Caroline Astell-Burt
At one time ‘gathering’ meant violence. Puppeteers were chased off as vagrants and their carts burned. The raucous gatherings of audiences in Japan in 1629 led to the closure of all puppet theatres, and puppeteers were relegated to domestic entertainment in brothels for 250 years. The authorities de-peopled performance spaces.
Five hundred years later, I sat quietly and alone on an aeroplane. On my in-flight table, with plasticine I modelled a female figure with a baby which I manipulated into various positions, inadvertently entertaining the gathering queue for the toilet. Afterwards, a tap came on my shoulder, and someone said that she and other people in the queue had been moved by the experience of watching me.
The re-peopling of puppetry is an act of welcome, an acceptance that we are all ‘other’ to each other but all are included. De-peopling performance spaces was an act based on distrust and suspicion; alternatively, gathering freely reasserts individual potential to be responsible and trustworthy. De-peopling is making non-being; its opposite is gathering and therefore the act of being present.
The act of being present is a restraint of the self in order to open out and offer to another. In this way, the puppeteer opens with the puppet to all spectators through the hands offering hospitality. But so little is said about the spectator in their manner of giving and receiving. They exhibit extraordinary energy to realise proximity with the puppeteer and find completion with a puppet-object.
The proximity of a neighbour is my responsibility for them, to approach them is to be their keeper, to be their keeper is to be their hostage … Responsibility does not come from communality but it exists as responsibility for another antecedent to my freedom (Levinas 181).
In my little world of plasticine, nothing of anyone was known. We were held in the gathering, responsible for allowing people to progress along the aisle, and my part—it emerged—was to continue my ‘performance’ until everyone had gone and I might return to my private contemplation of what makes freedom.
Imagine the queue along the gangway towards the toilet and the squeezing-by returning. However, unusually, there is a rustle of excitement—something is happening—there is a straining to attend towards one place. A woman in her seat is modelling a lump of beige clay.
There is a closeness in the queue because the focus is not only towards the toilet or back towards seats, but rather held in an experience that is bringing everyone together along the aisle. Instead of the impersonal wait in a queue, this is different. As people move along, there is a pull to the right and some stop; others carry on moving along but twist around to watch, to stare; all attention is on each person in the queue in an unspoken welcome to each other and to and from the puppeteer, the person making the clay figure by animating it into various positions.
Somehow the spectators are in touch with each other and with the puppeteer. The spectator and the puppeteer are therefore ‘in touch’ with each other in the puppet.
In the effort to understand things from the perspective of the spectators, I have tried to imagine how it felt from their points of view. I had finished my book and decided to play with plasticine. I was doing it to amuse myself—however, the attention from the queue made it into a performance. As a puppeteer, just as I live in close and often affectionate connection with the objects around me, I am moved when an animated object is touched or touches—for in that movement it becomes a character and a subject. On the plane I composed an action consisting of a mother touching her child. My kinaesthetic response to this haptic experience is sensed in my body, whether I am making the movement or watching it. Being present with others on the plane, I was inside a relational aesthetic, as the puppeteer being ‘one’ in the gathering of many. We all experience the movement of the puppet in our bodily imaginations. In fact, the powerful desire of every spectator to draw closer and share a world of inanimate but animated matter can overcome the fear caused by the intimacy of proximity and any threat of exposure or embarrassment.
Seven images:
1. I am the puppeteer on the plane, sitting with the table down, with a lump of clay on a plastic tray. (The lid of a take-away container. I keep the plasticine in the container.)
2. I work the clay, making a female figure wearing a robe of some kind. She is pregnant.
3. As I work, the image changes—I add a baby nestled in the arms of the woman who cuddles it.
4. As I animate the clay, the woman nurses the baby at her breast, then she is reformed and morphed.
5. And the baby seems older, now toddling beside the mother.
6. The clay is reformed again, and suddenly the baby is lifted high above the head of the mother.
7. Some actions I repeat, as the plasticine is quite flexible and I like the movement—I achieve rocking, walking, swinging the baby/child/mother—I am half-aware of people in the queue watching, but my concentration is taken up with what I am doing. Half-aware there can still be moments of stillness when the mother might stop and stare up at the spectators, I look through the puppet and we all touch each other through the eyes.
In On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida writes about the ‘law of tact’, regarding the thing which is ‘untouchable’ or which should not be touched. In puppetry, this is the puppet as a self-contained thing which appears to gaze at the spectator; Derrida continues: ‘and one should understand tact, not in the common sense of the tactile, but in knowing how to touch without touching’ (66).
The proximity offered by a ‘gazing figure’ in a social space (on the plane) produces for the spectators recognition of the mother and child puppet characters. I say ‘puppet’ because I was producing movement for them. But when in such close proximity, and while I was engrossed in modelling them, why did any spectators not reach out and touch? Firstly, there was a social restraint, in that what I was doing was not to be touched or interrupted because it was ‘scene’ and ‘action’. Secondly, despite such constraint, people will still find ways of satisfying their intense need for proximity, such as giving applause (this did not happen on the plane) or as the spectator on the plane did—entering into closeness by telling me what she and others had seen in my activity and how they felt about it.
Visual contact with a moving object is more than the perception of a surface, and does not only involve sight but inner mimicry, or a ‘feeling into’, whereby I and spectators simultaneously experience movement and consciousness in an inanimate object by means of empathy. I experience in the unique proximity of performance not something to but with spectators. Although I talk about watching and seeing, we perceive with all of our senses. I know that the greatest desire of the spectator is to ‘touch’ the puppet as an expression of their deeper sensory experience in proximity with another (me in the puppet) and others watching. I am offering physical access to something creatively original. Yet where my hands work, they are also ‘organs for thought’ (Pallasmaa 56). ‘Seeing’ is limited to the noting of fragments, the spaces, the erasures, and the surfaces. In apprehending by sight alone, the spectators on the plane might have been distracted by the table, the window, my hands. In truth, the spectator searches hungrily with all their senses to identify the thing that moves us to compassion and if necessary to look past the obstacles to find out what there is behind, the iconic something that sums up for us the presence of the Other in the puppet. The iconic as opposed to the idolatrous provokes vision beyond the visible. Nancy argues that ‘it is the closeness, the brushing up against, the coming across, the almost-there of distanced proximity’ that describes the manner of ‘being with’ (98). The puppet makes being with possible, and it is that tantalising enlivening of the self that the spectator experiences enjoying proximity, ‘being in touch with the inner being and each other …’ (Nancy 13-15).
A useful reflection on the ‘face-to-face’ or ‘being with’ of puppeteer to spectator to puppet—both individually but also as part of a group gathering—suggests an underlying will to share, accommodated inside an ethics of hospitality such as that explored by Emmanuel Levinas in 1961. However, in appreciating the ways of ‘touching’ and ‘watching’ on the part of the spectator, one cannot escape that metaphorical ‘face-to-face’ expression of the vulnerability of spectators and performers in close proximity (Levinas 275). Could such exposed vulnerabilities have led to the suspicion and violence described at the beginning of this article? In practice, the puppeteer behind the puppet is beleaguered and vulnerable, historically prevented from performing and their spaces de-peopled—and similarly, myself personally, launching into a ‘performance’ on the plane is risking embarrassment and failure, ‘held hostage’ by the obligation to perform when I became aware of ‘being watched’ (6, 46). At that point I turned from being someone playing with clay as one might read an in-flight magazine, instead tucking away my interior self to escape the gaze of the queue, to become ‘puppeteer’. Similarly, within a notion of hospitality, the queue became ‘spectators’, taking on the appropriate rules of behaviour, all ‘interiorities’ protected. Each seeks to maintain their position as spectator or puppeteer, trying to integrate the other into their project of being in the event. The effort of hospitality by everyone is resolved into the mediating object, the puppet.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford UP, 2005.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. 1961. Translated by A. Lingis. Duquesne UP, 1979.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford UP, 2000.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley, 2005.