Puppetry

in the 21st Century:

Reflections
and Challenges
Edited by Marzenna Wiśniewska and Karol Suszczyński

The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw

Branch Campus in Bialystok, Puppet Theatre Art Department
 Puppetry
in the 21st Century:
Reflections
and Challenges
Puppetry in the 21st Century:
Reflections and Challenges
Edited by Marzenna Wiśniewska and Karol Suszczyński

Reviewer:
Prof. Ida Hledíková, Ph.D.,
The Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Faculty of Theatre

Proofreading: Timothy Williams, Ph.D.

Layout, typesetting and cover design: Jacek Malinowski
On the cover: graphic by Grzegorz Kwieciński from the performance
Ręce [The Hands], Teatr Ognia i Papieru (1980)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing form the publishers.

Copyright © 2019 by Marzenna Wiśniewska and Karol Suszczyński

Copyright © 2019 by the Publisher
Free e-book version

Publisher:
The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw
Branch Campus in Bialystok, Puppet Theatre Art Department
Sienkiewicza 14 Str.
15-092 Bialystok, Poland
https://atb.edu.pl

ISBN: 978-83-88358-07-4
 Puppetry
in the 21st Century:
Reflections
and Challenges
Edited by Marzenna Wiśniewska and Karol Suszczyński

The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw

Branch Campus in Bialystok, Puppet Theatre Art Department
 Table of Contents

Marzenna Wiśniewska, Karol Suszczyński

Introduction 7

Part 1: Being an Artist of Puppet Theatre

Marek Waszkiel
Puppeteer: Craftsman, Actor or Creator? 12

Marzenna Wiśniewska
Performers in Polish Puppet Theatre 18

Miyako Kurotani
Searching for Traces of Life in Lifeless Things 32

Oriane Maubert
Puppet and Dancer, Choreography of Object-body:
Meeting, Control and Vertigo 38

Zofia Smolarska
Towards Sustainable Change.
Craftsmanship in Polish Puppet Theatres: an Ecosophical Perspective 54

Part 2: Challenges of Puppet Theatre and Research

Eric Bass
Colliding Worlds. Puppet Theatre Dramaturgy in a Time of Social Injustice 70

Julie Postel
Toward a Disembodied Puppet: Vibrational Presences and Illusory Animation 80

4
Agata Drwięga
Non-Human Puppet Theatre. An Empathic Approach to Horses,
Giraffes, Dogs and Other Animals 94

Karol Suszczyński
Diversity of Means of Expression in the Polish Puppet Theatre for Adults:
Since the Beginning of the 21st Century 108

Martyna Friedla
‘The Other’ in Contemporary Polish Puppet Theatre 124

Part 3: Organization and Education

Maria Janus
The Influence of a Theatre’s Organisational Structure
on the Work of Puppet Theatres in Poland and Germany 140

Sarah Vecchietti
Berlin and Charleville-Mézières: Two Models of European Puppetry School.
A Proposal to Research the Transmission of Puppet Knowledge and Practices 158

Tomasz Graczyk
Images in the Space of Mind: The Body Training of an Actor-Puppeteer 170

Notes on Contributors 181

Index 187
Illustrations 193

5
6
Introduction

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries brought heightened
visibility of puppets and performing objects in various fields of cultural
performance, so that we might call these last decades ‘a puppet moment’ – as
Claudia Orenstein points out in the introduction to the book The Routledge
Companion to the Puppetry and Material Performance.1 We are profoundly
convinced of the truth of this reflection and we see in this point of view an
important research challenge, one that leads toward a discussion about the
processes, tendencies, and influences shaping contemporary puppetry in
different countries. The intention of our monograph is to present theoretical
and practical ideas, analyses and questions which have arisen since the turn
of the century under the influence of the latest puppet performances and works
inspired by puppet art. The collection of articles naturally represents only a few
of the possible approaches to these topics, but we hope it provides a glimpse
of multidirectional contemporary reflection and different perspectives of re-
search now being applied to (and demanded by) puppet art.

This book originated at the International Conference ‘Puppet Theatre in

the 21 st Century’, organised by the Puppet Theatre Art Department in
Bialystok of the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art
in Warsaw and Białostocki Teatr Lalek [Bialystok Puppet Theatre] in June
2016, in conjunction with the 8th International ‘Puppet-no-Puppet’ Festival
of Puppetry Schools. The conference intended above all to provide a forum
young European researchers exploring the phenomenon of puppet theatre,
and encouraged scholars to share new methodological strategies in theory
1
7
Posner, D. N., Orenstein C., Bell, J. (ed.), (2014), The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material
Performance. London: Routledge. Taylor&Fracis Group, p. 2.
 and puppet theatre practice. The book Puppetry in the 21st Century: Reflections
and Challenges combines selected contributions presented during con-
ference discussions with other articles written specially for the monograph.
This volume’s authors are both researchers and practitioners, so the book
features scholarly discourse together with puppeteers’ accounts of their
experiences. These investigations highlight the redefinition of the terms
‘puppet’, ‘animation’, ‘puppeteer’ in contemporary theatre and performance,
analyse the different modes of relationship between puppet/performing
object and puppeteer, focus on artists and works exploring the borderline
between the puppet theatre and other performing arts, including dance, and
show the interdependencies among organizational approaches and models
of studying and practicing puppetry in different countries and the aesthetic
tendencies in puppet theatre.

The book is divided into three parts. The first one, Being an Artist of Puppet
Theatre, focuses on the question: what kind of artist is the puppeteer of
today? Marek Waszkiel confronts the tradition of puppeteer as craftsman and
independent artist, creator of invented puppet worlds (e.g. Neville Tranter,
Duda Paiva) with the model of puppeteer as actor cultivated in institutional
puppet theatres in 20 th century Eastern Europe. Using performance study
methodology, Marzenna Wiśniewska considers the performative potential
of the puppeteer. Her work focuses on the strategy of puppeteer presence
and bodily expression, the puppeteer’s relationship with performing objects,
and the event nature of such performances; she analyses three modes of
puppeteer-performer, represented in the contemporary puppet theatre in
Poland by Grzegorz Kwieciński, Tadeusz Wierzbicki and Adam Walny. The
Japanese puppeteer Miyako Kurotani from Theatre Genre:Gray here offers
a brief presentation of her idea of the puppeteer and his/her training. For
Kurotani, a puppet is a unique form of existence that remembers its material
origins and possesses its own individual energy; a puppeteer is thus someone
who discovers an object’s ‘traces of life’ trough their relationship with it and
‘brings it back to life’ through a kind of manipulation of that object. For Oriane
Maubert, the concepts of the puppet and the ‘return to life’ are reminiscent
of Heinrich von Kleist’s comparison between puppet and dancer; in her work,
Maubert considers common threads between dance and puppet theatre on
the contemporary stage. Her analysis focuses on performances by Gisèle
Vienne, Duda Paiva, Ilka Schönbein, companies WHS and Sungsoo Ahn Pick
8 up Group, the Compagnies Moussoux-Bonté and Pseudonymo. That section
closes with Zofia Smolarska’s essay, calling for reflection on the craftsmen
who work in puppet theatre’s back-stage professions. Her paper presents
the results of qualitative field research conducted at six Polish puppet
theatres, including interviews with craftsmen, and analyses the economical,
technological and artistic context of their work.
The section Challenges of Puppet Theatre and Research is focused on the pup-
peteer response to the issues relating to philosophical, aesthetical, cultural
and social transformations at the turn of centuries. Eric Bass from the Sand-
glass Theatre opens this section with his view of puppet theatre as a medium
of empowerment. His case study of a group of international theatre projects
(from The Story of the Dog in Cambodia to the recent Babilon) explores the
potential of puppet theatre for confrontation and engagement with some
difficult issues of our time: war, social injustice, and refugee crises. Julie
Postel’s article offers reflection on a number of contemporary artists (François
Lazaro, Nick Steur, Gisèle Vienne) and groups (Morbus Théâtre, Cie Non Nova)
who confront the audience with the emergence of visibility and visuality in
contemporary culture. The fragile and discontinuous presence of puppets
and the relationship between the puppet’s ‘two bodies’ – material and non-
physical/phantom – leads Postel to revise the definitions of the terms ‘puppet’
and ‘animation’. Agata Drwięga proposes posthumanism and animal studies
as productive methodologies for developing strategies of heightened animal
presence and representation in puppet theatre. Handspring Puppet Company
and a Polish play, Baltic. Pies na krze [Baltic. The Dog on an Ice Floe], present-
ed by Miejski Teatr Miniatura [Miniatura City Theatre], are examples that go
beyond conventional anthropomorphism toward theatre creation that resto-
res animals’ inherent attributes to their representations. The last two articles
concern some remarkable early 21st century performances in Polish puppet
theatre. Karol Suszczyński presents the diversity of puppet types and tech-
niques in the puppet theatre for adults (from such classic forms as mario-
nette, shadow to total performances and indefinable varied forms). His ob-
servation confirms Henryk Jurkowski’s thesis about the domination of Polish
puppet theatre by a theatrical ethos that prioritises maximum variety in the
means of expression used. Martyna Friedla asks about the embodiment of an
‘Other’ figure in the newest Polish puppet theatre and simultaneously focu-
ses on phenomenological reflection about the puppet.

The third section, Organization and Education, is dedicated to the institutional

dimension of puppet education and theatre systems in Europe. Maria Janus
compares the structure of German and Polish puppet theatres and shows the 9
main areas of their transformation since 1989. Analysing two pedagogical
 principles and practices in two representative puppetry academies of Central-
Western Europe: Germany’s Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in
Berlin and the French École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette
in Charleville-Mézières, Sarah Vecchietti shows how differences between
European puppet theatre models are directly connected with puppetry
education systems. The last paper in the book is a presentation by practitioner
and scholar Tomasz Graczyk of his own artistic training method. His method-
ology treats the physical training of actor-puppeteers as a particularly impor-
tant issue for our time, in which the puppet theatre is undergoing dynamic
and many-sided development.

We hope that this monograph will result in further innovative and dynamic
research on the subject of far-reaching changes in the space of the puppet
theatre in the near future.

Marzenna Wiśniewska, Karol Suszczyński

10