On Hybridity in Puppetry Wiśniewska, Marzenna
Performance research,
06/2020, Letnik:
25, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Hybridity as the essence of puppetry is the key idea that is considered in the article. By reflecting upon aspects of in-betweenness in puppet performing practices, the conceptualization of ...puppetry’s hybridity permits us to overcome a prevalent view that reduces puppetry in terms of binary oppositions such as human/non-human, living/lifeless, tangible/intangible. In this regard, a hybrid perspective of puppetry enables the exploration of the connection between performer and performing object as a synergistic relationship. The three areas discussed in the article manifest some of the major and most influential strategies of performing ontological hybridity in the puppetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first case focuses on Tadeusz Kantor’s bio-objects resulted in his theatre the genetically unique hybrid performer involved in creating the liminal, transgressive and subversive power of theatre. Based on contemporary puppet performances, the second part of the essay examines the ontological consequences of co-sharing and the interactive play of two bodies—the performer and the puppet. The final case deals with practices that merge puppeteering with complex forms of media, digital technologies and virtual environments. The article emphasizes the performative potential of perceptual multi-stability (after Erika Fisher-Lichte) produced by the hybrid puppet performing practices, resulting in the role of viewers as co-creators in puppetry hybridity.
The story of Rama has been known on Java and mainland Southeast Asia since before the 9th century. The strong divergences in West Java and Malaysian puppet versions from Valmiki show patterns of ...intensification and localization that make the narrative at home in the region. In the 1960s, the Ramayana was not seen as bearing overt religious or political implications for Muslim performers, and its trans-Southeast Asian popularity boosted its currency. In 1965 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held a pan-Southeast Asian Ramayana festival – spurring countries where this epic, preserved in puppetry/mask performance, was only modestly popular (e.g., Indonesia and Philippines) to increase attention to this central narrative for traditional Southeast Asian mainland puppetry. Since the 1990s, however, transnational religio-political forces, including the Hindu revival in India (which sees Rama as proto-ruler of a Hindu realm) and the Islamic revival in the Muslim world (which sees the story as shirk, worshipping a god other than Allah), may problematize the narrative in Indonesian and Malaysian puppetry.
Pull-the-strings Leite, Luis
Multimedia tools and applications,
05/2024, Letnik:
83, Številka:
15
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Pull-the-Strings presents a mapping model for digital puppetry based on a transparent framework to support generic device controllers and generic tools. Digital puppetry requires a creative ...interaction design, in particular in the way designers map the puppet to the puppeteer using specific devices. This process depends on a constantly changing interface technology, which limits the reuse of devices and mappings. This paper proposes a methodology and a set of tools that facilitate the mapping process, and promote the recycling of technologies. A flexible and generic environment independent from device specifications. By abstracting the hardware layer, the artist is motivated to think in terms of signal flow, establishing relations through meaningful mappings instead of handling the diverse specifications of each device and application. Pull-the-Strings is a data-flow ecosystem that focus on the functional usage of control signals. It provides a scalable environment for building semantic blocks that connect, transform and generate signals for the manipulation of virtual objects. Its goal is to make technology as transparent as possible, facilitating connections and reducing the obstacles between the performer and the performing object. On the other hand, it proposes an interaction design space that takes into account the manipulation and perception distance, responding to the specifications of the digital puppetry medium. This model was evaluated comparing a set of tools and methods with experienced and non-experienced users.
Refugee movements are, indeed, the embodiment of “glocalization”, or the increasing interconnectedness of global and local phenomena, with local entities being affected by globalization as well as by ...their own contexts. Host countries are generally unprepared for the local impact of refugee resettlement, and because there are significant differences between (and within) refugee groups, even for experienced service providers, the process is challenging. Escaping refugees, powered by the urgency of conflicts with, and/or within, their homelands, are faced by a myriad of additional tests to their fortitude and flexibility. Nation states are not insular, regardless of distance from the country in conflict, and they either directly or indirectly experience the consequences of these conflicts. As host nations prepare to receive and integrate refugees, the global or international issue becomes a local one, and the local community moves to develop opportunities for these newly arriving populations. This paper presents an overview of the refugee experience, proposing that refugee resettlement is only a beginning, and acceptance and integration in the host country is a lifelong process. It provides a model to speak to this ongoing process of adjustment and adaptation and suggests puppetry as a tool for the education of host country residents, service providers, and also for refugees.
In the Hakusan area of Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, two villages, Fukaze and Higashi Futakuchi, roughly 350 years ago, developed and have continued to preserve bun’ya ningyō, puppetry combined with ...the bun’ya style of chanting, a precursor of bunraku. These traditions draw their tales from folk stories and the epic Heike Monogatari or Tale of the Heike. Although their puppets are basic in construction and use a simple form of manipulation, each of these related but distinct traditions captivates with its own unique figures, particular chanting style, and ingenious manipulation techniques. Equally worthy of attention are the roles these non-commercial traditions have played in uniting their rural communities and the deep attachment locals still have to their artform. With the erosion of rural lifestyles throughout Japan and the aging of the forms’ most engaged practitioners, it is difficult to anticipate the future of these arts. Along with Hakusan City Hall, the forms’ preservation associations have experimented with ways of documenting the traditions, finding new performance opportunities, and promoting their arts to a broader public.
This case study explores a collaboration between young people, researchers and artists which captured stories of how people in the Red River Catchment of Northern Vietnam are responding to climate ...change, and then used the local art of water puppetry to communicate those stories to a wider audience. The performance evoked the interdependence of the human and physical worlds, showing the impacts of climate change but also people's adaptiveness. In this way, the piece highlighted how communities along the Red River are practising how to 'live with hope', as Gallagher describes it (2022), and how others could do so, too.
This article reflects upon my short visual recording
Eyedrops: A Monoculogue
(2021). It describes the thinking process of creative avoidance (both making something new, but recycling ideas and ...materials which already exist, both in the mind and close to hand); pleasure in making (the haptic joy of production); considerations of performance; being audience to one’s own work when exhibited alongside other work responding to the same initial call; re-presenting the work in a workshop context. While it draws upon interdisciplinary theoretical writing to provide phenomenological and ekphrastic considerations of the work, moving between the three-point dynamic which links and divides viewing positions: the image (screen), subject (eye) and the object (puppet), it employs an immediacy of writing, which resists the usual considerations of academic scholarship in a move to free up thinking and to expose the emotional and experiential, questioning what it is to ‘see’.
PDF
