Dispatch – Death Of A Puppet

Dispatch, was shown at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) as part of the Master of Puppetry programme in September 2007. Dispatch’s premise was drawn from one of three tenets of Hindu philosophy, coming from the Bhagavad-Gita:

From nothingness we come.

By nothingness we are sustained.

To nothingness we return.

The following paper will discuss this philosophy in relation to puppetry using Dispatch as a model for analysis.

Dispatch evoked the story of a puppet character Sorrel, a girl who had died, arriving at a timeless ‘middle place’, an island. Sorrel could not let go of the emotional and material trappings of her life. The main puppeteer/performer played Maman Brigitte, a Goddess, presiding over the island. She functioned to guide Sorrel through her journey, offering her a series of lessons and choices. Dispatch was a reflection on mortality and the art of detachment.

This original Hindu philosophy was interpreted in an eclectic manner in the creation of Dispatch. While founded in Hindu philosophy, the interpretation looks beyond Hinduism, drawing on elements of philosophy from other religions:

From nothingness we come – We arrive into the world from ether, from a spirit world, a world not of material substance but of ‘no-thing’.

By nothingness we are sustained. We are sustained, supported and held by no-thing – no object, no material possession. A Buddhist slant on this would suggest that the yearning for the material creates suffering, and expectation, the same. If we let go of our expectations and our desires, if we desire no – thing, we are free. If we can be sustained by no-thing, by living with no expectation and no attachment, then we should not suffer. Failure to be sustained by no-thing creates the opposite.

To nothingness we return – when we die, our body perishes, and returns to dust: “…thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”(1) We, once again turn, out of the body, away from the material plane, to the world of spirit, to ether to no-thingness.

For Dispatch the interpretation of the premise was played out in the following manner. The object, a puppet, was brought into the view of the audience, without life – from nothingness it came. The puppeteer then imbued the puppet with life. The puppet character then struggled with having no-thing: she did not wish to relinquish her material possessions and tried to satisfy emotional needs by gathering more. This gathering was in itself an attempt at distraction from the truth, and the truth was that her body was actually dead.

The fact that she was dead but not at rest was symptomatic of her inability to confront the truth. Chasing these illusions, these distractions, kept her at a distance from this truth and as a result the character continued to suffer. When the puppet character did finally face the truth it was when she had no-thing left. She was freed from desire, liberated from suffering, and able to move on: her release from pain came with the acceptance, tacit in this case, that by nothingness we are sustained.  At the end of the play the character died – found rest – and was thus returned to, was liberated into, nothingness.

The interesting point about this ending of the play, with the death of the character and her return to nothingness – is what it might imply about puppetry itself.

Firstly, to define the action of puppetry: A puppet – an object, an icon of a character – lies on the tabletop and is lifeless. A puppeteer, God-like, “…affects animation and controls action through manipulation of the puppet as the object” (1) The puppeteer brings to life the puppet by endowing it with soul, intelligence, feeling, breath and movement. From this perspective, a puppet only exists with life in time and space, until such time as the puppeteer puts it down – returning it to the lifeless status of mere object.

In Dispatch, the object/puppet arrived in a boat of bones and was endowed with life wh
en given the above-mentioned qualities.  At the end of the play, the character gave way to nature’s course, took her last breath in front of the audience, and died. In this moment, the death of the character was confronting for the audience as they had invested in her, had believed in her. In her death, she became not a lifeless puppet or an object, but a dead girl. Despite the fact that all the qualities that comprise a live puppet had gone: the puppet was a little dead body. 

What was it then, what is the essence of that moment, when a lifeless character is more than a lifeless object?

The audience and the puppeteer had strong investments in the character Sorrel. Both had developed, and in the case of the puppeteer, practised a relationship with her. A puppeteer’s skill and art is to bring a puppet to life, but surely the puppet informs the puppeteer? 

A puppet’s character is generated by a transaction between puppeteer and the puppet, within the context of the work performed. It is an “…actively reciprocal relationship between the puppet and puppeteer…a pas-de-deux rather than manipulation”(2).

A puppeteer and puppet work symbiotically to create relationship, which the audience then accepts.

This is the act of acceptance of the puppet as an icon of a character[1] – a puppet is an object representing potential character. Added to this is a:

…Shift of view from the logic of the normal, secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic “of make-believe” – “as if.”(4)

When viewing puppetry, we make a leap from everyday logic, to suspension of belief and engagement of the imagination to accept the puppet as icon of character, then to living character. Henryk Jurkowski describes this as a process that both audience and puppeteer go through:

Animation and especially animisation of human simulacra can be considered a mental process…it is a mental process for the manipulator who intends to bring life to his simulacra and for the spectator who comes to the theatre in expectation of a fictional experience. Before we can see the scenic fact of animism or animisation we have to pass through the preparatory psychic process of allowing our imagination to work. (5)

A lifeless character became more than a lifeless object in Dispatch because both the puppeteer and audience were ready to engage in the experience of making ‘nothing’ into ‘something’.

The skill of a puppeteer is the execution of this pas-de-deux of puppetry, to create life with an object and bring something from nothingness: The audience is complicit in the experience of making nothing into something: in making an object or puppet, into a living character.

When a puppetry performance ends, the character/s return to a lifeless state as object/s or, a state of nothingness: The audience accepts this as part of the theatrical transaction. In Dispatch, as with all puppetry, the object implies character, but at the end of Dispatch the character is dead, but not the object. Why? Aided by the conviction of the puppeteer, it is the sentiment and emotion of the audience that lives – our attachment to the character is all that remains, blinding us to it as an inanimate object.

In terms of the premise, this is the cornerstone of the contradiction Dispatch presents to the audience. The play provokes the audience to become attached to the puppet character, yet also asks that the middle clause of the premise ‘by nothingness we are sustained’ be addressed. The play is, at the same time as provoking attachment, campaigning for non-attachment. 

This is one of life’s conundrums in a nutshell. How can we live and love and yet achieve detachment? How can we be sustained by nothingness? This sentiment and line of questioning, were reflected in the following comment made by one of the Dispatch collaborators who fell ill during the creative development:

For me ‘Dispatch’ is a tale of the journey we take through the night towards light.  Most often our journey is disrupted, unexpectedly derailed, and because the fear of death we hold keeps us attached to physical objects for security, we lose control of choosing when and how we make the journey.

Ironically, my own condition of ‘cytoplasmic’ pneumonia re-emerged during the rehearsal process.  But, there are no coincidences.  What am I to understand?  What is Sorrel saying to me? (6)

Sorrel is unable to let go of the trappings – emotional and material – of her life, and it is this that causes her suffering. Dispatch aims to create the experience of attachment in order to focus on non-attachment. It asserts that nothingness is a natural state. Puppetry is an ideal vehicle because a living character is generated from nothingness and acts as a metaphor for the premise.

Our bodies, like Sorrel’s, return to nothingness. The moment when Sorrel died, the audience witnessed the impossible death of something that was never ‘really’ alive. Perhaps puppetry is a metaphor for what the body is.

“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (7).

End Notes

(1) Bible, King James Version, Genesis 3:19, Accessed from: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=citation&book=Genesis&chapno=3&startverse=19&endverse

(2) Lee, Janet, “Dancing Puppetry – Dance and puppetry as interdisciplinary performance”, Animated Encounters – A Review of Puppetry and Related Arts, Puppet Centre Trust, 2007, p. 17

(3) Lee, p. 17

(4) Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology – The Masks of God, Arkana, 1991, pp. 21-22

(5) Jurkowski, Henryk, The Human Among Things and Objects, UNIMA Press, 1998, p. 5

(6) Bartlau, Penelope, (comp), Dispatch Peer, Mentor and Audience Feedback, 2007, pp. 4-5

(7) Bible, King James Version, Genesis 3:19

Bibliography

  • Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology – The Masks of God, Arkana, 1991
  • Jurkowski, Henryk, History of European Puppetry: Volume One, From It’s Origins To The End Of The 19th Century, The Edwin Mellen Press 1998
  • Jurkowski, Henryk, The Human Among Things and Objects, UNIMA Press, 1998
  • Lee, Janet, “Dancing Puppetry – Dance and puppetry as interdisciplinary performance”, Animated Encounters – A Review of Puppetry and Related Arts, Puppet Centre Trust, 2007

 

[1] Henryk Jurkowski talks about the puppet as being an artefact, created specifically for it’s intended theatrical use. It is “an icon of an actor (or character) rather than the actor (or character) itself”. Jurkowski, Henryk, History of European Puppetry: Volume One, From It’s Origins To The End Of The 19th Century, The Edwin Mellen Press 1998, p 20.