The Art of Trust: Documenting the Act of Puppetry is a spring event series funded by the JHI’s Program for the Arts. In collaboration with filmmaker Fiona MacPherson, the series will produce two short documentaries capturing the exploratory, playful, and deeply focused encounters that unfold when artists gather to engage with Handspring puppets—taking them out of their crates to think, talk, and work together. Ahead of the spring events, organizer Lawrence Switzky offers a glimpse into the world of the Handspring Puppet Company.
We are in the garage of a house overlooking Kalk Bay, a fishing village and vacation spot outside Cape Town, South Africa, looking closely at some of the most ingenious puppets ever constructed. They comprise the casts of two productions by Handspring Puppet Company. Handspring is renowned for developing the larger-than-life-sized animal heroes of the English National Theatre blockbuster War Horse, but the worlds these puppets inhabit are far from those spectacular battlefields. One is a set of marionettes from their breakthrough puppet play for adults from 1985, Episodes of an Easter Rising: two lesbian lovers, a wounded Black freedom fighter (he would have been called a “terrorist” by the apartheid regime), and the various people who intersect with their lives around a rural farm and factory. The others are modified bunraku rod puppets from a 2010 production, Or You Could Kiss Me, two versions of gay men called Mr. A and Mr. B at opposite ends of the life course—in their early 20s and their mid 80s—based loosely on Handspring co-founders Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. We are considering these puppets as answers to a question that Handspring confronted at very different moments in their career: what can puppetry, usually associated with fantasy, show us about ordinary lives and everyday circumstances that a theatre of human actors could not?
It has become something of an artistic rite of passage among Handspring’s collaborators to visit their garage, take the puppets out of the flight-crates associated with one production or another, and engage in exploration and conversation. We have gathered with filmmaker Fiona MacPherson as part of the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Program for the Arts series to make two short documentaries that will, we hope, capture and convey something of the playfulness and absorbed seriousness of these encounters. Neil Bartlett, the British playwright of Or You Could Kiss Me, has claimed that he learned about the art of writing for silence, the state that puppets naturally occupy, from one of these “unboxing” experiences. He then focused the action of his script on the unspoken intimacies, searching gestures, and conspiratorial quiet of queer love.
Taking the puppets out of a crate often involves untangling a jumble of wooden body parts and dodging the snapping bicycle cables that attach controls to limbs. Basil and Adrian are unsentimental about their puppets, which bear unsanded chisel marks and are frequently hollowed out, refurbished, and even re-carved before and during a production. But they are deeply thoughtful about the reverberant capacities of a “simple” form—engineered with enormous skill and artistic sensibility—that manifests complex metaphorical meanings and metaphysical visions. Modernity, in Max Weber’s formulation, promoted a disenchanted world, where the subject stood apart from and gazed out over a plane of inert objects. The puppet seems to reignite a pre-modern self, one that dwells in the paradoxes of self and other and matter and spirit that have long fascinated mystics. As the British philosopher Simon Critchley has recently put it, devotional objects in the Christian tradition both need to be revered because they are a divine creation and abjured because they keep us distant from divine communion. As he says, “Matter is both affirmed in its specific thingliness and transcended.” The relic is a part that functions by calling into sensuous apprehension a whole of great vastness and power, more strongly than a direct path to that whole (if such a thing were possible) ever could; part and whole are strangely dependent on each other. And so it is with the puppet, in Handspring’s hands: Joey in War Horse is both a particular plow-horse from Devon, recruited into service with thousands of other horses in World War I, and the horseness that had never previously appeared on a stage, even when actual horses were led across it; Little Amal, the twelve-foot-tall puppet of a refugee girl who strode across Europe in 2021, is one child in search of her mother and all children displaced by the Syrian civil war. This kind of built-in ambiguity permits audiences to look at a puppet like Amal and say, at the same time, “This is wondrous” and “This is me.”
Since they formed their company, Handspring have established a reputation as leading puppeteer-philosophers, not only skilled makers but also thoughtful and trenchant guides to the operations and possibilities of this strange and subtle art. Unlike traditional philosophy, however, puppetry is unsystematic: it explores the shifting interfaces of materials like flesh and wood, our relationships with a world we share with other things (in which we are also a kind of thing), through supple moment-to-moment improvisations.
One of Handspring’s major platforms has been that the puppet fights to sustain life on stage with as much effort as any actor would struggle to feign death, and that breath, passing through the operator to the puppet, is the basis of that life. Handspring’s primarily ethical approach to puppetry, in which the puppeteer is obliged to visibly sustain and care for the life of the puppet, often at the cost of significant physical pain and the surrender of their own expressiveness and subjectivity to a piece of carved wood, was at first surprising and controversial. The eyes of their performers are fixed intently on the puppet—its eyelines, its movements, its thoughts (which are inseparable from its movements)—rather than on the audience and each other. Handspring’s approach has now become a standard practice in many places, particularly the UK, where so many of the leaders in the puppetry community worked on War Horse. Most puppeteers there today will tell you, “Well, of course, you begin with the breath.” Forged during the apartheid era, when hard lines carved up the landscape into racist geographies and separated person from person, their artistry comprises ever more exuberant blendings and blurrings—of one medium and another, of persons with other persons, of human and animal ontologies. Their productions, which are always collaborations with other artists and institutions, are enacted demonstrations of the interdependency and mutuality on which all our lives rely. Their art is, fundamentally, one of trust in each other and in belief in the impossible event that is nevertheless happening in front of us. It likewise makes perceptible the kinds of trust that structure and maintain relationships off the stage.
Our films set out to show students of puppetry how the design and operation of a joint, or the carving of a face, gives form to a way of life—often, one that is only dimly articulated or imagined. The puppets in Easter Rising are marionettes. They’re not good at lateral movement, but they can sit and stand and carry well, and they’re well suited to discussion. In that sense, this awkward form of puppetry, unusual for Handspring, was uniquely attuned to the needs of 1985, when discussions about gay love and interracial friendship needed to take place. Such conversations were not often permitted in South Africa’s theatre of actors but they could occur in the marginal and “minor” art of puppetry. Likewise, the new development of a swivel hip for the puppets in Or You Could Kiss Me made them capable of a range of actions that had not been available to single Handspring puppets before: swimming, playing squash, making love. Puppets are usually specialized to perform a few specific actions, but Mr. A and Mr. B are, so to speak, universal puppets. As playwright Bartlett has asserted, actors on London stages previously had to “do” gay rather than simply “being” gay. But the sheer unapologetic presence of the puppet—in its lack of interiority, in its silence, in the extraordinary gracefulness of these gliding, dancing, aging bodies—was the surprising vessel that smuggled an authentic way to be a gay body into the theatre and British culture more broadly.
Political theorist Achille Mbembe has recently proposed that we have entered a new age of animism, one that collapses the distance between persons and things, and where we seek not to differentiate ourselves from so-called objects but to merge with them. The long-cherished project of liberation as the escape from reification is, Mbembe believes, now shifting. In a related development, puppetry scholar Claudia Orenstein has shown that we are living through an extended “puppet moment”—one where puppetry is no longer a diversion for children or an archaism, but features centrally in culture (The Lion King, The Life of Pi, My Neighbour Totoro) and help us to conceptualize a range of questions and challenges, from the pervasiveness of connectivity to our possible domination by the intelligent machines we have made.
Out of a joint, an ethics. Out of a body made for multiple operators, a politics. Out of decades of decisions and discoveries that have revitalized an art form, Handspring have made a world. We want to bring some of the thinking behind and within that world to film and thereby to others.