The following are descriptions of the individual components of the diagram. (Computer imaging by Najma Harisiades)
. “Kermit the Frog”—star of Jim Henson’s Muppets and arguably the most widely recognized pup-pet character on the planet.
. “The God Face”—by Peter Schumann. The arrival and setting up of this " tall rod puppet marks the beginning of Bread and Puppet’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus Pageant performance.
It requires eight performers to operate. These two figures represent the two most influential purvey-ors of late-th-century American puppet theatre. (Photo by Ron Simon)
. A Kayon Shadow figure from Indonesian wayang kulit represents the Tree of Life. It is used to indicate act divisions and the start and end of performances. It is also used to represent scenic ele-ments, such as mountains, forests, or palaces. The Kayon is the cosmic ground on which the shadow play is enacted, hence its use here as the body of the “Puppet Tree.” (Photo by John Koopman)
. A Malaysian dalang, or puppet master, singlehandedly operates all the characters from the complex narratives, drawn from classical Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. (Photo by Leonard Bezzola)
. “Mother Earth”—another giant rod figure mounted on a wheeled carriage, from the Bread and Puppet Pageant. This figure engulfs the entire cast of hundreds of performers at the end of the per-formance, lights the fire that consumes the representation of evil, and then exits the field with ev-erybody in its skirts and arms. Figures and represent the extremes of the dimension of Ratio of performer to object. (Photo by Ron Simon)
. Sergei Obratzov’s love duet strips down the hand puppet to its most essential elements. (Photo courtesy of Stephen Kaplin)
. A Japanese bunraku puppet and performer, from the highly refined tradition of puppetry. (Photo by Harri Peccinotti)
. Antique Czech marionettes from Faust, from the collection of Vit Horej and “Hurvinek,” the famed costar of Josef Skupa’s marionette theatre in Prague. (Photo by David Schmidlapp)
. Stop-action “claymation” figures from the Aardman Studios (makers of Wallace and Grommit) are manipulated in the temporal space between blinks of the film camera’s eye. (Photo by Richard Lang)
. Stop-action dinosaur armature built by Jim Danforth for the movie Caveman (). Puppet fig-ures such as these had been staples of movie special effects until they were superseded by computer animation figures. (Photo by Jim Danforth)
. Two mechanical dinosaurs from the movie Jurassic Park (). The T-Rex operated via a /-scale Waldo, which encoded the movements into a computer that then translated them into motion for the full-scale puppet. The whole rig could be operated by four puppeteers.
. Virtual puppetry requires new ways of interfacing with the computer-generated environment.
These motion-sensor gloves, on the hands of their inventor, James Kramer, allow the wearer to per-ceive the shape and firmness of virtual objects. (Photo by Thomas Heinser)
. “Manny Calavera,” the star of LucasArts computer adventure game, Grim Fandango, represents the digitalized future of the performing object. (Image by LucasArts)
. NASA’s Martian Sojourner represents the furthest extreme of remote-control manipulation pos-sible with today’s technology. (Image by Don Foley)
A Puppet Tree
Stephen Kaplin
Craig further classified puppets according to the “materials from which [they are] made,” “costume” and the “country of origin.” Issues of taxonomic clarity aside, such systems hardly do justice to today’s plethora of new tech-nologies and hybrid styles of puppet theatre. It may be good to distinguish be-tween a Chinese shadow puppet and a Sicilian marionette, but much more remains to be said.
But if the puppet/performer dynamic is taken as the starting point, then a useful new kind of classification system can be constructed. Two quantifiable aspects of this dynamic are distance and ratio. By “distance” I mean the level of separation and contact between the performer and the object being ma-nipulated—beginning at the point of absolute contact (where performer and object are one) and running through psychic, body, remote, and temporal de-grees of contact. “Ratio” refers to the number of performing objects in com-parison to the numbers of performers. Thus a “:” ratio indicates a direct transfer of energy from a single performer to a single performing object. A
“:many” ratio means that one object is the focus of the energies of diverse manipulators, as with Bread and Puppet’s giant Mother Earth Puppet, or a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. “Many:” indicates a single per-former manipulating many separate objects, as a Javanese dalang does during the course of a wayang kulit performance.
I shall use these two aspects of distance as the X and Y axes for plotting the various permutations of the object/performer relationship. The map itself takes the shape of a tree, or more exactly, a kayon—the fan-shaped shadow figure of Indonesian wayang kulit performances, made from delicately punctured and carved buffalo hide, that represents the universe in the form of the Cosmic Tree.
The kayon is used before and after the performance to frame the play; it also functions as an act curtain and a set unit during the show. The central spine of the kayon is superimposed on the Y axis, representing the degree of distance, beginning at the point of absolute contact and extending upward to the most tenuous degree of remote contact. The X axis measures the ratio—with the left side of the diagram representing many: and the right side representing :many.
At the point of intersection of the two axes—a zone of absolute contact—
no displacement between performer and performed exists at all. But once ac-tors begin to represent themselves onstage (as do Spalding Gray or Annie Sprinkle) a gap begins to open up between the performer and what is being performed—their stage personae. Even if these personae recreate their offstage personalities precisely, it is still a highly edited, crafted, and shaped self that is being savored by the audience. It is this presence of others, the audience, which compels the first split in the unity between performer and performed.
At first the displacement is merely a shift in mental calibration to “perfor-mance mode.” But the psychic distance widens as the performer’s role be-comes more distinct from the performer. A character role in a play has an objective existence distinct from the actor. Hamlet or Medea is the “object”
that becomes embodied in a set of gestures, moves, and utterances enacted by the actor. The role is or becomes autonomous. In some instances, character roles can be flexible, shaping themselves to the impulses and whims of the performers. But in some genres of traditional performance, such as in Chinese opera, roles are tightly defined, with every gesture and expression choreo-graphed, and every detail of facial makeup and costume codified.
At some point, the increasing distance from the performing object means that the actor’s own body can no longer physically accommodate the role.
Makeup and costume, prosthetic devices, wigs, and body extensions help to a degree, but eventually the performing object reaches the limits of the human body’s anatomy and must begin to emerge with a physical presence of its own. This first happens with the mask. A mask is an object totally external to
A Puppet Tree
the performer, a sculptural expression imposed from without. To be effective onstage, it must appear to be articulated from within by the actor’s own im-pulses. It doesn’t alter the actor’s center of gravity, but it re-contours her sur-face, while remaining in intimate contact with the flesh beneath its shell.
As long as the mask’s features correspond more or less with the actor’s own face, the character’s center of gravity remains united firmly to the performer’s.
But a mask doesn’t need to be limited to or confined by human physiog-nomy. It can be oversized, so that the actor peers through the mouth or nos-trils (as can be seen in vejigantes, the horned demon masks of Puerto Rico, or traditional European Carnival “fathead” characters); or it can be shifted away from the face entirely, to the top of the head, for example (like the lion mask/
headdresses in The Lion King, which are modeled on African antecedents). At this point, a new threshold is crossed and the performing object has become detached from the actor’s body, developing its own center of gravity, its own structure, its own presence.
It is at this point, where the center of gravity of the performing object and the performer are distinct from each other, that the term “puppet” can be used. But like all the different zones of contact I outline here, the divisions are not sharp. There is a liminal zone where the actor in an oversized mask and the puppeteer in an all-encompassing bodysuit overlap (as in sports team mas-cots or theme park stroll-about characters). But once the performing object wriggles free from constraints of human anatomy and proportion, there is nothing, beyond the practicalities of engineering, to stop it from drastically morphing in form or scale. It could telescope upward to two or three times human size and be supported from below by a backpack or other frame de-vice, as with Trinidad Carnival mas; or it might shrink to less than a foot tall, its center of gravity migrating to a useful human appendage, such as with hand puppets. Once the object is liberated from the body, it no longer needs to have a one-to-one correlation with its power source. A puppeteer can operate two hand puppets simultaneously, while a giant Bread and Puppet–style rod puppet or an elaborate Japanese bunraku puppet needs several performers to be properly manipulated.
As the physical distance between the performer and the object widens, the amount of technology needed to bridge the gap increases. Moving the puppet’s center of gravity outside the body of the puppeteer requires more and more sophisticated linking systems. Rod puppets use a direct, mechanical linkage to support, lift, torque, and lever the spines and limbs of the puppet figure. One of the simplest rod puppet is the Indonesian wayang golek, with a center rod that runs through a T-shaped shoulder block and attaches to the neck of the solid, carved, wooden head, and two thinner rods attached loosely with knotted string to each hand. The puppeteer operates it from below using both hands; if necessary, the arm rods can be held in the same hand as the body rod. One of the most mechanically complex styles of rod puppets is the bunraku puppet, a type that has become more popular in the West in recent years. It is operated from behind, with parts of the body manipulated by sev-eral puppeteers. The main operator controls the head through a control grip in the puppet’s chest, which is also the locus of separate lever controls for ar-ticulating such features as eyes, brows, and mouth. The shoulder block is sus-pended from cords attached to this center rod to give the puppet maximum articulation of the neck. The same puppeteer controls the right arm with a short rod that is hinged onto the lower arm, or attached solidly to the elbow.
Often wrists and even fingers are articulated for greater gestural expressive-ness. A second puppeteer controls the left arm, and a third manipulates the feet. If more precise manipulation is required, the operators can slip their fin-gers into loops in the palms of the puppet’s hands to handle and pick up props
Stephen Kaplin
directly. Bunraku puppets are notoriously difficult to master, in part because of their complex construction and in part because of the difficulty of melding together the energies of three operators. Even the simple act of walking takes great effort and study to be convincing.
Marionettes use a more tenuous mechanical linkage; they are suspended from above via strings (or in some cases, wires), which means that control of the puppet’s limbs is maintained through a precise play of gravity against the shortening and lengthening of the strings in relation to each other. A simple head turn, for example, requires the operation of four strings: two shoulder strings are pulled up slightly to take the weight of the puppet body off the head and free it to drop forward; then two head strings are altered in length by tilting the main control, which pulls one ear or the other upwards and causes the puppet’s face to turn in that direction. Every articulation of the body quires additional strings to control. The simplest marionette from Rajastan re-quires only two: a loop from the top of the puppet’s heavy wooden head up to the hand of the performer and then down to the middle of the back, and then another from one puppet hand to the other. A European-style marionette re-quires or , and a Chinese string puppet often has or more.
No matter how attenuated and subtle the control linkages become, rod and marionette puppets still give the operator a linear, mechanical path into the puppet. But as distance between the performing object and its manipulator in-creases, operating with a direct line of sight becomes untenable. It is possible for puppets to be controlled remotely with hydraulic or radio devices, operat-ing systems that are quite commonly used for film and television special ef-fects. Puppets like the dinosaur heads used in close-up shots in Jurassic Park () may be articulated by dozens of separate servo-motors, which can be operated by a team of puppeteers live on the set, or more distantly via com-puter. As the level of available technology climbs, so does the ability to oper-ate objects at greoper-ater and greoper-ater removes. And conversely, the greoper-ater the distance between object and performer, the greater the level of technology needed to span the gap. In early television viewers saw an extreme of such long-distance manipulatory feats when they watched a little sand buggy roving around the rocky surface of Mars, beaming back three-dimensional pictures and nibbling at boulders while its crew of operators sat millions of miles away in Houston.
Physical proximity between performing object and performer is only one dimension of the term “distance.” There can also be a separation between an object and its image. You can notice this separation if you pull a shadow pup-pet away from the screen and back toward its light source. When the puppup-pet touches the screen, the silhouetted image cast on the focal plane corresponds exactly to the outlines of the object. But as it pulls away from the screen, the shadow image starts to increase in size and become blurrier. The object per-forming before the audience’s gaze in this case is no longer the puppet held in the puppeteer’s hand, but the image of that puppet seen on the focal plane of the shadow screen. If the image is captured by a camera lens instead of a sheet of fabric, then a further distancing is possible: whereas a lamp can illuminate only a few square yards of cloth, the video camera passes the image to millions upon millions of screens simultaneously. The camera also allows a further bi-furcation, a temporal schism between object and image that can be exploited by using the techniques of stop-motion animation. These techniques—objects or poseable models manipulated by hand as the camera is advanced frame by frame, giving the illusion of motion to the object—are almost as old as cinema itself. An obvious difficulty is that the animator may spend weeks or months posing and reposing objects to make a moving image that is only a few min-utes long. This technique does not encourage spontaneity.
A Puppet Tree
But more recent technical developments in the field of digital imaging and computer-generated imagery (already a staple of film special effects, as evi-denced by the dinosaur herds of Jurassic Park, the spiffy buff surfaces of Toy Story [], and the teaming arthropodal swarms of Antz []) have made real-time puppet animation quite practical. By using motion capture suits and data-glove interfaces to stream digitized movement data directly into the com-puter, fantastically realistic motion can be given to virtual objects, or objects scanned digitally from real hard copy. The computer-generated avatar becomes a sort of virtual body mask or diving suit, which allows the actor to inhabit the digital environment. With the motion capture suit, the performer can again achieve a kind of direct contact with the object, performing as though from inside the object. But unfortunately, at this level of technology, the complex-ity of the systems themselves creates impediments; although the cyber-puppe-teer is capable of wondrous feats of real-time animation, a small army of technicians and programmers is required to run the system before he or she can take the first step in a motion-capture suit. And once the digitized actors record their object’s movements, a whole other team of specialists must step in to take that data and further massage and render it before it can be finally du-plicated in some format that can be shared with others. No wonder at the present time such technology is incredibly expensive, out of reach for anyone lacking access to deep corporate pockets. However, probably in the not-too-distant future such technology will become cheap enough and easy enough to use to be accessible to individuals and smaller production companies. Already something like digital avatars exist for virtual immersion arcade games and for players on video game networks. It is only a matter of time before some enter-prising puppeteer converts one for use in a theatrical performance.
References
Craig, Edward Gordon
“The History of Puppets.” The Marionette :–.
Jurkowski, Henryk
“Transcodification of the Sign Systems of Puppets.” Semiotica , /:–.
Proschan, Frank
“The Semiotic Study of Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects.” Semiotica
, /:–.
Segel, Harold B.
Pinocchio’s Progeny. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shershow, Scott Cutler
Puppets and “Popular” Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.