HANDSPRING PUPPET COMPANY and the Dispersed Body: 1

There is a rather remarkable series of thought experiments in Locke’s Essay

Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s his question:

Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses

acting the same Body, the one constantly by Day, the other by Night;
and on the other side the same consciousness acting by Intervals two
distinct Bodies: I ask in the first case, Whether the Day and the Night-
man would not be two as distinct Persons, as Socrates and Plato; and
whether in the second case, there would not be one Person in two
distinct Bodies; as much as one Man is the same in two distinct
clothings.

Locke’s puzzle, in the famous Chapter on Identity, is this: in what does

Personhood consist? The challenge to the commonsense presumption that
body and consciousness are one thing, is surprisingly confounding. Locke
has us imagine, first, two consciousnesses inhabiting one body, alternately
by day and by night; then he wants us to turn to the idea of one
consciousness inhabiting two bodies. Through this modeling of the problem
he resolves (as he has clearly set out to do) that Personhood resides in
consciousness.

The question gets Locke into a furious public debate with Bishop
Stillingfleet, who sees a dangerous, potentially heretical theological question
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Paper presented at the Puppetry Conference at the University of Connecticut in 2011.

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sheathed inside the philosophical enquiry. It’s useful to remember that the
early modern era is marked by bloody business over the question of Persons
and numbers. The brilliant anatomist/philosopher, Michael Servetus, was
burned alive with Calvin’s sanction, for questioning whether there was any
Biblical evidence for the Trinity of Christian belief. How could three
persons be one?
The dilemma was frequently posited within aesthetic terms. In Masaccio’s
“Trinity” in the Brancacci Chapel of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence,
for example, each of the three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) is
given extension, a material presence, and the artist has to contrive a way for
them to exist simultaneously in one space/time set of coordinates. As a
result, the Holy Spirit is embodied as a kind of sublime neckscarf around the
throat of the Father, who holds the tormented Son aloft in his arms.

SCREEN IMAGE ONE: MASACCIO TRINITY (1425)

These thoughts take me to a consideration of Durer’s self-portrait painted at

the end of the fourteenth century (1500.) It is one of the key works explored
in the argument about an emergence of the modern self as evidenced through
the self-portrait. Yet it is quite clear, too, that Durer is here also modeled
after Christ, so the self is its own artwork, and stands in the place of the self
as the other. Joseph Leo Koerner, in his study of Durer (The Moment of
Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art) discusses the move in Durer’s
work that is characterized as a split between the self and its
I am starting here, in this rather remote history, in order to underscore that,
even in the West, the apparent natural given that an individual Person is
located in a non-contradictory way within a single body, is not simply the

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easy gift of the enlightenment. “Self-fashioning,” I would suggest, is not just
about the invention of an individual self through imaginative brio and
ambition; rather the very “fashioning” of Self as a concept is at the same
time being worked through a combative and tormented series of experiments
in dismemberment, discipline and inquisition, as the systems of internal and
external authority (King, conscience and Church of Rome) are incrementally
shifted. If my conscience is at odds with my King? A torment. My King at
odds with my priest? A torment.

Locke’s move is a strategic one: he settles the question of the Person

through invoking the law. “Where-ever a Man finds, what he calls himself,
there I think another may say is the same Person. It is a Forensick Term
appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent
Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery.”
In other words, a Person is a legal device through which to fix
culpability; to receive, as he says, “Pleasure or Pain; ie. Reward or
Punishment.” (346).

I would like to leave that set of propositions in place as it is, as a

background to thinking about the body and the puppet; and now to turn to a
more proximate legal context, and the situation of the person as conjured
with during the height of Apartheid, the situation within which Handspring
Puppet Company evolved its distinctive idioms of performance. Obviously
these spheres are in many very significant ways wholly distinct from one
another. Yet at some level, it is worth noting that the colonial law that
pertains in South Africa at the time is a combative mix of British legal
theory and Roman-Dutch law. (The Cape you will remember alternates

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between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, and is at times under
British, at times under Dutch rule. (These colonial powers meanwhile are
holding in check the so-called customary law such as was and is practiced
outside of the colonial administrative reach.)
The 1980s, as Handspring was coming into being, was the decade of
Emergency legislation, with the state deploying increasingly repressive and
violent means to quell what was referred to as mass democratic action;
uprisings against total power. It has been suggested that in regions of
colonial administration, where the threat to the ruler’s law and order is
collective, habitual principles of individual liability tend to be waived, as the
principle of order takes precedence over that of law. Society itself needs to
be deterred, and as a result the fundamentals of law, such as individual
liability, may be undermined.
In purist South African legal theory for much of the twentieth century,
the idea of the ‘subject under law’ was modified in accordance with
circumstances under the changing political regime. This was particularly
manifest in relation to evolving ideas about popular unrest. There was an
incremental shift away from the idea of a legal ‘accessory’ to a crime, to the
principle that persons who were not prime movers in the criminal action
could be described as “contributing causally” or “as causally furthering a
crime.” Here the ‘common purpose’ rule becomes increasingly invoked,
until bystanders can be convicted of murder if they are found to be of
‘common purpose’.
In the mid 1980s there were several notorious cases in which groups
(what in other historical settings have been characterized as mobs) were
arrested and all parties jointly held legally liable. One such case, from 1985,
was notorious: in a hot, dry rural town, Uppington, in the Northern Cape

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(famous for its sunshine, and the cultivation of date palms along the banks of
the huge perennial Orange River) 26 people, men and women ranging in age
from 17 – 57 years, were arrested for murder. 25 were found guilty although
several testified that they were nowhere near the scene, and 14 were
sentenced to death. The murder victim was a local policeman, Jetta Setwala,
from the township, who was killed while fleeing a collective assault on his
home.

This case gives substance to Locke’s assertion that “Person is a forensic

term,” if as he is suggesting the Person is that entity that becomes the
instrument of the law. Meanwhile resistance movements within the country
modeled selfhood along collectivist lines, drawing from diverse anti-colonial
paradigms: Christian, as well as traditional Africa, and leftist-Marxist
models all invoked subjectivities that were not circumscribed by the
paradigm of bourgeois individualism. Hegel might have interesting things to
say about this dialogic reciprocity, the two combative systems (the State and
its opponents) mirroring one another in this valorizing of the collectivized
figure of the subject under law.
So too, in the aesthetic realm, there is a resistance to bourgeois figures of
the individual. These dynamics inform the work of Handspring, and from
early on, they push the metaphoric potential of what they are making,
inventing a distinctive performance ethic that is both representing and is
generating new models of personhood.
The landmark production of Woyzeck on the Highveld signals the
complex nexus of mutually dependent beings that has come to signify
Handspring’s work. Buchner’s character, Woyzeck, is at once a sensual and
metaphysical being of huge emotional longing and philosophic melancholy;

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yet he has through his experiences become a blunted and grim man with
lethal potential. The performance between the two puppeteers who
manipulate this figure actually seeks to maximize the differences in their
expressive capacity, as they project themselves into the mentality of
Woyzeck, constituting a Personhood that is contradictory, complex and
doomed. In other words, each of the puppeteers brings a supplement of his
own interpretive competence to the role; in the same way that Adrian Kohler
always designs his puppets with asymmetrical faces, so that through the
maneuvering of the head, the puppet can change expression. The dynamism
of the dual puppeteering is integral to the construction of character.
I am going to use Woyzeck as my first example here, and in order to do that
let me show you the expressive artistry that Adrian Kohler carves into the
face of the puppet.
SLIDE TWO
And
SLIDE THREE.
At one point in the production, as Woyzeck lays the dining table (he is in the
service of the Doctor who is conducting minimal behavioural experiments
on him). The character gets lost in reverie about his incompetence in the
world. Through the staging, it is easy to lose sight of where the split subject
ends and begins, and furthermore he gets lost in the object world within
which he has been instrumentalized.
SLIDE FOUR: WOYZECK AND TWO PUPPETEERS.
Adrian here is the master puppeteer, and Louis is the genius at expressive
performance.
At times the puppet hand is displaced by a puppeteer’s hand so that the
bottle can be moved with fluent ease; and behind Woyzeck we see the

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puppeteers, each of whom brings a distinctly different manipulating style to
the performance.
SCREEN DVD CLIP OF WOYZECK LAYING TABLE
Woyzeck, is Handspring’s first collaboration with artist/director William
Kentridge, when both Kentridge and Handspring made massive creative
strides together, learning from each other’s media. They also put pressure on
one another creatively: as William notes in an interview, because he didn’t
know the limits of puppetry, he constantly expected Adrian to know how to
solve problems that he would never dream of taking on himself. His
assumption, over and over, was “Adrian will know how to do that.”
Part of what is liberated in this inter-disciplinary dialogue is the sense
that nothing is forbidden, and so new moments are possible on stage, as
here, we have seen in the film clip, with the sudden small and unexpected
interaction between the puppet and the live performer who hands him the
bottle; and as later, when he is challenged by the actor who is effectively the
M-C of the show.
SLIDE FIVE: Barker with WOYZECK and KNIFE
We frequently see a practical solution to a performance demand, and that
will generate unexpected meanings. In one scene, a very macho gold-miner,
is doing a kind of bravado stick-dance using his shovels as swagger-sticks
that he twirls around about his head. This is, as you can imagine, difficult
enough for a live performer but very tricky with a puppet.
SLIDE 6: WOYZECK, MINER’s Dance.
The strategy is to have the hands of the puppeteers honestly grasp the
handles. This remarkably is absolutely tolerable for the audience, who make
no complaint about such solutions. And by looking at the image we see

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something interesting: the miner is played by two puppeteers, and here I
think we have Basil Jones and Louis Seboko, as we see from the next image:
SLIDE 7: MINER AS BASIL AND LOUIS
Here the puppeteers are clearly visible but this will also help you to
understand the complexity of what is happening ‘behind the boards’, as
groups assemble in small knots of performance inhabiting a body for a
scene, then often breaking up to take on another role. At some points,
because of the demands of voice, for example, a puppeteer will have to hand
over his or her puppet in mid-performance to another puppeteer, giving rise
to an impromptu radical experiment in inter-subjective identities. In
Woyzeck, some of this magic is played for the audience, some of it is
transacted backstage, because the set design actually uses various levels of
reveal. Some of the action is completely open; some of it behind a partial
board, some of it fully disguised.
SLIDE 8 of Maria above playboar: player’s feet visible
Here you can see the Bunraku puppet being used behind a playboard. You
can tell from the feet below that the puppeteers are now completely masked;
whereas earlier they have been more or less wholly revealed. (This photo is
shot during a rehearsal and the shoes are visible.)
These simultaneous layers give a tremendous sense of spatial depth,
as well as psychological layering across what is ‘known’ and what is
“unknown” between as well as within various characters. This is in some
ways about being in another’s position, taking another’s point-of-view, and
allows for alternative ways of imagining being.
The next few images will suggest something of that set of spatial
possibilities, and their meaning for emotional and psychological complexity:
SLIDE 9: Woyzeck watches miner and Maria

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Casting does not follow race or gender but rather levels of skill, or aptitude.
And at times the asymmetries of such competencies have meaning. William
as director has noted to me that Adrian’s remarkable skill and fine detail as a
puppeteer means that when performing alongside another manipulator, the
fluctuating pulses across the two performances can suggest an almost
schizophrenic persona.

Everyone here will probably have recognized the Bunraku-style

puppetry involved in Woyzeck. The figures are roughly 2/3 of life size,
manipulated with hand-holds and articulated joints. In some Bunraku
traditions the puppeteers are effectively concealed from view behind black
veils, with black costumes to make their presence all but undetectable. It
became evident fairly soon that there was much to be gained from keeping
the puppeteer a visible element on stage, and this has become an
increasingly significant element of Handspring’s work. The illusionism of
the art relies on the collaborative imaginative care of the audience, who
demonstrate over and over again, their great pleasure in contradiction. Part
of what is gained is a sense that there is a vast, all but invisible serving class
that maintains and sustains the life force of the puppets, as well as the
figures that they embody. In the late 1980s, it was a desirable
political/aesthetic effect to have such ‘minders’ visible rather than obscured
from view.
The work of Handspring discovers, as part of its working philosophy,
that something uncanny and profound happens with the staging of human
subject in a reciprocal, densely social circuit of shared being. It is in some
ways philosophically akin to the Bakhtinian proposition that speech acts are
necessarily dialogic: any statement requires an interlocutor, language is

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between people rather than within persons. Diderot’s radical experiments in
the dramatic dialogue, (his Rameau’s Nephew, for example), explore the
ways in which each exchange in the dialogue makes it ever-more impossible
to determine where the author is aligned in his affections for the two
characters (Named, simply, “Me and “Him”). At the start of the piece, we
feel Rameau’s nephew to be loutish, socially rather unsavory in his
opportunism, our sympathies are all with “Me” – as they naturally would be!
Yet as the work progresses we feel our affections shift, until we find “Me” to
be a prig, conservative, too cautious, and “He after all is witty, amusing,
beguiling. Such is conversation!

Finally, let me make a comment about that ‘subject under law’ identified at
the start of my paper. Interestingly it was through the Truth and
reconciliation Commission, (the quasi-legal hearings at the end of the
Apartheid era) that individual narratives were recuperated and legitimated.
As tens of thousand of victims of Apartheid-era violence came forward to
testify about their own history of violation, what became evident was that
the national narrative was in fact constituted by such individual stories: that
the Self, as a legitimate category, had been one of the victims of colonialism
and of Apartheid. As Handspring’s puppetry suggests, the Self is not
antithetical to the dispersed being, but rather, it is in the co-operative realm
of community that the Self becomes viable.

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