Cutting a Moment into the Paper

Although Paper Cut has a strong "the personal is political" theme - it mercilessly deconstructs the oppression of 1950s' ideals of femininity and the tyranny of glamour - it isn't a political work in the manner of, say, Kieran Hurley's Hitch. Yet it provides a moment that cracks open a matter that has concerned me since Bathsheva Dance were boycotted in the Edinburgh International Festival: one of the most thrillingly uncomfortable moments of manipulate that is all the more profound for being so unexpected.

Yael Rasooly is an Israeli artist, but Paper Cut is set in a notional America. At least, the main character, a downbeat secretary, is surrounded by American films and music. Her rich fantasy life is filled with lantern-jawed men and simpering women and her ambitions at the beginning are little more than reflections of a romantic Hollywood happy ending.

In a particularly detailed dream, Rasooly's secretary ("the bulldog") lists her honeymoon destinations. From Paris through Egypt to Edinburgh, her husband takes her around the world, allowing her to soak up the ambience while he steps, repeatedly, in dog shit. She flips over the next postcard and... it's Palestine.

Embarrassed, she pauses. Instead of her usual eulogy to the beauties of the location, she looks ashamed and says that this one is difficult, and that she'll talk about it later. Then, with a swift movement, the next postcard arrives and the bulldog is back in the fantasy.

There has been plenty of debate about Israel's activity in Palestine within the arts: most notably, the call to boycott Batsheva dance last August, and the infiltration of the audience by protestors who then disrupted the choreography by chanting. Boycotts do have a degree of political legitimacy, thanks to the boycott of South Africa during the 1980s, and campaigning against violations of human rights is probably more important than going to the theatre.

Yet the specific activity of the protestors in August did not necessarily prove their moral superiority, not advance their claim. While I am very big on the importance of theatre as a location for public discussion, I tend to see it more in terms of creating artist works that convey an idea emotionally and intellectually. Appealing for a ban on a certain company is a different dialogue and while it might bring the theatre out of the building, it has that awkward overtone of censorship.

Paper Cut doesn't actually address the Palestinian question - it just admits that it is there. There are artists who are actively engaged in the debate (David Greig has been out there, and written about his experiences) but Rasooly merely raises the matter. It's cunning - offending neither side in the argument but showing that it is important. Theatrically, it is jarring enough to break open the smooth narrative of the bulldog's fantasy (a reminder that reality might have been set to one side, but it is still waiting), but is quickly smoothed back into place.

Just a moment, and hardly the whole point of this wonderful one women show, but worth noting.

Puppetry is Dead...

Although I have had plenty of art-crushes in my life, I have had far fewer philosophy crushes. Generally, old  philosophers, like Plato or Nietzsche, have managed to express ideas that inspired me alongside the sort of gender politics that would make Jim Davidson blush. Fortunately, I haven't managed to delve into the biography of John Bell too far, and I think he is my current "philosophy of puppetry" crush.

Apart from having an obvious love of puppetry that comes through even in his most academic texts, Bell is unafraid of offering  big answers. Death and Performing Objects, which is where I first fell for his mind, looks at the history of puppetry and concludes that it is fundamentally a spiritual process. Once a member of Bread and Puppet Theatre, and currently holding a post named after a Jesuit, Bell chases after the essence of puppetry, concluding that it has been used within ritual thanks to the specific qualities of the materials used in its creation.

Death and Performing Objects has the bold energy of popular criticism rather than the precise detail of the academic essay: kicking off by establishing the dualism between the living and the inert (and noticing how life itself comes from non-living matter), he sees inspiration for the arts coming from performers' willingness to look towards death. 

Citing both Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 On the Marionette Theater and Edward Gordon Craig's 1906 The Actor and the Ubermarionnete, Bell separates object manipulation from both scripted and physical theatre by emphasising how the object can replace the human presence (he quotes Craig's sardonic "the body of man is by nature utterly useless as a material for an art"). He then promotes an alternative: the 'elevated prop' can work together with the actor to offer a more comprehensive representation of reality, one where the profound question of live against death is implicit in the very fabric of the performance.


Like McLuhan's declaration that the medium is the message, object manipulation draws attention to the function of art by its format. Vox Motus' Slick has human heads atop puppet bodies, mirroring the slapstick humour of the script in the actor's (suddenly diminished) presence. Paper Cut surrounds Yael Rasooly with fragments of the magazines that maintain her character's rich fantasy life. And Cloud Eye Control explore the contemporary interface between human and technology on a stage set by projections and software. 


Bell insists that there is a difference between actors' theatre which "can talk about death and show death with living bodies pretending to be dead" and object theatre: "When puppeteers, maskers, object performers, political demonstrators, machine operators, web site designers, film directors, multi-media producers, and advertising agencies work, they constantly create and modify relationships between living human beings and dead matter: wood, stone, metal, plastic, leather, bone. This makes for a profound reckoning with death on a constant subconscious or symbolic level."

The drama of Bell's essay is that he presents an essentialist vision of object theatre, before linking the idea back to its history. He's good on the global history too - Mongolian rituals bash heads with more contemporary experiments, and there is a generosity in his inclusive analysis. That uncanny moment of recognition, the magic of the puppet, is given a grounding in its very material. And even better, he offers a possible appreciation of the purpose of art that can be seen as consistent across time and place.