Puppetry - A user's guide - Phelim McDermott & Julian Crouch

What is a puppet to us?

A puppet is anything that is moved on our stage in a way that suggests that it has a life of its own. Sometimes we use puppets in a fairly traditional manner, with puppets that have legs and arms and a head. The puppets in SHOCKHEADED PETER fall into this category. Sometimes we use everyday objects or materials that are manipulated in such a way that they become characters. The sellotape and newspaper creations in 70 HILL LANE are examples of this, or the cups and suitcases and bits of string in ANIMO or the LIFEGAME. However, even the elements of our stage design are manipulated as one might manipulate a puppet - a grandfather clock can enter the stage grandly or insecurely depending on the atmosphere through which it is moved and the way in which it is moved. A tree might lurk menacingly, or a bed might meander aimlessly. All things on our stage are living and breathing if we have done our job correctly. Puppetry has never been treated as a separate technique in any of our shows. We aim for a theatre without boundaries where anything and everything will be used in the search for the alchemy that takes our audience to that other place.

How do we make them?

We make our puppets the same way we design our sets - in a kit form. We like to maintain flexibility throughout rehearsals - often a show is devised from scratch - often we do shows that are entirely improvised on the night. Our larger scale productions usually involve a great deal of design. A balance always needs to be struck between maintaining this flexibility and making early decisions to allow time for the different design elements to be made. We have found that by using kits we are able to strike this balance in a satisfying way. Often this means the design has to come first. SHOCKHEADED PETER was an example of this. We decided to design a fully contained eccentric theatre in which to stage our show. We wanted it to have its own flying system and a myriad of doors and various hatches. Because our budget was low we collected together various scenic elements from previous shows - the cardboard cut outs had come from an opera and had been sitting in a garage for a couple of years.
Likewise many of the puppet bits had come from a kit that had been expanding and developing over the course of many productions. In addition to the old elements, we decided on new elements - a set of cut out gravestones for example. We made extra puppet bits, but not whole puppets - various heads and torsos, arms and legs. All of this was made before we even knew the story.

It is good when designing like this to make some definite decisions that don't yet have a reason to them. For example, decide that there will be a number of trap doors or a large piece of silk without yet knowing how you are going to use them in the show. This involves trusting that the creative process will reveal to you or will tell you why you made these intuitive decisions. It also requires the honesty to tell a company that you don't know why you did certain things but you hope to find out with their help. The way to find these things out is through play.

We usually call our puppetry kit the ‘Bosch Kit’ (after the painter Heironymous Bosch) It dates from the first production we did together, DOCTOR FAUSTUS, were we used our kit of human and animal body parts to dramatise the Seven Deadly Sins. Our ensemble would put random elements together and improvise with them in rehearsals and this process continued until we had successfully identified each one. In this way we ensure that our puppets are not fully finished until they are in front of an audience - puppet making is not completed on the maker’s workbench.

In many of our productions the puppets are made from scratch on the night, in front of the audience. This is something that we have discovered the audience really enjoy. In 70 HILL LANE the sellotape that was used by the performers to define the walls and fabric of houses, staircases, corridors and furniture was cut down and drawn together to create an ethereal figure that strode across the stage before transforming into a silvery globe. Where is the making? Is it in the focus of the performers, in the heads of the audience, or in the sellotape factory? The answer is that it’s in all these places.

How do we direct them?

The simple answer to this question is ‘exactly the same way as we direct actors.’ Whilst creating shows there have been a number of things that we've discovered about directing puppets.

One is that they can be treated and talked to like any other actor in a company. In fact they often seem to be a lot more resilient at taking direction than a lot of actors are. This is perhaps because the performer, aware that he isn't being directly addressed, doesn't take feedback so personally. The puppet is also given more permission to react naturally to any power dynamics that might happen between itself and the director. There is a great game to be had around the roles of the director and the performer that can produce very creative work from puppets. For example, asking a puppet to demonstrate how well or beautifully it can perform a scene is often amazingly creative. Challenging a puppet often seems to make a puppet "appear" from its lifeless state.

Whilst working on a show the puppet often knows how to solve a problem in a scene much better than a director or performer can. We would encourage you to do the following - If you are creating something or if there are problems in your piece, ask the puppets... they may know a lot more than you think.

Talking to a puppet directly encourages the performers to love their puppets and helps to reinforce the mythology of the puppet characters, all of which adds to the invisible life and depth of the world you are creating onstage. Too much concentration on skill or how a puppet "should move" can result in the spirit of the puppet becoming bored and leaving its puppet body. This effectively kills its life onstage. If a puppet does something which doesn't look right or appears strange onstage, don’t stop the rehearsal. Stay in the scene and talk to the puppet and discuss it. Give it feedback and tell it which things work well from the outside. It is rare for a puppet to want to perform badly. If it does there's probably a good reason.

What do the audience see?

The first thing to remember is that the audience sees everything. As a collective being the audience has a great intelligence and imagination. The audience sees everything the performers are doing physically on the stage. This means they see what the performers are doing with the things they are animating, but also what they do in the space, and how they interact with their fellow performers.

Simultaneously the audience also sees an imaginary or dreaming world: Where objects are able to come to life and behave as if they were living things. Where imaginary landscapes and images exist at the same time as the words they are hearing and the physical images they are seeing within the theatre space.

A puppet which looks like a figure, a piece of wood or some other material may move and behave onstage as if it were a living thing with thoughts, emotions and intentions. It is only through the conspiracy of the players and the audience to play together that this becomes possible. Only if the audience willingly dream and agree to put part of themselves into the puppet can the magic happen.

It is in discussing this idea that we have come to talk about "The gap". This is the gap through which the audience imaginatively enter the show and become participants in the theatre event. It is a gap that the audience can dream into. It could be a gap in your set. It could be a material or an object that can easily represent something else or it could be an ‘open’ quality that a performer has. At the other end of this spectrum is a set which is complete or finished or a performer who seems to tell the audience what to think. Some objects seem to find it difficult to be anything other than themselves. It is good to ask whether your show has a gap in it? If it doesn't and everything is finished off, the audience might not have anything to do!

The other thing the audience sees is how well the players get on with each other? Do they like playing with each other? Do they love each other? Do their puppets love them? On second thoughts they don't see this... they smell it!


What makes a good puppeteer?

This is perhaps a contentious question and it's consequently one we are interesting in posing. We would propose that the answer is related to the questions - What makes a good performer, a good improviser or a good show? There is of course no simple reply. We would suggest that the reason it feels difficult to answer is that it's not necessarily to do with how good they are in terms of skills as a puppeteer.

What we mean by this is that often when we have worked with trained puppeteers the biggest stumbling block to creating a great ensemble or a complete show has been those very skills which trained puppeteers have. Often with performers in our shows what we are looking for is what we would call ‘metaskills’ - these are feeling skills and attitudes which lie beneath any technical skills a performer may have as a puppeteer, improviser or actor. Often these qualities seem to be paradoxical.


Some of these paradoxical qualities are:

Confidence and humility - We must be committed to truly learning our craft and brave enough to stand in front of the audience, but must have the humility to realise that as yet we know nothing. It is our ability to be invisible with humility that makes it possible to reveal ourselves to an audience.

Precision and carelessness - We have to know that certain things just seem to work if they are done ‘just so’ - this is very clear when working with puppets - ‘lift the head more’ - ‘keep one foot on the ground’ etc. However, the great puppeteer knows that the gold lies in the mistakes - in the involuntary movements. This is the beautiful relationship between chaos and order. It is the alchemy of our profession.

The awareness of rules and the courage to break them - Often our learning can take the form of rules, and this becomes a long list as our experience grows. The rules are often very important but remember that puppets love breaking rules.

Total belief and detached awareness - To make a puppet ‘live’, it needs total belief and focus from the puppeteer. Each move must be felt. It is real. Wait a moment… No it’s not… It’s only a puppet.


What we have learned from puppets?

One of the things we have learnt from puppets is a love of materials and objects, a sort of humility - a respect for nature and the process which brings with it a realisation that the best discoveries come out of mistakes. Our greatest moments have rarely come from great ideas, but have been the product of play/ accident / or the Tao.

This humility can often be seen in the actor's relationship to the object: For example the performer's ability to be with the object before you are touching it physically. The performers ability to send herself out to the object. To Imagine that she is already touching it. What would it feel like? What would it be like? What would its texture be when she actually touches it. This often demands a metaskill of being able to wait. To sit happily within silence to let a creative process reveal itself rather than to force it or demand results of it.

When working with animating materials such as newspaper or tissue paper the improvisatory dynamic is a dialogue between the performer and the material. If the material is dominated by the performer then we get the feeling that the object or the material does not get given an opportunity to speak or to "Have its say" We are looking for our work with objects to be as stimulating as two performers working onstage together. If one performer were to dominate the other onstage then it could be a troubling interaction. We can begin to worry about the other performer and whether they are enjoying themselves. The same is true for our objects. If the object is given space then it has some life. If the puppeteer is too dominant then it doesn't even get the opportunity to be born. The other thing to know is that in watching a puppeteer animating materials we see his attitude to the world he inhabits. How a performer interacts and treats his materials will be a good indication of how he will treat other performers and also himself during the creative process.

In watching performers improvise with newspapers we see that each performance from beginning to end is a miniature act of creation. How this improvisation is birthed and brought to its conclusion is a whole journey. The puppetry table becomes the whole world and the stories that happen can be epic in their themes. The imagistic and symbolic nature of the form means that those who are watching see big stories of love, conflict and death.

The situation on some level seems to ask ‘how can we learn more but remain innocent?’

What do we hope for the future?

We hope that the fact that puppetry is part of a show will no longer become an issue - that it is considered in the same way as text, design or movement as part of our available theatre vocabulary.

When an aspect of theatre has been marginalised and then becomes more adopted by the mainstream there is excitement that people begin to see its value but there is also simultaneously a sense of loss become because puppetry perhaps loses some of its sense of being special. It is no longer just ours but belongs to everybody.

We worry that something dear to us has just become a fashion. Perhaps the way to make sure puppetry is used well is to remember why we first used puppets and what things were trying to be said by these strange creatures and ensure that when we use them we are truly speaking from that space. If we are just using them because they are the next “in” thing then we should put them aside for a while and wait till they want to join in again.