Can the puppet dance?

In the waning days of April, the Aerowaves network’s remarkable annual dance platform Spring Forward unfolded within the city of Dublin. I wouldn’t begin to try to describe the entire festival programme here. Instead, I want to focus on and characterise performances that indirectly or directly involved puppets. By ‘puppets’ I don’t necessarily refer to physical objects, but rather to productions where a dancer’s movement or the choreography evokes the evolution of puppetry or, more specifically, the trope of being manipulated on strings.

Deyan Georgiev’s solo Wired, for example, very much imitates the motions of marionettes. In a grey space illuminated by cold light, a man stands alone as the last survivor of a destroyed world. The icy lights focus on a stage filled with red strings or cords. His gestures begin slowly, as he winds and unwinds himself from the strings. His body bends at the joints, evoking the physicality of marionettes. When this anthropomorphic figure tears off the strings I become excited. Can the performance transcend the constantly repeated metaphor associated with puppets? The answer doesn’t take long to reveal itself as the figure, freed from its irregular cage of strings, soon finds itself trapped in another prison (a circular booth). Ultimately Wired beckons forth the very essence of marionette yet remains aesthetically shackled by the stereotype of strings and/or manipulation.

In Joachim Maudet’s Welcome, Cie Les Vagues evokes anthropomorphic puppetry through a different kind of movement. Three dancers (Joaquim Caudet, Sophie Lebre and Pauline Bigot) stand in stoic unity, their countenances locked in states of arrested animation and fixated upon a singular point. An illusion is cast upon our senses, akin to the impressive sensation one experiences while immersed in a puppet theatre performance: we hear a voice coming from somewhere, but the puppet’s face remains immobile. According to the rules of puppet theatre, we viewers are willing to believe that a puppet is speaking even though its ‘body’ is not capable of producing speech. As the dancers slowly approach each other their facial muscles remain rigid, but their speech and greetings (to us in the audience, who are addressed by name) elongate as if the words are issuing from somewhere other than themselves. The puppet-like effect intensifies further towards the end of the performance when the cast showcases choreography for their tongues. This usually secreted part of the human anatomy becomes a kind of separate, living entity that is controlled by each one of them. The scene is puppet-like, and strangely captivating.
 
Although I was hardly able to recover from the enthusiasm engendered in me by Welcome, the perfectly-paired Believe by Structure Couple immediately followed. A man and a woman (Lotus Eddé Khouri and Christophe Macé) continuously perform peculiar trembling and vibrating gestures to repetitive music. Their contained yet frenzied motion seems to originate from their centres, shaking their helpless limbs. The work’s visual imagery once again evokes a different type of puppetry – the kind of marionette that possesses a stout stick, anchoring it to the crossbar, while individual strings control the articulation of its arms and legs. The noticeable struggle of this duo’s quivering, which despite the over-all constraint is suffused with a great energy, suggests the idea of marionettes trying to break free as well as invisible manipulators who refuse to release control, constantly restarting the music and forcing these pathetic dancer-puppets into action.

While not directly tied to puppetry per se, Tamara Gvozdenovic and Kangding Ray’s Metronomia delves into the peripheral realm of robotic theater – a branch of performance deeply entwined with the very origins of puppetry. Six anthropomorphically styled women shift about in perfect unity to the mechanical dubstep music of Kangding Ray. They are like robots or dolls shifting in circles, faces staring rigidly in one direction; their gestures, too, are mechanical and devoid of emotion, and repeated in a programmed manner. They never look at each other, yet their meticulous kinetic patterns are either synchronised or carefully staggered. The production can be interpreted as a possible vision of the future, and a theatre dominated by artificial intelligence. The notion of dancers transformed into robots is enthralling, but after a while the choreography’s shrewdly calculated reiterations become monotonous.

Intertwining threads of illusion with physicality, these Spring Forward performances dissolved the boundaries between puppet theatre and other, perhaps more humanised forms of performance-making. Aerowaves thus provides an opportunity for the art of dance to transcend mere flesh-based embodiment while still resonating with the essence of human experience.

Zsófia Bálint