Training experiences in cyberspace and creative processes in social isolation

This article was prepared from the conference that the author gave at the opening of ANIMA UDESC Internacional Seminar of Studies in the Arts of Puppetry Online Edition, on May 21, 2021. The conference had as its theme Training experiences in cyberspace and creative processes in social isolation, and addressed aspects of the link between Puppet Theater and the pandemic, and reflections based on the author's work with her students in the first six months of the pandemic.

Puppetry and plague. Puppetry and pox. Puppetry and panic. Puppetry and pandemic. The fact that theatre can, and does, intervene in the presentation and formation of health narratives within society is age-old. From the prologue of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex where the outbreak of plague is chillingly recorded to the terrifying and haunting masked social performances of medical figures during the 17 th century bubonic plague which ravaged the world 3 , to more contemporary performances of illness in the 21 st century which seek to educate, raise awareness and destigmatize, illness, plague and pandemic are part of our ongoing theatre culture.
Artaud likened theatre to the plague 4 : a ravaging, wild, unstoppable beast which reduces the performer to a stripped-back version of themselves, the plague destroying the boundaries of physical, social and cultural behaviors: 'volcanic eruptions on the surface of the flesh violate the inside/outside borders which preserve corporeal integrity, as social, psychological and ethical structures implode' (GOODALL, 1990, p. 529) 5 . Goodall notes that plagueas seen by Artaudenables revelation and transformation (ibid, p. 529). Grotowski too saw theatre as something contagious and challenging: the performer, in order to find authenticity in their work, must train until almost-collapse, must exhaust their body beyond the usual limits in order to discover its true potential in weakness, vulnerability and desperation. The self, without artifice, in direct communion with an audience who did not always completely know what the narrative was, but who were gripped by the physical extremity and starkness of the performers.
Peter Brook, too, in 'The Holy Theatre', called upon theatre not to be a meaningless transaction, but a powerful ritual experience likened to life and death ceremonies 6 . These seminal directors of the twentieth century transformed a vision of theatre from something of entertainment to something which sought to speak to the heart of human experience. Actors, according to Grotowski, were 3 Blakemore, Erin (2020), 'Why plague doctors wore those strange beaked masks': https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/plague-doctors-beaked-masks-coronavirus 4 Garner, Stanton B. Jr (2006), 'Artaud, Germ Theory and the Theatre of Contagion ', Theatre Journal Vol. 8 No. 1, March 2006, pp. 1 -14. 5 Goodall, Jane (1990, 'The Plague and its Powers in Artaudian Theatre', Modern Drama, Vol. 33 o. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 529 -542. 6 Auslander, Philip (1984, 'Holy theatre and catharsis ', Theatre Research International Vol. 9 Issue 1, Sping 1984, pp. 16 -29. like shamans who suffered for their tribes, subjecting their bodies to dangerous rituals, experiencing illness, trance and risk in order to heal the community 7 . The metaphor of plague, contagion, illness, is a powerful one for theatre. Theatre, after all, is both religion and healing. Again, referring to Grotowski, actors lived as outsiders, undergoing extra-ordinary feats of training on behalf of their communities. They often lived outside cities, inhabiting communes or artistic ghettoes where they worked on their art. Plague, epidemic or widespread contagious illness has also been a means through which communities choose to scapegoat or blame others for the ills inherent within their societies. Carlo Ginzburg noted that throughout history, 'the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kinds could be discharged' (GINZBURG, 1989) 8 . Those with contagious illnesses were ejected from their societies or confined within them; they were isolated in limited physical communities with other sufferers; in some cases, those with illnesses had the city gates shut to them and were forced to become itinerant, seeking benevolence and support from other travelers or itinerants, living as homeless wanderers, travelling, whenever they were able to, from place to place. In this they share a history with puppetry. Traditional puppetry was often performed by 'outsiders'. The position of the marginalized, outcast, not-belonging itinerant figure, moving between cities, countries and continents, was familiar to the puppeteer, who also depended upon others' largesse for their survival. 9 No less, puppets themselves can be compared to images of plague: traditional puppets often swollen, exaggerated, erupting, gargoyle-esque caricatures reminiscent of boils, lesions or exhibiting the traits of strange illnesses and tics. Puppets do not particularly represent the well human body in-health, but instead remind us of its frailty; its potential to disintegrate; it's ludicrous and unbalanced nature. Many of the most interesting puppets that we see in performance are like growths of some tumorous disease, emerging from our own bodies, like viruses or bacteria, epiphytes or parasites; dwelling inside us, amongst us and dependent upon us for their survival.
The last year has turned us into puppets: confined to our own little living box or booth, unable to leave, or unable to go very far; over-familiar with our own kitchens, our own stairs, our own windows through which we peer at the world outside which once we knew. The English expression 'to bounce off the walls', which refers to the frustration at being confined, can be literally translated to puppets, who use the limitations of their booth or box, or playing area to dance the choreography of their confinement.
Limits, we are told, in theatre, are useful; they require us to define our practice; to concentrate our gesture and our expression; to become a tiny focus of energy in a small space radiating beyond it. 10 Have the limits of confinement and of the screen therefore been useful to puppetry over the last year? Despite the privations, confinement has forced us to focus. Theatre should certainly be an experience of consciousness, has the last year enabled us to question our art and our practice and to ask what it is that puppetry is and does?
Enough of these philosophical reflections. We have been turned into puppets in our confinement but within those confinements we have found ways to communicate and to train. The remainder of this talk will concentrate on those tendencies that have emerged in puppet theatre over the last year through the requirements to work online, on the screen or in confined and small spaces; and will discuss processes of student training. I will focus on those practices which have been enabled by confinement, not those which have been disabled. I will, additionally, not be talking in this presentation about the theoretical or practical considerations given to us by technology. It is clear that there are many of these and that the ways in which puppetry can and does intersect with technology is another field. Let it be assumed that our stage is (for the most part) the Zoom screen. Nor will I be talking about training in making or training in puppetry theory.
I think, even if we sometimes prefer to be together, that making, writing, theorizing, and to an extent, even directing, can reasonably easily be discussed and practiced via digital means. Here I will be focusing on physical performance training for the puppeteer.
The title that I was asked to respond to was: Training experiences in cyberspace and creative processes in social isolation. To me there seem to be two parts to this: 'training experiences in cyberspace', with a focus on the word 'experiences'; and 'creative processes in social isolation', with a focus on creativity and social isolation. The last year has been unprecedented in forcing people to limit social contact and spend much or most of their time online for work, social activities and social engagement. We have done it; we have done it willingly or unwillingly; things are starting to change and the reflections of the last year being harnessed to future planning. This work led to a series of philosophical reflections upon whether the puppet could leave the house; we know that puppets are transgressive and don't like rules; we also know that puppets get away with a lot more than humans do and get out of punishment by nature of their puppet-ness; could it be that a puppet could leave the house and avoid infection and return safely? As stand-ins for ourselves, students' puppets shimmied down fake drainpipes to tiptoe around the streets of their imagined cities, deserted and lonely.
This led us to the theme of dystopia. Without a doubt, the last year has been an experience of dystopia. Confined, masked, fearful, rebellious, critical, ill, dying, angry, punished, fined, unable to travel, unable to meet; full of national prejudice (which country is doing the best job; which is doing the worst job; illness either as a punishment upon the immoral or a visitation upon the heroic, whether they are populist leaders, martyrs, overweight, unwell, disabled, aged, unhealthy, or simply very very unlucky… our prejudices have run wild); we have become a dystopia in which to go out of your house you had to fill out a form gaining permission to mingle, or to visit your ailing mother. But isn't it the case that puppets always, or often, live in dystopias? In our 2019 talk and subsequent publication about directing for puppetry 11 , Mario Piragibe and I identified this feature of puppets: that they live in other worlds and that there are a series of different rules for those worlds. They do not inhabit the usual human world. The world that we are now inhabiting under Covid is an-other world. As an example, the latest UK guidance is that we are now permitted to 'hug cautiously 12 '. How do you hug cautiously? That advice about how to hug is now a government directive is part of a strange and dystopian universe. Working on screen, the details and specifics of creating dystopian, or, let us say, weird worlds, became even more 11 Astles, Cariad and Piragibe, Mario (2019), 'Nine Questions on Teaching Directing for Puppetry: a transcripting recreation of a dialogue', 15:11 (21). pp. 432-457. 12 Swinford, Steven (ed), 'Boris Johnson tells people to hug cautiously as lockdown restrictions ease', The Times 17.05.21: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hug-cautiously-avoid-tight-clinches-and-restrictphysical-contact-to-outdoors-sage-adviser-warns-bj36ssbvm important. In the 1980s, the UK company Faulty Optic 13 created a series of performances which showed strange characters living in strange worlds. The work of this company was characterized as the creation of micro-worlds. Puppets dwell happily and easily in micro-worlds. Under Covid, the enforced use of the screen has reminded us of the importance of these micro-worlds in which the puppets live in dystopian ways, with their own rules. In Faulty Optic's Snuffhouse Dustlouse, for instance, the characters keep their parents in their home pickled in jars. If we find this strange and grotesque, let us contemplate the efforts that people in, for instance, Ecuador in April 2020, had to make in order to preserve the bodies of their dead when there were no spaces in the cemeteries and, due to the high death rate at this time, insufficient personnel to pick them up.
With my students we spent some time creating micro-worlds for their puppets to live in. These micro-worlds varied. Some were plastic, some were paper; some were under water. All showed puppets in limited situations working through the rituals of their daily lives. If I insist on this point, it is because I am increasingly struck by the resemblance that human lives have at times to those of puppets. That freedom is always a concept contingent on perception and on our own dreaming. Alongside these creations of microworlds and dystopia, two other factors became important: the use of domestic space, the ordinary, and autobiography.
The experience of being at home draws attention to the mundane, the ordinary, the presentation of our own living spaces. We worked in bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms. We invited others into our personal daily living spaces like never before 14 .
In addition to this, people expressed shock at the experience they were going through. How long would it last? Governments were scared to say that it would last two, or more, years. The 'roadmap to release' became a catchphrase.
But the emotional experience of suddenly being in danger; families in danger; lives changed so much led to a focus on people's personal experiences; their personal lives and narratives. Autobiographical theatre has often had a focus on the domestic: mental health, pain, illness and intimacy. I would like to comment on two more really important aspects of working on the screen and from home. The first pertains to microtheatre. I am convinced that in some way the pandemic has reminded us of key puppetry principles and practices. It was patently obvious from very early on that we were not going to be able to stage large productions with multi-operated puppets; that we were going to have to do puppet shows for tiny audiences, or on the screen, and that we were going to have to do solo performances for a while. Microtheatre, which had been growing already, before the pandemic, has become the norm for many puppeteers. Microtheatre is theatre done in small spaces, often with only one performer, often with only one in the audience, or done, these days, on the screen. But microtheatre has been part and parcel of popular puppetry practice since time immemorial. The itinerant glove puppeteer, touring with her/his booth, setting up the booth in a town square, was performing microtheatre. Let us look at this booth. What a perfect socially distanced and masked performance! The performer in their cloaked-off space, unable to breathe upon others as they are surrounded by the booth. In recent years microtheatre has also included forms of theatre such as suitcase theatre and the Brazilian form Lambe Lambe: theatre in a box. The beauty of this kind of theatre is that it can be made and performed with everyday materialsoften with card and paper onlyand quite cheaply.
Over the last year microtheatre has mushroomed to a huge extent as performers, creating theatre from their own homes have used their own suitcases, bags and boxes to bring all that they need to the performance space. Microtheatre also enables precision and clarity. In this form of theatre, each student has their own story which they carry with them; they don't need to share props or puppets. It To consider all of these tendencies and to focus on the learning that has taken place over the last year, I would summarize that the last year has of course not been easy for puppeteers. Their touring circuits and incomes have disappeared and their habitual modes of working disrupted beyond our previous imaginings. What has happened, however, is a return to some of the traditional I have sometimes said in the past that in order to gain status within mainstream theatre over the last twenty years, puppetry has had to absorb some of the tropes of 'high' art. Puppetry within live theatre, within opera and within landmark institutions, with large troupes and puppetry handlers has given muchneeded status to the art. In being deprived of these possibilities however, I wonder if we have returned to some of the ways and means of popular puppetry where the puppeteer did everything and presented everything and where the puppet was an extension of the puppeteer's own body, at the end of their arm or climbing out of their pocket.
Puppetry is eternally adaptable. The puppets will come out wherever or in whichever circumstances we find ourselves. They are irrepressible!