Big F'in Puppets

The uber-marionette is a descendant of the

stone images of the old temples... a rather degenerate form of a god... the last echo of some noble and beautiful art... it will not compete with life - it will go beyond it.

Craig sounds rather pompous and melodramatic here - but everyone was writing like that in 1907. His rejection of the 'emotionalism' of actors suggests that, unlike Wordsworth, who said something about art being the recollection of emotion in tranquility, Craig was not interested in art that reflected on the human, but a spiritual art that transcends the physical.

Unsurprisingly, he dedicated his collection of writings to Blake. He was a romantic, but one who flew on the wings of imagination to invent metaphysical entities. 

Craig would claim that he wasn't literally trying to replace actors with bits of wood, and that he was describing a method of performance - a return to an abstract theatre that refuses to get bogged down in the reality of the actors' experiences on stage, but rejects the trappings of ornamentation for a theatre that pointed to deeper truths.

Yeah, then Brecht said the same sort of thing - all that 'fourth wall' and revealing the mechanics of performance. He used to do puppet shows when he was a kid, too. 

Craig and puppets and stripping gorillas

I'm not that interested in a cull of actors, or emotions, in theatre: Craig only recognises the passionate qualities of the human, and forgets about the ability to, like, contemplate... or that emotion can communicate, too. But his idea that there used to be this amazing marionette somewhere in India, and some women ripped off its routine, and invented theatre as a commercial proposition, does offer something intriguing.

There is something special about a puppet or a doll. I always compare it to that time Johnny Woo did a striptease while dressed up as a gorilla. As he dropped his clothes, Woo did a little dance that usually involved him slipping on a banana skin, and looking up at the audience, as if hurt by their reaction.

Despite the complete lack of change in the gorilla mask expression, each time Woo looked at the crowd, the expression seemed to be saying something different. 

It's the same with puppets - well, the ones with faces. I was watching a very long video about bunraku - the fashionable Japanese form that controls the puppet with sticks. The expression on the face never changes - everything is done with the arms and the legs and the torso - but the emotional range is huge.

Is it the absence of emotion on the face that allows the audience to impose meaning onto the blank face? Craig hoped that 'acting' would be rejected by future generations, and replaced with 'symbolic movements'. Lecoq came along and developed that kind of approach. Kantor based his theatre of death manifesto on Craig's thoughts. 

Edward Gordon Craig: drop the emotion, buddy...

So Craig says, in his Uber-marionette, that actors are a degenerate version of really impressive ancient automated statues. I'm not sure about that, or his criticism that humans, being all emotional, make 'useless' material for art, but I like his idea that massive puppets are the next step in performance.

Craig was writing around a century ago, so he gets to look cool in sepia prints and mutton-chops, and, since he was before Dada, performance art and Beckett, his meditations on theatre are focused on the naturalism of the late Victorian period. 

He's against emotional outbursts ('art is the exact antithesis of pandemonium'), has essentialist views on human nature that I wouldn't dare ('the whole nature of man tends towards freedom'), but he influenced that Polish fellow Kantor and suggests an escape route from the romantic ideal of art. 

So I am listening...