Visual Test

Those than can, create. Those that can't, critique. And those that can't critique, get a load of books from the University and play pick and mix with concepts and phrases.

In the conclusion to A History of European Puppetry (it's a big book, and I started at the end), Henryk Jurkowski ponders on how puppetry, having been consistently a folk-art form throughout human history, had become part of the high-art corpus following the modernist dream of 'total theatre.' From Wagner onwards, performers have fished for the show that contains aspects of all the arts, and puppetry got caught up in the trawl. Jurkowski is delighted that puppetry's place seems assured in the pantheon, but doubts a further taxonomy of puppetry is possible: logging all the different forms would involve assigning a genre to every production, since each one has its own style and characteristics.

He even gets a bit snotty about what would now be called 'object manipulation': having studied the history of the puppet, he remembers that they were once regarded as magical or holy objects: 'the puppet has lost its leading role,' he cries.

He does identify the same problem faced by the critic looking at manipulate, or the physical theatre section of the Edinburgh Fringe. While loose ideas of compositional style or content provide connections, finding a common aesthetic that binds, say Planet Luvos and the aerial arts of Paper Doll Militia. And unlike devised theatre, which has its own set of icons (Lecoq, Forced Entertainment, Bausch), there is no list of Important Artists who have defined the techniques and genres of visual theatre.

I battle with a definition of visual theatre every year: ranging from vague gestures towards 'theatre that is not on the radio' over to a more concrete 'theatre that uses the image as the point of conversation with the audience,' I never quite get to the magic of the genre. I accompany that essay with further mystical meditations on the status of puppetry in sacred art, tracing it through medieval liturgical theatre to Indian shadow story-telling. I detour into the idea of the actor or dancer as a puppet (a status that devised theatre has fought to undermine, by making the performer part of the creative process and not a mere pawn in the hands of the director).

Jurkowski gets away with it by stopping at some time around 1987: just before technology made all sorts of cross-platform multi-media possible, and before the post-modern really took hold and encouraged rejection of simple genres (and difficult language to explore them). I'm left pondering, in the vague hope that all these words and phrases might add up to something that moves me into the category of being able to critique.