma; working through what we cannot control yet still affects us through the apprehension of vulnerability. Puppetry and ventriloquism were thus key for spectator-puppeteers and audience, who have already “allowed themselves to beseduced and deceived by dynamics of immunization and fear. Celebrating a life that refused to be unlived, the artist called for resistance through transgression.
Related papers
Puppet shows with multilayers of primitivism Marta Soares
Marta Soares
Marta Soares, 'Puppets, child art and an illuminated manuscript: Puppet shows with multilayers of primitivism in 1920s Granada', in Joana Cunha Leal and Mariana Pinto dos Santos (eds.), The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms, New York; Oxon: Routledge, 2023, pp. 170-192., 2023
Strongly connected to the ritualistic roots of theatre, folk art and the Grotesque, puppets are easily framed by the modernist celebration of the primitive and the quest for origins. In this context, it is not surprising that modern artists, such as Pierre Bonnard, Ramón Casas, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Otto Morach and Alexandra Exter, as well as writers, such as Alfred Jarry, Maeterlinck, Michel de Ghelderode, Arthur Schnitzler, Ivan Goll, Marinetti, Luciano Folgore, Edward Gordon Craig, Gertrude Stein, Jacinto Benavente, Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca, among others, cherished the artistic potential of puppets and appropriated them in stylised, explicit or subtle ways.Moreover, these appropriations parallel a heated debate on the actor versus the marionette, which marked theatrical theory in the early twentieth century, one example being the discourse of the playwright, theorist and actor Edward Gordon Craig. Along with Spanish writers Jacinto Benavente, Santiago Rusiñol (also a painter), Jacinto Grau, Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca enthusiastically engaged with puppet theatre. Among the group of artists and intellectuals gathering around Café Alameda in early 1920s Granada, young Lorca, the composer Manuel de Falla and the artist Hermenegildo Lanz (1893–1949) shared an interest in puppets that would prove to be crucial for two key projects in 1923 – Títeres de Cachiporra, a performance for children that took place at Lorca’s family residence in Granada, and Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro, an opera for puppets commissioned by Princesse Edmond de Polignac that premiered in Paris. Besides the primitiveness associated with puppets, these puppet shows unfold two other sides of primitivism – the fascination with the child universe and medieval art, which often stimulated modern artists in their fights against mimesis, academic art and bourgeois taste. Chidren's drawings triggered Hermenegildo Lanz’s sets for the play La niña que riega el albahaca y el principe preguntón (The girl who waters the basil and the inquisitive prince), performed in the Títeres de Cachiporra show. Equally part of the Títeres de Cachiporra programme was the Misterio de los Reyes Magos (Mystery of the Magi) play. By reviving mystery plays, adapting a Spanish dramatic piece written in the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, and basing its sets and cut-out figures on an illuminated manuscript, it paved the way for the medieval imaginary that marked El Retablo de Maese Pedro.
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Marionetas de São Lourenço: The puppet as an artistic object, from the stage to the museum.
Marta Guerreiro
Dolls and Puppets: Contemporaneity and Tradition, 2018
What is the lifetime of a puppet? Can we consider it only the time it is on stage, interacting with other puppets, actors and the public? The time when the play for which it was designed is being performed? And afterwards, what opportunities are there for it? Often it is in this à posteriori that it can survive, even if only through the weak light of that ephemeral moment that was the theatrical performance – if this is true for the theater of actors, it is even more pertinent to the theater of puppets. Based on an analysis of the works of the theater company Marionetas de São Lourenço this article seeks to explore the potential of the puppet by taking into consideration not only the different aspects worked on by the group but also the possibility of the afterlife – or of “another” experience – of the puppet-object off stage, apart from the time when it comes to life through manipulation.
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Puppetry as a Pedagogical Tool of Ethics and Politics for Adults: A Reflection on Pedro Reyes' Manufacturing Mischief (2018)
Deniz Başar
American Society of Theatre Research, 2018
I went to see the political-satire-bunraku-puppet-show “Manufacturing Mischief” on 24th of May 2018 at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre (Canadian Stage) without really knowing what to expect from the show. “Manufacturing Mischief’s” online information gave a crazy sense of what the play might be: “American linguist Noam Chomsky is headed to Silicon Valley to judge a competition of new Artificial Intelligence devices hosted by South African inventor, Elon Musk. Chomsky’s prized student, Millie, has entered a device, called the Print-A-Friend, in the competition. It materializes the author of any book inserted into it. Chaos ensues as Ayn Rand, Tiny Trump, Karl Marx, and others are reanimated - and the Print-A-Friend is stolen! Chomsky, Millie and Marx must fend off the forces of capitalistic evil and the damage they might do with this new AI machine.” After I watched the show I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual charm of the show and how it dealt with so many difficult ideas through the material world of puppets and objects. Show’s maker, Pedro Reyes, has a long and profoundly interesting artistic career where he has used a variety of theatrical mediums, including performance-exhibitions like “Doomocracy” (2016), and other political puppetry pieces like “The Permanent Revolution” (2014), to broaden the political and ethical imaginations of adult participants and audiences through the Americas. The show consciously made the choice of casting women puppeteers for male puppets and the only male puppeteer for the central female puppet (Millie), which not only successfully bended the expectation of gender roles but also very smartly used bunraku’s potential of making characters through superposed elements (such as the material reality of the puppet, its animation and its voice). In this paper I will analyze the show’s technicality, how it merged digital and analog mediums, its allegorical approach to political reality, and its pedagogical approach towards the intellectual accessibility of philosophical and ethical debates that correspond to substantial means in many people’s lives.
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Puppet Theater: Changes in the perception
Katerina Kotsoy
2015
This research paper investigates possible changes in the perception within puppet theater which have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and in order to offer a cross-disciplinary approach to the subject, puppet figure is explored within the sociological study on objects as theorized by Bruno Latour and the anthropological study on things by Tim Inglod. The puppet figure will arise as a "thing in life" which influences the artistic process equally as the artist. On the other hand, the notion of intermediality is employed in order to not only place the puppet theater within contemporary theater-theoretical discourse but to suggest that the intermedial lies in the core of this art form, enhanced by the emergence of the artist’s perception of the puppet as a thing.
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THE PUPPET AS AN INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT
olga levitan
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Our Puppets, Our Selves: Puppetry's Changing Paradigms
Claudia Orenstein
Mime Journal, 2017
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Dolls and Puppets as Artistic and Cultural Phenomena (19th – 21st Centuries)
Kamil Kopania
2016
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C'unduá: Activist Art in Downtown Bogota
Ruben Yepes
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“Puppets Invade France: The XIVème Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes.” Theater 38.1 (2008): 132-141.
Claudia Orenstein
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The Puppet and its Master: Deconstruction as Ventriloquy
Maxime Philippe
2017
In this article, I start by focussing on Jacques Derrida’s last lecture on Antonin Artaud. I consider this lecture as a ventriloquy, that is to say a staged version of the entirety of Derrida’s experience as a reader of Artaud. This lecture reveals how Artaud represents both a conceptual character embodying écriture and a problematic precursor to Derrida’s writing style and thought. I will then connect this ventriloquy to the appearance of the figure of the puppet in both Artaud’s theory of theatre and Derrida’s last seminar The Beast and the Sovereign. In so doing, I will attempt to show how the puppet materializes Artaud’s redefinition of writing, and more generally the creative act, through a practice of performance that was so influential to Derrida’s study of the notions of the performative and creation.
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