Look! Look! A Work in Development by Vanessa Valliere

Dolls, Daydreams, and Delicious Doubts: The Playful World of Look! Look!

An Essay by Will Bixby

As the audience files in for Look! Look!—an in-development work by Vanessa Valliere in collaboration with Lindsey Noel Whiting—we watch Valliere, stationed downstage left, as she frantically scribbles in a notebook interrupted by brief anxious peeks back at the growing crowd. The stage is replete with the familiar iconography of the New Vaudeville stage—milk crates, travel trunks, bird cages—with a healthy dose of dolls and mannequin heads. The result resembles a vaudevillian clown’s childhood bedroom: whimsical, absurd, and just a little grotesque, which is an excellent description for what happens next. 

Look! Look! unfolds across three distinct vignettes: “Nice Try,” “The Life and Times of Terry,” and “Your Best Self.” The sequences are strange—deliberately so—unfolding with the sort of manic pace and logic of a child vying for their parent’s attention on the playground as they debut their latest creation (“Look! Look!”). Each piece (adapted and expanded from Valliere’s earlier short performances) centers around a journey of self-discovery and deploys a variety of puppets (found objects, miniatures, projections, and hand puppets) in combination with Valliere’s grotesque and earnest clowning to champion the embrace of one’s inner weirdo. 

“Nice Try” focuses on a playdate between Deborah (Valliere) and her overbearing (and creepy) playmate: a sentient baby doll. Deborah performs a sequence of short puppet skits—a ballerina doll dances on a miniature proscenium stage, a one-foot-long slug moves across a trapeze line tautly held by two members of the audience. Each end with her eating the puppets. After each act, Deborah is berated by the disembodied voice of her baby doll until, after having her fill of the negative feedback, she plunges a knife into the doll’s skull, opens its brain, and retrieves a small alien figurine, which she then—you guessed it—chews and swallows. 

Consumption is key for this sequence, as Deborah eats her puppets in the same way that her inner critic (embodied as the malevolent baby doll) eats away at her self-confidence. Valliere brilliantly combines consumable material into the puppets’ forms to add layers of comedic suspense to the short sequence. Her first bite—the head of the ballerina doll made of some sort of confectionary treat—comes as a complete surprise as the consumable so seamlessly blends into the plastic body of the doll. Her second victim—the trapeze scaling slug (in actuality a long  gummy worm)—is more obvious. We watch the slug as he makes his way across the trapeze wire before Deborah, looking out into the audience with a knowing grin, drives a knife into the gummy puppet, carves out a piece, and pops it into her mouth. This pattern of surprise, buildup, and payoff is endlessly charming, and it adds a level of immense satisfaction as Deborah finally silences the baby doll and consumes (literally) her self-doubt. 

The second vignette, “The Life and Times of Terry,” opens with June (Valliere again) as she scribbles in her diary, daydreaming about a romantic partner. Seemingly inspired, June pulls an audience member onto the stage, snaps their photo with a Polaroid, and then cuts and pastes their head onto a paper doll. Using a projection screen and a document camera, June performs a living scrapbook where paper doll versions of the audience member and herself (complete with a cutout of her face) go through a sequence of domestic milestones. Their first meeting, their first date, and even their first intimate event are all played out on paper as June enacts her romantic fantasy. The sequence shifts after June and her paper partner discover there is a baby on the way, and a new scrapbook, “The Life and Times of Terry,” comes onto the screen. A drawing of Terry—a slightly embryonic-looking creature—is cast onto the projection screen as June overlays a series of plastic transparent sheets documenting Terry’s milestones: his first crib, his graduation from high school, and even his receipt of dozens of Oscar statuettes. The sequence culminates with June operating a hand-puppet version of Terry as he mumbles through a rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings” after accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center. While certainly bizarre, there is something effortlessly charming about this sequence and Valliere’s use of handmade puppets. The paper dolls, scrapbook drawings, and even the Terry hand puppet all bear the mark of a do-it-yourself construction, and watching June literally design, build, and perform (in absolute earnest) her desires is surprisingly poignant and uplifting. Why sit back and dream about what your life could be when you have the power to build it yourself? 

The final vignette, “Your Best Self,” builds on these themes of self-acceptance and self-construction. It follows Barbara—the disembodied head of Valliere attached to the body of a baby doll—as she attends a self-help convention. As the keynote speaker (Whiting) babbles on in a string of self-help aphorisms, Barbara drifts away into a series of increasingly odd daydreams. From a quirky mashed potato dinner to a grotesque balloon-popping burlesque act, Barbara’s daydream sequences lean into the gross and the beautiful in an embrace of her inner weirdness. The human-doll hybrid suggests that to truly embrace our “best self” is to embrace our inner child, that playful and weird version of ourselves that we often keep locked away inside. 

At its core, Look! Look! is about empowerment through the acceptance of the unconventional. It’s a celebration of weirdos, misfits, and anyone who was ever told they don’t fit in. In each vignette, Valliere’s characters remind us that self-discovery is not about fitting a mold but looking into ourselves and embracing the strange and wonderful parts we find.