Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope

11. Performing Spaces of Hope: Street Puppetry and the Aesthetics of Scale

Performing Spaces of Hope Street Puppetry and the Aesthetics of Scale PETRA HROCH Imagine a four-storey elephant moving slowly toward you in the city street. Imagine a giant “little” girl inhabiting the streets where you live for a few days and performing ordinary daily rituals—showering, dressing, eating, sleeping , and going for a walk—on an extraordinary scale. If Royal de Luxe recently visited your city or town, such sights would not be mere figments of the imagination, but rather real events that actualize worlds one might never have imagined possible. The significance of scale in our everyday lives and on our experience of the places we inhabit is often overlooked and undertheorized.1 This chapter emphasizes the significance of scale on human experience in and of space by focusing on Royal de Luxe, a street puppet theatre company based in France, in the city of Nantes, whose mechanical players’ gigantic size relative to their audience is a defining characteristic of their performances. The company was founded in 1979 by Jean-Luc Courcoult and has since its inception created theatre in public spaces in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America (Harris 2007a, 1).2 In this chapter I suggest that differences in scale contribute to more than merely a quantitatively different spatial register; they create a qualitatively other—an aesthetically and affectively other— experience of space. The gigantic scale and resulting slow-motion mobility of the puppet performances Royal de Luxe creates in cities and towns around the world physically transform the everyday urban spaces we inhabit and bring into being an alternative affective dimension that audiences describe as feeling full of hope. 245 11 246 HOPE Setting the Scene: Puppet History Puppetry is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “minor” art form (1986, 16). “Minor” arts, according to these theorists, are always “political” and “collective” enunciations (17); they exist within and alongside “major” art forms but are less static (16). In other words, puppetry, like other “minor” arts, is not only materially but also institutionally more mobile. In this chapter I argue that mobility and scale are two of puppetry’s most socio-politically relevant attributes. The mobility and scale of puppets relative to the human body enable this performance art form to create alternative aesthetic and affective spaces within “everyday life”—spaces wherein convention can be challenged, the power of authority can be subverted, new sets of social relations can proliferate, and indeed, a hopeful atmosphere can be felt (Lefebvre 2002). Puppets have a long history of intervening in the social and political sphere. Puppetry is one of the most ancient forms of theatre; historians suspect that this form of performance art originated as part of religious rites before the world’s earliest written records (Baird 1965, 35). Puppetry is also perhaps the most geographically widespread form of theatrical performance (7). From their earliest known beginnings, puppets have been used to tell stories that supported the didactic religious, educative, and political ends of those in power (10). However, their physical versatility made puppets perfect vehicles for not only prescribing but also critically reflecting upon social or political states of affairs. In fact, although puppetry has had moments in history during which it was considered to be “high art,” its propensity for parody, profanity, bawdy comedy, caricature, and satire has classed it principally, at least among Western theatrical traditions, as a form of popular entertainment. The status of puppetry as a popular, folk, “low” art has contributed, in turn, to puppeteers’ ongoing freedom to subvert canonical aesthetic standards as well as to take certain social and political liberties.3 To describe puppetry as a “minor” art is, of course, not necessarily a comment on puppets’ often small size. In fact, although the history of smallerthan -human-sized puppets, figures, or dolls extends back tens of thousands of years into the history of art (e.g., the small limestone statuette of the Woman from Willendorf from around 33 000 BCE), large-scale “puppet” figures such as ancient effigies also have a long history in communal rituals, festivals, and spectacles. In an issue of Puppetry International devoted to “mega-puppets,” American puppeteer and puppet historian John Bell (2007) points out that an “interesting aspect of giant puppets” is that they are “often absent from lists of various forms of puppetry throughout the world” (26). He notes that often in historical records, “the focus is wholly on smallerthan...