2023 Festival Archive: Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium
The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium
January 21 and 28, 2023
Studebaker Theater and streaming on Howlround
Presented by The School of the Art Institute Performance Dept. and Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
Scholarship and Resources
“Boundless Bodies”
An Essay by Hazel Rickard
On January 21, 2023, at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppet Symposium, Dr. Paulette Richards convened a conversation titled “Boundless Bodies” among Ishmael Falke (Livsmedlet performance duo), Camille Trouvé (Compagnie Les Anges au Plafond), and Julie Lukor, representing Elise Vigneron (Théâtre de l’Entrouvert). Richards began with a proposition—putting new materialism and other theoretical discussions of object or material agency in dialogue with experiences and insights from puppeteers: “As object performers, we are always wrestling with objects that seem to have agency…constantly running into the material world in a way that forces us to think about the bounds of our own human bodies” and the “agency/existence/animus” of objects. Richards sought to unsettle the path that many scholars in academia take when they investigate agentive matter—referring first and foremost to European philosophy. Instead, she offered an image from Hindu mythology: Shiva’s dance is the source of all movement in the universe, and the purpose of the dance is to release humans from illusion (specifically the notion that they are the center of the world). The Tandava dance, Richards argues, produces transcendence through immanence. This image orients her question: “Is the puppet an extension of the human body?” The subtext being that puppeteers decenter human consciousness through embodied practices, and such work can yield a wealth of discoveries.
Ishmael Falke (born in Israel/Palestine, currently working in Finland) discussed his work, focusing primarily on Invisible Lands (2015), a show that features miniature figures as refugees undergoing challenges while traversing landscapes represented through human bodies onstage. The work deals critically with issues of scale. In his words: “the body became a platform for private, intimate events,” like a scene of one refugee taking care of a wounded companion, as well as “many geopolitical events,” specifically the “refugee crisis” unfolding in Europe at the time of the show’s debut. Discussing another show titled Inevitable, Falke expressed his awareness that physical movement and touch can lead to empathy in a way that bypasses conscious thought. In the show, humans are employed as objects in a grand chain reaction, suggesting that bodies we try to define as “ours” are actually reacting and causing reactions in a way that we cannot control. In response to Richards’s question about the connection between puppeteer and puppet, Falke stated that his goal is to “blur the image” between puppet and human body, or as he demonstrated with a gesture of touching the microphone, creating entirely new configurations of agency that blur the division through practical engagement.
Julie Lukor discussed Elise Vigneron’s method of working with ephemeral materials, specifically the show Anywhere (2016), which features a marionette puppet made of ice that melts over the course of the performance. Vigneron calls her practice “material movement,” deliberately avoiding the terms puppet and object because, one could speculate, those terms come with far too many assumptions and can seem rather fixed. Vigneron is concerned with the liminality between material statuses, as Lukor puts it: “the fragility of our lives and relationships, what is visible and invisible, what is absent and present.” The ice puppet represents Oedipus after he has departed without his sight from the scene of the Greek tragedy, inspired by the text Oedipus on the Road by Henry Bauchau. In response to Richards’s opening question, Lukor argues that Vigneron does not see the material as an extension of the human puppeteer but rather as a double, separated as if seen through a mirror.
Camille Trouvé discussed her piece R.A.G.E., a play about a legendary swindler born in Lithuania when it was still part of the Russia Empire early in the twentieth century and his mother, who filled his head with stories to protect him from the horrors of war. Trouvé describes her work as a “transdisciplinary practice mixing language of the body, language of the material, music, and text,” where no aspect is privileged above the others, rather “everything is created at the same time.” In response to Paulette Richard’s question about the object/puppeteer relationship, Trouvé responded: “When I’m in my working place, I am animist.” She brings something to life by creating a kind of ceremony with light, projecting her imagination on the material thing. Then when the puppet enters the stage, she gives it full responsibility, hiding herself behind the puppet. Themes of animism continued to come up throughout the conversation to name the orientation that all of the artists maintain towards materials—not the “Western” assumption of inanimateness, but the sense that there already is life and story in the material and the artist’s job is to impose on it as little as possible.
This conversation took place at a moment when it has become impossible to treat “matter” as neutral. As Richards noted in the Q and A, puppetry can be a liberatory experience for those who have historically been treated as objects, mostly notably African-American artists, as she studies in her own work. None of the artists on this panel were specifically concerned with liberating their objects or casting off objecthood, but the themes that came up in the discussion exposed that thinking with animated matter can be a liberatory practice. For instance, Trouvé discussed the fact that the puppeteer can be freed up to think beyond the limitations of the human actor in a theater world that, particularly for women and people of color, can be objectifying. Conversely, Falke’s work employs human bodies as objects to expose aspects of culture that objectify people in harmful ways. As these artists demonstrate, creating a sense of symmetry with objects can build empathy across damaging social and ontological divides, at times allowing puppeteers and performers to proceed unhindered by the hierarchies that bind them.
“Building New Worlds: Emerging Voices”
An Essay by Hazel Rickard
On January 28, 2023 at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppet Symposium, Dr. Dassia N. Posner convened a conversation titled “Building New Worlds: Emerging Voices” with panelists Felicia Cooper from the University of Connecticut, Camille Casemier from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Claudia Kinahan from Northwestern University. After all the participants had presented, Bruce Chessé, renowned puppet artist and educator, responded to all of their theoretical insights from his perspective as a long-term practitioner of the art form. Dr. Posner began the conversation by recognizing artists at the festival who have expanded the definition of puppetry through performing objects made of ice and flame, and she shared her hope that the artists on the panel “will expand our world even further” to think about object performance through found objects, construction materials, robots, and bicycles. By putting emerging artists and scholars in dialogue with Chessé, a legend in the puppet world, Posner created a space to think about how puppetry has changed over the decades, helping us imagine the future of puppetry.
Camille Casemier, a performing artist who was raised on Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, discussed her artistic practice in a presentation entitled “A Third Thing.” Casemier described her persistent desire to play with scale and focus, beginning with the idea that a puppeteer keeps a puppet alive through eye contact. Perhaps, she speculated, this idea could become a strategy for participating with each other in performance, between performer and audience, finding a meeting place outside of us, “a point where we might converge.” This is the third thing, which often manifests in her work as a screen, site of activity, or collection of materials. In what she calls a “choreography of attention,” Casemier attempts to facilitate a “shared arrival” between herself and an audience as they witness a third thing.
Claudia Kinahan is a director, performer, and scholar investigating how robots perform gender, race, and labor. She discussed a recent solo show she created, Goodnight Lovelace, in which Grace (Kinahan playing the human actor) develops a relationship with a robot who, rather than submitting to an update, asks Grace to permanently turn them off by drowning them in a bucket. In her work, Kinahan poses the questions: “Can human-robot relationships become intimate? Can nonhumans have rights, agency, and emotions? How do we develop ethical codes for human/nonhuman relations?” These remain open questions in her investigation. Her presentation pointed us to a key concept: the glitch. There was a moment in a performance of Goodnight Lovelace when the robot entered on the opposite side of the stage from where Kinahan had programmed it to enter. This moment was not a problem to be fixed or a failure but rather a “productive rupture” allowing for new possibilities. Expanding on this concept of the glitch, Kinahan suggests that the glitch can be a “counter-hegemonic tool” forcing us to reconsider gendered and racialized constructions. To phrase it differently, learning to practice failure can be a way of rethinking ethics, not as a system of right and wrong, but a process of exposing and reimagining social structures.
Felicia Cooper, devoted puppet artist who devises shows for children of all ages, gave a presentation entitled “The Infinite Schlep,” suggesting that puppetry is infinitely flexible in responding to social and political issues. For Cooper, puppetry is unique in responding to “the immediate”—what she understands as the necessary meeting the possible. In her work, Cooper pokes fun at bureaucracy and remains deeply rooted in community. For example, in The Official Bureau of Lost Things she responded to the immediate need of her community to grieve in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, making shadow-puppet representations of what her community had lost. Cooper contends that we are practicing for the future we hope to inhabit by building puppet shows.
Bruce Chessé reflected upon how he was amazed by the ways in which the field of puppetry has grown. When he started working with puppets in 1955, “Puppetry was the bastard child of theatre and art. There were no college courses. You have validated what I have worked for all my life.” All of these young emerging artists “are speaking to great, important issues, and that is the strongest aspect of puppetry—you can address anything.” He shared his famous definition of a puppet: “anything you can move with intent.” The panelists have taken up this offering in incredibly productive ways.
During the Q and A, Posner and Chessé reflected upon the state of the field, Chessé sharing his awareness that the pandemic created a new need for puppetry because “we don’t know how to converse.” So many of us have been so isolated, the “third thing,” as Casemier put it, is an incredibly valuable tool in knitting our social world back together. As the conversation unfolded between the artists and the audience, a few themes continually returned: the glitch and a value that Cooper highlighted: “Everyone deserves wonder.” Casemier shared an illuminating moment related to the glitch: a show where she fell out of a window onto another performer and improvised a new show with broken puppets. Casemier articulated that there is a “moment of terror” (not to mention pain) when a performance goes against the plan, but the terror will pass and something else will happen. “I’ll reengage with the third-thingness” and discover possible futures that did not previously exist. This roughly encapsulates the heart of the conversation: It is important to let oneself be out of control and humbled before materials; the risk will reap unforeseen rewards.
Significantly, this conversation ended with a lifetime achievement award presented by Jacqueline Ward to Bruce Chessé, someone who has not been acknowledged for all of the work he has done inspiring children and adults to find themselves through puppetry. He was a mentor for many and he changed the world of puppetry in significant ways. The feeling is: Puppetry is a flexible space, as Cooper put it, that allows us to honor our ancestors and imagine unseen futures.
“Grand Narratives and Petits Récits“
An Essay by Hazel Rickard
On January 21, 2023, at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppet Symposium, Dr. Paulette Richards convened a conversation titled “Grand Narratives and Petits Récits” with Sara Fornace (Manual Cinema), Matt Olenon (Rough House), and Theodora Skipitares. Richards convened the panel to illuminate the ways in which puppetry might accomplish what many critical theorists attempt to do in their writing—trouble grand narratives. Building on Francois Lyotard’s work, Richards suggested: “The idea is to get at the small stories (petits récits) not the big one.” Puppetry may be uniquely positioned to do this because puppets often change the scale of stories or play with time and space, using collage, montage, and other techniques that disrupt linear or hegemonic meaning-making. Richards posed the question: “What happens when you put a grand narrative on a small scale?”
Sara Fornace discussed the work of Manual Cinema (producing elaborate visuals with overhead projectors and sound scores live in front of an audience), specifically their adaptation of Frankenstein, which was performed at the festival. Fornace articulated how the team drew heavily on the structure of the original text by Mary Shelley (three distinct voices in the text: sea captain, doctor, and monster), as well as contextual information that has often been ignored by twentieth-century adaptations of the novel: most significantly, a forward that Shelley wrote in 1832 divulging that the book was inspired by a nightmare she had after losing her first child. The team created four distinct visual idioms for the show, adding a depiction of Shelley’s giving birth. Richards asked Fornace: “Was this approach deliberately a feminist retelling?” Fornace responded emphatically yes. Fornace elaborated that “using Shelley’s grief as an outer layer was one way of getting her voice back in.” Furthermore, by staging the horrors of birth at a time when midwifes were being replaced by male surgeons added necessary context. By centering birth, Manual Cinema resists an abstract or ideological interpretation of Frankenstein. The grand narrative that Frankenstein has become (as a critique of science or male hubris) becomes, in their hands, a very specific, embodied story that unravels with diverging modes of being.
Mike Oleon discussed his work at Rough House, focusing on ideas that continually reassert themselves in the company: 1) A nonnarrative approach; as he put it: “Finding one’s path in a single narrative is challenging.” 2) Empathy: no matter how much the puppeteers try to create horrifying puppets, “you can’t even fight the empathy that starts to develop.” 3) Exquisite corpse: puppets tend to go “trudging through” boundaries, specifically the division between the self and other. While discussing Rough House’s show at the festival, Invitation to a Beheading, Oleon articulated a central theme in his practice: the effort “to reach inside a human and pull out one aspect.” Mask performance in Invitation can be troubling because it feels like the performer stops halfway in this process—the human becomes something outside of themselves, but not something fully formed. Richards noted that this mode of creating seems to support neuro-divergent thinking; in a world with so much input, it can feel impossible to focus or be one thing. Oleon responded: “The vast expanse of everything is way too much…metaphor makes it digestible.” The puppet as a metaphorical tool seems to have autonomy: “You create this thing and put it between you and the audience, living as a metaphor, and in the end, you realize you can talk about the same thing because the metaphor can exist entirely as itself.” Rough House takes the impossibility of narrative certainty or control as a guiding principle.
Theodora Skipitares began as a solo performance artist in New York City in the 1970s, later became a director, and came to think of herself as a puppeteer decades later. She describes herself as a “stitcher,” learning how to sew from her Greek mother. Her early pieces were “stitched together” from different nonnarrative elements. Skipitares highlighted a moment from one of her early performance art pieces when she took one of her “Theodora dolls,” sawed off the limbs, and reconnected them to make the doll move. Her experimentation with scale was directly related to her distrust of grand narratives. In Micropolis (tiny city), she staged real stories from newspapers. She created plays about the history of medicine and science, approaching such iconic figures as Charles Darwin and Marie Curie, expressing that “I wanted to knock them down.” Her work at the festival, Grand Panorama, tells the story of photography through the story of the most-photographed man of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass. Black protagonists are at the center of her recent work as she responds to the anti-Black violence that continues unabated in the United States. Richards commented upon this, asking to what degree stitching might be related to creative practices within African-American communities (like quilting) that subvert an archival system that has discounted the writing of Black history. Skipitares agreed that there is great value to quilting or collaging things together, but she admits that “it’s easier to pass on grand narratives.” She ended with “I don’t know how you spread fragmentary performance.”
I find this ending to be rather revealing, partly because so much of this discussion resisted a tendency to theorize; all of these artists were ultimately concerned with the poetics and tactics of creation in specific modes and places. As Skipitares commented, each artist’s destiny has everything to do with context. That is perhaps the inherent point that Richards is making—that a petit récit is a turn to specificity. As the conversation closed, Claudia Orenstein posed a question: “What is the dramaturgical relation between objects and narrative?” Each artist responded to this quite differently, with Spikitares highlighting the significance of rhythm in addition to scale; Fornace sharing “You don’t discover what the thing is until you’re doing it”; and Oleon arguing that “time is a dramaturg” because time changes the thing or object you are working with. All of these answers, in different ways, point to changeability and a gap between the object and the narrative.
“Maya: The Uses of Illusion“
An Essay by Hazel Rickard
On Saturday, January 28, 2023, at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppet Symposium, Dr. Paulette Richards convened a conversation titled “Maya: The Uses of Illusion” with Janni Younge (Janni Younge Productions), Jonathan Meyer (Khecari), and Eduardo Felix (Pygmalião Escultura Que Mexe). Richards began by citing Hindu cosmology, where the material world is considered to be “maya,” or illusion. In her words: “The gods brought forth and maintain the material world.” And so, in this context, “The soul’s journey of enlightenment is a process of awakening from the illusion that our impermanent material existence is separate from the divine consciousness.” Richards then commented upon Graham Harman’s argument that “we can only enter into the reality of the material world outside of our own consciousness through metaphor.” This is the rich place in which the artist works and plays—the landscape in which we “apprehend” what is around us. Each artist on the panel has a unique approach to their work that questions the idea that the material world, our “selves,” and our bodies are discrete and completely knowable.
Janni Younge, previously a director of Handspring Puppet Company in South Africa but now operating her own company, had much to say about how her creative process aligns with the Hindu concept of maya. In her words: “Certainty is our greatest threat in negotiating the fragile space of humanity,” for certainty (“I am…; this is…, they are…”) is a source of great conflict. Younge expressed that “The heart of my work has always been to scratch at the edges of the illusion of a stable and unified reality, to provoke a glimpse of the fluidity between our selves and our world.” These two ideas—the danger of certainty and the artist’s ability to bring an audience to question it—came up a number of times throughout the conversation. Younge discussed her productions The Firebird, The Bluest Eye, and Hamlet, the latter of which was performed at the festival. Richards posed a question about the intention behind Younge’s tactic of voicing each puppet in Hamlet by multiple puppeteers, to which Younge responded: “Hamlet is a single person represented by a number of forces.” She wanted to keep the character’s limit and boundary in flux, “I’m delighted that we can keep doors open,” inviting the audience to keep asking themselves: “Is this one human being?” This is one way of questioning the assumption of individual human agency that is so central to “Western” cultures.
Jonathan Meyer, a dancer who is rather new to puppetry, discussed his intention behind his piece for the festival, as though your body were right, which treats the human body as a terrain, guided by a multitude of questions concerning the nature of being, both human and nonhuman. Some of Meyer’s guiding questions were: “How can we witness the lives of selves? How can we choreograph that life?” In the show, the audience is very close to the performer and the stage is so small, “you can see the infinitesimal” even “the cellular.” While much of the practice involved in building the show was about zooming in on the body, Meyer expressed that the puppets became increasingly important in the piece, and the scale began to zoom out again. Meyer asked: “If we can experience the cellular, can we experience the superorganism?” Superorganism, while he did not define it specifically, could refer to an entire network of being, human or nonhuman. In the Q and A, Richards asked Meyer to describe his somatic movement practice in more detail, and he led the audience in a moment of meditation: “Imagine that your cells are a murmuration,” not a set of organs and bones with fixed boundaries but a multiplicity of beings in motion.
Eduardo Felix, of the Brazilian company Pygmalião Escultura Que Mexe, discussed his movement from contemporary art to puppetry, expressing a need to “interact with my time,” and to “provoke the public to think about things they don’t want to think about.” Speaking about Philosophy of the Bedroom (2007), a show based on the story of the Marquis de Sade, and his show staged for the festival, Macunaima Gourmet—based on the 1928 modernist novel by Mário de Andrade—Felix discussed how he understands his role as an artist in telling brutal truths and posing questions like: “Who are you eating?” and “Who eats you?” Like Younge and Meyer, Felix is concerned with the violence of the status quo but engages with it in perhaps a more brutal way. He notices people leaving the theater and pays particular attention to the looks on audience members’ faces. They are not happy, most of them. And this is how he knows he is doing something right.
In the Q and A, Jacqueline Wade posed the question: “At what point does the metaphysical or spirit of the puppet take over, no matter what you want it to do?” Younge responded that the life of the puppet can only be discovered in play, and Richards noted an underlying tension in the framing of the panel: “We’ve been dancing around the metaphysical,” noting that “Western” new materialist philosophers “all stop short of animism.” By framing the conversation through Hindu cosmology, Richards implicitly challenged the assumption that matter and material performance are inherently secular.
Festival Events
About the Symposium
January 21 and 28, 2023
Studebaker Theater and Streaming via Howlround
410 S. Michigan Ave.
The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium brings together practicing festival artists with scholars to consider the intersection of puppetry with other disciplines and ideas. Before 1912, the year the Little Theater of Chicago was founded in the historic Fine Arts Building, the term “puppeteer” did not even exist. Little Theater director Ellen Van Volkenburg needed a program credit for the actors she had trained to manipulate marionettes while speaking the text of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she coined the word “puppeteer.” That marked the dawn of the movement that has brought us to the rich art form now practiced around the world. In Van Volkenburg’s honor, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival presents four discussions featuring festival artists and key topics from the works presented in the Festival.
Boundless Bodies
Saturday, January 21, 2023
In Hindu cosmology, the rhythmic energy of Shiva’s Tandava dance is the source of all movement in the universe, propelling the cycle of creation, preservation, and dissolution. The purpose of the dance is to release humans from illusion. Since the puppet body can be an extension of the puppeteer’s body or a separate object that forces us to negotiate with matter that is distinct from our human bodies, object performances can readily explore how human consciousness might transcend the boundaries of our own bodies and how can we find transcendence through immanence on the path to self-knowledge.
Moderated by Dr. Paulette Richards with panelists Ishmael Falke (Invisible Lands), Elise Vigneron (Anywhere), and Camille Trouvé (R.A.G.E.).
Grand Narratives and Petits Récits
Saturday, January 21, 2023
François Lyotard criticized modernist meta-narratives such as Progress and Enlightenment as totalizing stories justifying the hegemonic order. He and other post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault called instead for petits récits or localized narratives that could transmit the full diversity of human experience. The shows represented in this panel challenge the grand narratives of western civilization by adapting classic stories in ways that mute the discourse of traditional patriarchs. Post humanist theory takes this shift in focus one step further by challenging the notion that human subjectivity is the only possible narrative agent. Thus we can view object performance as an experimental methodology for apprehending the agency of human and non-human others.
Moderated by Dr. Paulette Richards with panelists Yngvild Aspeli (Moby Dick), Sarah Fornace (Frankenstein), Michael Brown (Invitation to a Beheading) and Theodora Skipitares (Grand Panorama).
Maya: the Uses of Illusion
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Hindu cosmology regards the material world as Maya – illusion. The soul’s journey to enlightenment is a process of awakening from the illusion that our impermanent material existence is separate from the divine consciousness. Maya therefore also encompasses the wondrous creativity of the gods who brought forth and maintain the material world. Western theories such as Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology, similarly conclude that while humans are not the only agents in the universe, we can only enter into the reality of the material world outside our own consciousness through metaphor. Thus Harman turns to aesthetics rather than science for new tools of knowledge creation. Puppets, masks, and performing objects can be powerful implements in this endeavor because they function as three-dimensional metaphors that explode Cartesian dualisms such as Self and Other by enabling us to apprehend material objects as subjects in their own right. The shows represented in this panel use performing objects to un-mask the grandiose obsessions of the human ego and make space for the enchantment of vibrant matter in our perception of reality.
Moderated by Dr. Paulette Richards with panelists Eduardo Felix (Macunaima Gourmet), Janni Younge (Hamlet), and Jonathan Meyer (as though your body were right).
Building New Worlds: Emerging Voices
Saturday, January 28, 2023
The School of the Art Institute Performance Dept. and Chicago Puppet Fest present: Emerging Voices. Moderated by Dr. Dassia N. Posner with panelists: Felicia Cooper from the University of Connecticut, Camille Casemier from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Claudia Kinahan from Northwestern University. The emerging artists present their most recent works with Living Treasure of Puppetry, Bruce Chessé serving as the respondent.