Puppetry as Technology

Technology gets a bad press. Ironic, really, considering that most of that press has been enabled through advances in technology. I can't resist taking a chance in my blog to have a pop at the way the internet has undermined traditional journalism, replacing it with a diversity of voices, and I am sure that the invention of the printing press was greeted with a similar disdain: if you can just read it, why would you bother to memorise it?

It seems a bit rich for humans to be so uptight about the impact of technology on our emotional lives. The ability to use tools, although not unique, has been important in the success of homo sapiens and the arts have been pretty much reliant on technology ever since the Greeks worked out how to design an auditorium that amplified the human voice.

The speed of invention in the last few decades has been staggering - even in the 1990s, Hollywood films would feature computers that seemed to consist of a big button and a screen flashing EMERGENCY in a decayed font as if that was the cutting edge - and the accessibility of the internet has offered at least the potential for everyone to get on-line. But now that stories of mothers discovering how to use Facebook are not played for surprise, it's time to accept that the dividing line between cyborg and human is getting vague.

Puppetry isn't just an ancient an art form: even some worthy traditions, like bunraku in Japan, only date back to the 1600s. The isolated evidence of puppets turning up in ancient Egypt or in Herodotus ("The festival of Dionysus is observed by the Egyptians much as it is by the Greeks... but in place of the phallus, they have invented the use of puppets two feet high moved by strings, the male member nodding and nearly as big as the rest of the body" Book II, chap. 48) emphasises that puppets were enlisted as performers early on in written history, but the development into its contemporary diversity has been the product of a consistent technological development.

Unsurprisingly, the self-consciousness of modern theatre has seen contemporary object manipulation deconstruct its own tricknology. Neville Tranter carries around his Hitler puppet on stage, making it very clear that this is not a person: Vox Motus' use of "black box" puppetry was exceptional for trying to hide the puppeteers but Leggy Pee's duets with Charlie Montgomery (a rod puppet) are more typical, playing on the inanimate object's obvious manipulation for humour and drama.

Puppetry's development and format is, perhaps surprisingly, relatively modern. The rise of Mr Punch in Britain came after the Civil Wars, and for every tradition like the Vietnamese Water Puppet (dating back around a thousand years), there are several traditions like Black Light which have only become possible in the post-industrial era.

As for technology's bad press: perhaps it has enabled vicious warfare, the rise of online pornography and the destruction of traditional print newspapers, but it helped surgery along and precipitated the revolution of object performance.

John Bell's argument that the very material of the puppet makes the form spiritual could be countered by noting that its relationship to technology makes it a fundamentally progressive art. Certainly, it has the quality of blurring boundaries, so beloved of the twenty-first century avant-garde thinker and artist.

If the relationship between human and machine has become a hot topic - mostly thanks to the unstinting books of science fiction that angst about the danger of robots ruling the world - and the influence of the internet is a matter of worry - thanks to the articles from endangered print authors - it is a reiteration of themes that have bothered philosophers for about as long as directors have been putting puppets in their plays.