Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning…We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, yet nobody knows better how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships.
(Merleau Ponty, 1945/2002, p. xxii-xxiii)
In reflecting upon my applied arts practice the alarming truth that I am a man guided by puppets is an inescapable one. Somewhere between others and me, puppets invariably emerge. For as long as I can remember my motivation has been to engage with the imagination, especially of the young. It was never my intention to become a puppeteer. The continuing magnetism of puppets for me has not rested in them as objects but in what they allow others to make of themselves. The puppets give voice to stories that may never have otherwise been told. They make makers out of those who have been persuaded that they are unable to make anything creative. The puppet engages audiences in irresistible, anarchic and surreal ways. And for me as an applied arts practitioner the dynamic of others, me and puppets is constantly surprising and stretches my practice into a future that is unimaginable to me in the present moment. But on retrospective reflection I can see how that future was suggesting itself back then. This piece is a simple, personal tale that emerges from thinking about reflection through applied arts.
THE FISHERMANS DREAM
We can follow this better if we think of a fisherman making a net. As he works, care and meaning are present in every flick of the finger. He draws his thread, he ties the knots, enclosing emptiness with forms whose exact shape corresponds to an exact function. Then the net is thrown into the water, it is dragged to and fro, with the tide, against the tide, in many complex rhythms. A fish is caught, an uneatable fish, or a common fish good for stewing, maybe a fish of many colours, or a rare fish, or a poisonous fish or at moments of grace a golden fish. There is however a subtle distinction between theatre and fishing that must be underlined. In the case of the well-made net, it is the fisherman’s luck whether a good or a bad fish is caught. In the theatre, those who tie the knots are also responsible for the quality of the moment that is ultimately caught in their net. It is amazing―the fisherman in his action influences the quality of the fish that lands in his net! (Brook, 1993, P.84)
Early on in my workshops the puppet Abdullah the fisherman often enters. He is one of Four Abdullahs who end up sharing their wealth with a whole nation. Abdullah the Fisherman is poor with many mouths to feed. He is also a hopeless fisherman. Two things change his fortune. The first is Abdullah the Baker who keeps giving the fisherman bread without wanting anything in return. Second is that his wife advises Abdullah to break his habits and fish in a different place. Abdullah follows her advice and as soon as he casts his net it becomes very heavy. He has caught a merman – Abdullah the Merman, who offers the fisherman jewels in exchange for fruit. The fisherman repays his debt to the baker and then takes jewels to the market to sell where he is immediately arrested as the thief who stole the Queen’s jewels. He is dragged through the streets and taken straight in front of the king, whose name is also Abdullah. The king is amazed when he hears the fisherman’s story and he makes him prime minister. The story ends with the king deciding that all this new found wealth from the bed of the ocean should be shared amongst everyone and so nobody in that country goes hungry or without a house to live in.
Early on into my journey as a puppeteer, my performing partner emigrated so circumstances dictated that I needed a new show. It had to be put on fast and performed solo. I had discovered that as a performer I needed to see the audience. As I searched for a tale to tell, the above story found me and gave birth to several other theatrical inventions – a storyteller, a magic cat and a baddie -F.L.Schmang, the greatest brain in the universe, who wants to catch the cat, stop the storyteller and close the Gap – the Gap through which the storyteller, cat and stories mysteriously arrive in different venues. The Four Abdullah puppets were made in one week using good toilet paper to fashion four papier-mâchéd new characters that would fit in the rucksack of the storyteller. They were to appear 1001 times over fifteen and a half years.
Although each Abdullah was much smaller than me, when held up with my focus as puppeteer on the puppet, the audience’s attention was focused on the puppet. And not only was it focused there but the intensity of that focus was different than when they were focused on me. Their disbelief is instantly suspended so that without any psychological character complexity they can read the happiness, sadness and anger of these simple puppets. Remember this is painted toilet paper that they are looking at. Obviously it is not the emotions of toilet paper that a workshop audience are seeing. The simple act of Abdullah the fisherman entering the space at the beginning of a workshop hooks a group in ways that they don’t expect. Their imaginations are irresistibly drawn in.
The fisherman is giving me everybody’s attention. There is an instant unconscious commonality in the room. In other words, the group is becoming present with each other and me in a single, simple and transparent moment. This does not guarantee that this presence will be a lasting one but it’s a good start. We are in a workshop though and they are about to create something themselves and this will entail risk and they need to feel safe. The fisherman on his stick provides evidence that if they perform with a puppet the focus will not be on them: the focus will be on a puppet.
The fisherman at the beginning of a workshop permits us a license to play. He’s a little man who is not a little man who engages and says, “you can”. How does he do this? He doesn’t say so in so many words. He demonstrates the license by showing that in this space here and now there is an ability that we hold in common. That ability is our ability to read. Read not words but objects. From almost the moment we begin to play we manipulate and transform an object. The fisherman reminds us of that moment in our life when we haven’t learnt we can’t yet. I tell the people in the room that the fisherman is made of toilet paper and so we all know that toilet paper doesn’t have emotions. We hope not. Then the fisherman’s head goes down and he sinks his eyes towards the floor and walks slowly along his imaginary ground. How does he feel? Sad. All of us know he feels sad and most of us can feel his palpable sadness in our guts. We read it, together.
So the fisherman puppet is a mirror of childhood and shared abilities. Now, in the workshop we begin to make our own puppets and the story of them – then – there unfolds further. Card, newspaper and everyday objects are transformed into animatable beings by animate beings in ways that none of us could have imagined. As we create of ourselves in our own ways we play in a paradox. The paradox is that we simultaneously control a process and the process controls us as the puppet takes on a life of its own through our hands. This symbiotic flow displays its hold in the same way the special low hum we hear that accompanies a party of children eating ice cream fills the space. There is a moment of joy as the realization dawns that expectation is being exceeded. The transformation that is happening to the newspaper is replicated by a transformation that is happening within the individuals making that transformation. The character taking shape through the hands of each maker is also happening in their mind’s eye. These makers can be seen imagining conversations with their embryonic paper on a stick characters long before anyone else in the room can see a shape. Parallel inner and outer processes are at play and this allows story to be told that may never otherwise have seen the light of day. Sometimes this manifests in informal chats around table and at other times puppets begin to speak to each other and tales begin to emerge. A platform though is built in the group that allows performance and in just a few hours a dynamic social dreaming has become a complete creative process.
It was long ago the story of that fisherman found me. The puppet then stepped right out of its show into a fully participatory space but the story of an inclusive gift economy that emerged from deep below the surface, from the unknown, remained. When guiding a workshop I have an idea of where we are aiming to get to, more ideas about how we are going to get there but no idea about who is going to come into the room or the look of each individual creation they might make – much less how they will blend with each other to create the bigger whole. I know, though, that the fisherman is an ally at the beginning, that we are going ‘to fish’ together and that they will find themselves somewhere in the process of making a puppet. In each workshop, to paraphrase the bard, the imagination bodies forth and finds local habitation and a name.
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
It happened by accident, by chance. Thirty years ago when I was thirty, I walked into a friend’s flat just as he was starting a puppet company. I offered to help with some administration to lessen his evident stress. My friend accepted my offer and invited me to meet him in a hall the next day. I did this and was instructed that I was to be the narrator of the show and that I would make a puppet representing myself as narrator and another of a Condor.
An unknown universe of puppets in which there were books, a history, professionals and distinctive performances found me. And I found, in time, that I had autonomy within a whole creative process. I could realise visions and make and animate characters and tell stories and produce theatre. Everything was up for grabs, everything mattered and anything was possible. By accident a practice emerged that made sense to and of me. Many years later an artist in our collaborative, cross-art form company described Workshop, a practice we in the company treat as an integral and distinctive form of practice, as the art of anomaly. How much of what we learn is accidental? How much do our lessons depend on being given permission to make mistakes? Or indeed, how much can develop from permission to explore the seemingly frivolous activity of making a puppet and bring to life?
WORKSHOP IS A WAY TO CREATIVELY TELL OUR STORIES
A long time after that catalytic collision with the Chilean, I began to research workshop as a distinctive form of contemporary arts practice. I was doing a Masters Degree in Applied Drama and interviewing practitioners from different creative practices on the question: What is Workshop? One of these practitioners was my Chilean friend who had played such a large, if unconscious, role in initiating this journey. He said, ”Every workshop tells its own story. It is a story that is told then and there by those people. One thing leads to the next and to the next. It is a unique story. It is told then and there by those people and can never be told again.”
Although my practice has moved in all sorts of different directions, the puppet remains at its heart. My eldest son, when he was seven years old, wrote a piece of homework about the jobs people did our small town in Devon. He wrote that there were bus drivers, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, road cleaners and puppeteers. As I mused about his perception it dawned on me that he was right. A quirk in the structure of the universe meant that there were an unusually high number of puppeteers in our town. In a town of 5000, I could think of at least 15 puppeteers. My idea was that we all collaborated to make a huge show in a day called The Biggest Puppet Show on Earth!! And so, some months later, 15 puppeteers ran 8 concurrent workshops with 250 participants and created a show called The Guests of Chance. Later on that day, the same number crammed into the Civic Hall to watch.
Everything about this event exceeded my expectations: the way the workshop artists collaborated, how seemingly disparate random parts suddenly clicked to make a whole, the quality of all that was made and the effect of it all on the those there and beyond into the town. I had no idea that this much could happen in a single day.
This event affected three areas of my practice. It gave me a new form – making huge puppet shows of high quality in short amounts of time that reflected something special about those who made the show. It showed me that working alone was not the best way forward to expand my practice and thirdly, it provided me with irrefutable empirical evidence that my participatory work was not an adjunct of my main artistic practice. It was my main practice. Why, when there are so many practitioners who bear witness and give articulate expression to the potential and power for transformation of creative, collective practise is that power and potential systemically sidelined?
THOSE JEWELS FROM THE OCEAN BED
In a recent schools workshop, 120 children were animating a West African story of emergence that tells the tale of why humans are so diverse. It is a story of a creative sky god, inquisitive sky spirits, intention and accident and beauty. The sky spirits mould children from mud. The week was arranged so that the story is told then all the students decide what they need to do to bring it to life as a puppet show. The first part of the week entails all of them making the puppets in class groups. This is followed by rehearsal and devising. They create a script and we make a soundtrack. On the fifth day the show is performed to other children and parents.
Early on in this process I noticed that these world creation myths or stories of emergence reflect the process that the children engage in and that this reflective aspect between form (the story) and content (the creative process) has a special resonance. In that recent workshop one class was making the children who in the story emerge in all sorts of different shades and colours. A hand went up. The girl looked thoughtful and then said, “I’ve just realised that we are doing the same thing as the sky spirits only we are moulding our children out of newspaper.” Of course, she was right and to some extent that is exactly the point of the story and those children breathing their life into that story – the reflection that they are diverse makers. As John Moat, the poet, painter and co-founder of the Arvon foundation said to me in a recent interview, ‘Workshop works and is authoritative because when alive it becomes a microcosm of the creative universe.”
If our universes are not creative, what are they?
WHO’S TEACHING WHO?
Part of the motivation for my research into Workshop as a distinctive form of practice emerged from my inability to get support to develop my practice outside the economic imperative of the next gig and a perception that I was part of a community of practice that was unsupported. The aim of the research was to find the right form to provide that support to those artists for whom Workshop was central.
And so I found myself leading a workshop on Workshop for workshop artists – this was called A Moveable Feast. It began with a story and the fisherman and then one thing led to the next and the next. Over four days 42 artists made all sorts of creations and reflections of their work. A book was written about the event and the practitioners went away to create new workshops, forge collaborations and even found new companies. Eventually, a core group got together and founded a multi-art form company, The Moveable Feast Workshop Company, who collaborated to make cross- art form, bespoke workshops.
We did a lot of work with the disability branch of a now defunct, national initiative called Aim Higher, which aimed to widen participation in Higher Education. At the first of these projects we are asked the group to decide on a name to frame their project. The group were between fourteen to sixteen years old and visual and aural disabilities that impacted on their confidence. Two or three would only address the group through their personal assistant. They went away to discuss the title whilst we spoke to the teachers. After a while they reappeared and announced that they wanted to call their project: “Impaired Teens don’t have Impaired Futures.”
Over the next few weeks those young people were transformed. One big moment in this was when they created puppets that represented their daemons – their inner selves. This wonderful moment opened the multi-media show they created in which the stage filled with them represented as butterflies, horses, lions and all sorts of creatures. When one makes a puppet, especially for the first time, it is an extension of oneself that simultaneously reaches outwards and inwards. It inevitably bears the signature of who made it embodied in its character, attitude and colour. This reflection of the maker is dug out the great seabed of their unconscious. There is so often a delight and almost a shock as the eyes are placed on the face and the make sees what they have made. What the others in the space see is a reflection of that person holding their new creation. The puppets open up three levels of story: stories of self, of others and of the world.
One day many years ago I woke up with no idea that I was ever going to have anything to do with puppets and that night when I went to sleep a puppeteer. Watching this same process of being a puppeteer, for that’s what you are in that moment, happen as I guide young and old through workshops over all these years endlessly renews my practice.
I write this from a break in some work in with the Indigenous People’s Health Research Council in Saskatchewan, Canada that does Arts- Based Health Research with Aboriginal Communities. Part of my job last year in this project was to create a puppet show with a group of indigenous Cree youth to open a symposium. At the end of the show, the audience of artists, researchers and academics asked if they could question the puppets. One woman said, I want to ask that puppet there with the blue hair how she feels about us asking her our questions” The puppet answered, “I didn’t even exist before yesterday”. And that’s it. As Samuel Beckett said, “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day”.
Puppets have been exemplary companions to create an applied arts practice that is open to so many different worlds. Sometimes I have wondered why such evident joy in learning is not exploited more by those organisations concerned with learning. At other moments I have been grateful that it is ignored so that I can get on unhindered to work on what works. How do we write about our practices and processes of embodiment and emergent actions? Do we need to quantify what really is not measurable because funders and assessment agencies require it? Or does the act of reporting those moments shorten the life of the freedom to learn through doing and permission to make mistakes? As one practitioner so aptly reflected upon a workshop, “…those kids were glowing at the end of that workshop, but how do we measure glow?”
This article was first obliged as the Afterword in Playing in a House of Mirrors by Warren Linds and Eleanor Vettraino