Workshops During and After the Festival

Collaborating with “The Other:”
Building and Manipulating with Natacha Belova & Tita Iacobelli

An Essay by Ana Díaz Barriga

Puppetry artists Natacha Belova and Tita Iacobelli welcomed us into the Chicago Puppet Studio on the first day of their five-day workshop, “The Other.” Belova and Iacobelli explained that we would spend the first three days of the workshop building a puppet with Belova and the final two days learning manipulation principles with Iacobelli. Though the workshop’s structure would suggest that construction and manipulation are separate processes, Belova and Iacobelli’s practice demonstrates the opposite. They believe in the iterative nature of puppetry and that, by letting the creation emerge from the process, puppetry allows us to co-create with facets of ourselves that manifest through the puppet. 

The title of the workshop acknowledges the parts of ourselves that appear when we create with puppets. At the start of our construction day, Belova gave us a series of tips, instructions, and warnings that lowered the stakes of the building process. An hour later, when I attempted to draw the character I would make, I understood the reasoning behind Belova’s advice. “I don’t know how to draw,” I thought as I picked up the pencil—exactly what Belova warned us we might think. She had told us we were not drawing masterpieces, just making technical renderings to ensure the proportions of our puppet; we were not making perfect puppets, we were learning strategies that we could incorporate into our artistic practice. Getting caught up in perfectionism would keep us from seeing what was emerging, and Belova’s process helped us create high-quality puppets without getting trapped in our own heads. 

The building process began with a real-scale drawing of our puppet heads—like the head puppet Belova~Iacobelli use in Chayka. Each of us created a clay version of our drawing, translating our thinking into a three-dimensional object. Once the clay version of the puppet was ready, we covered it with Worbla.¹ Just as making a clay version of the drawing required redefining features of our character, molding the Worbla to the clay required resculpting the character and finding details that appeared through this material. Once ready, we worked on adding controllers and paint. At each stage of the process, Belova encouraged us to forge ahead, highlighting how dwelling too much on the details does not make for a better creation since the puppet is finished with the performer. The work is necessarily a draft because the only way to complete puppetry work is through the work itself: Belova and Iacobelli emphasized that we were learning techniques and strategies to create beyond the time of the workshop. Each stage in the process contributes to the creation. Each time you revisit a stage, the sketch becomes more defined. 

Belova and Iacobelli’s practice reminds us that the puppet itself is a collaborator. This idea builds off other scholarship in puppetry that describes how puppets are created through a cyclical process of exchange. For instance, Handpsring’s Basil Jones (2009) emphasizes the role that the designer plays in authoring the puppet character, while scholar Margaret Williams underscores the role that the audience plays in co-creating the performance (2014). Belova and Iacobelli repeatedly remarked that the puppet’s purpose is to perform, prompting us to think of the fact that the human artists do not always know what it is that the puppet wants to perform or how. This recognition of the object as having an agency that guides the performer may sound familiar to puppet artists (and is described in depth by Posner, 2014). Even as puppeteers control what story or theme they explore, or what aesthetic they want a character to have, once the puppet comes into being it has a force of its own. My fellow workshop participants and I determined elements of our puppets when creating the eyes and painting the faces, but there were elements we could not choose. We played with putting wigs, hats, and costumes on our puppets, amazed at how each option shifted the character in front of us. 

Once our puppets were built, Iacobelli led us in a series of exercises to explore the ways in which the form provides sets of possibilities for performance, alternating between the technical and the playful. We practiced establishing the puppet’s focus by moving our heads within an axis and replicating that with our puppets. We practiced dissociating our movements by having each of our hands doing something different and then adding unrelated speech to our actions. In her demonstrations, Iacobelli displayed the discipline she employs in her own practice, which allows for clean manipulation and exploration. These technical exercises were followed by improvisations where we played with having the voices of the puppets come from outside the stage, using different body parts to create the bodies of the puppets, or having the puppeteers converse as a puppet moved—seemingly within a separate realm—by taking over some of the puppeteers’ body parts. The exercises, prompted by Iacobelli, encouraged us to see how puppets and audiences could make meaning in ways the puppeteer might not have imagined. Instead of being the “master” of a puppet, the puppeteer is a co-creator with the puppet.

Belova and Iacobelli’s workshop gave us a glimpse into their creative process: Even though they have a story they want to tell, the theme and reason for it do not become clear until they play with the puppet. To enact this process, collaborators have to be highly skilled. The designer has to adapt the construction to provide the puppet with what it needs to communicate. The performer needs to train her body with precision, developing her technique to allow the puppet character to emerge. She then needs to balance distance and connection, giving space for the puppet to grow before developing the puppet/puppeteer relationship. The puppet must be left to speak, even as we understand it speaks for us. The process of creating with the puppet positions the object as a collaborator—one that represents parts of ourselves we might suppress if we have fixed ideas of what a performance should be. Embracing the puppet as a co-creator lets the puppeteer effectively collaborate with themselves. This is the power of the Other that the puppet manifests.