Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects at the End of the Century

What is the situation of masks, puppets, and performing objects at the end of the century? Puppets and masks are central to some of the oldest forms of performance, and “performing object” is a term used by Frank Proschan to refer to “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance” (1983:4). In the Euro-American tradition, puppets, masks, and objects have always had a strong connection to folk theatre, popular theatre, and religion, but (or perhaps consequently) they have rarely been the subjects of sustained systematic academic attention in this century. The purpose of this issue of TDR is to give some attention to performing objects in the hope that more people will be inspired to examine this rich and wide area.

Much writing about puppet, mask, and object theatre is not distinctly defined as such. Instead, it often appears within the various literatures of folklore, anthropology, semiotics, art history, theatre history, drama, and performance studies. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about Northwest Coast Indian masks in 1975 not so much to describe what they did in performance (he didn’t), but to explain tribal kinship patterns. In this issue of TDR, Stephen Kaplin criticizes Scott Cutler Shershow (1995) and Harold B. Segel (1995) for eschewing direct attention to puppets themselves, in favor of a focus on definitions of popular culture or on the puppet as “a literary trope.” These criticisms point to something good writing on performing objects needs, whatever its methodology or critical perspective: attention to the objects themselves in performance. The submersion of performing object writing into other disciplines has meant that to a large extent it has been an invisible field. This invisibility—due to a lack of close, unified attention—may have helped protect the field in some ways, but it has also in many cases prevented us from understanding the intense and revelatory connections between performing objects as they have occurred in vastly different times and places. At present, things are changing. It is possible to consider studies of performing objects as a continuing, connected dialogue about different techniques in different cultures: traditional puppet and mask theatres, machine performance, projected images (whether shadow theatre, film, video, or computer graphics), and rituals. This issue of TDR seeks to make a contribution to such studies, whose scope I would like to briefly outline.

In Europe, the idea that puppet and mask theatre is a subject worthy of serious theoretical consideration emerged during the period of German romanticism, and is particularly evident in Kleist’s quirky and oblique 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (1918). Then, at the end of the 19th century, new thinking emerged in the suggestive, symbolist-oriented work of E.T.A. Hoffman (1946 [1819–1822]), Oscar Wilde (1909), Alfred Jarry (1965), W.B. Yeats (1921), and, above all, Edward Gordon Craig (1908, 1911, 1908–1929, 1918). The meaning of objects in philosophical, social, and psychological theory also covers a wide range, from Marx in Capital writing about the commodity as fetish object ([1867] 1972) to Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of subject-object relations (1994), Heidegger’s sense of “thingness” (1971), and Winnicott’s “transitional object” (1971). Their thinking suggests the ways in which theories of objects can take us far (or not so far) from the modest predicament of the puppet or mask.

In the early decades of the 20th century, avantgarde practitioners such as F.T. Marinetti ([1909] 1986), Wassily Kandinsky ([1912] 1982), Fernand Léger ([1913–1925] 1973), André Breton ([1935] 1969), and Oskar Schlemmer ([1925] 1961) valorized the performing object in three new ways: as an important link between European and non-European ritual performance; as a central aspect of traditional popular theatre with contemporary experimental possibilities; and, in a particularly new manner, as the central focus of what Léger called “machine aesthetics” (see also Rischbieter 1974; Plassard 1992). These practitioners’ theories frequently took the form of manifestos, a way of proclaiming that the essay in this issue by Peter Schumann continues (see also Schumann 1991).

In Russia...