Vile Banter

As sad as it might sound, Heinrich von Kleist's On The Marionette Theatre is one of my favourite philosophical essays. Not only is it the sort of conversation I'd like to have with my dancing friends, it covers everything from the mystery of grace, through the problems of conscious to an analysis of what makes performance so entrancing. It's short, sweet and has none of that cheerleading for the Big Thinker that makes Plato so frustrating at first.

Kleist meets up with his pal, a dancer, who is enthusing about the marionettes, favourably comparing their movement against that of humans. Kleist puts on his poshest voice, worrying that such vulgar entertainment might influence the professional. The dancer points out that the movements of the marionettes have far more elegance than that of his own company. He bemoans what he regards as an unnecessary self-consciousness in the human performer.

Again, I find myself returning to the dual nature of theatre: the split between what is literally happening, and what is supposedly being portrayed. With puppets, it is harder than usual to suspend disbelief. A full suspension of disbelief for TIP Connection's To The End of Love would end up in the audience running screaming from the venue, claiming to have seen costumes taking on a life of their own.

For Kleist's nameless friend, the marionette has a perfection because it has no will of its own. It doesn't spoil the performance by adding its own personality, or tiny spectacle, to the immediate movements. To apply this to human actors would be harsh, insisting that they remove any spark of themselves from the role - and counter to the exciting developments of the method technique (Polish and American).

When Kleist references Genesis, it's difficult to judge whether he is using it as a parable or literal truth - in 1801, both positions were more respectable. But if he is using it as a symbol of the problem of consciousness, it transforms the discussion from a simple chat about a show into a deeper questioning of human identity and potential. And within that, it is an early attempt to explain why performance is more gripping than representation.

Rather than emphasise the complete control of the body - something that the French tradition leading to Lecoq champions - Kleist sees it more as a matter of controlling the centre of gravity. The marionettes are moved so perfectly not by attention to detail, but to the core.

Perhaps Kleist, aside from his meditations on the nature of being human, was interested in the aesthetics of puppetry - the discipline was only then, at the turn of the eighteenth century, beginning to articulate itself. The mystery of transference, the way that an audience can identify with the puppet, is a function of the marionette's lack of personality. There is nothing to get in the way.

By contrast - Macbeth, as performed in the one man version by Alan Cumming. Cumming's celebrity feeds into his portrayal: it's impossible to see the show as anything other than a vehicle for his talents, especially since he jumps from role to role with disarming ease. There's a context to Cumming - I can't help thinking of him singing a song about Glasgow's West End with Forbes Masson, or painted as Nightcrawler in the X-Men film. This does feed his interpretation of Macbeth, but in the opposite way to Kleist's purity of intention.

The object being manipulated - whether it is a glove puppet, a lamp, a huge blue man representing depression - has only the life that it presents in the performance. There's nothing beyond the show. It is, in Buddhist terms, fully present. 

Kleist's dancer gets very excited at the possibility that he can make a marionette for the perfect dance. What he champions is the precision of the communication: movements so graceful that they transmit the ideas directly. It might be impossible to forget that the marionette is a fake person, but it expresses the truth behind the movement exquisitely.

Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival: Performance. Strings. Death. Despair. Puppets

In his dialogue On The Marionette Theatre, German romantic philosopher Heinrich von Kleist commented that the puppet represented the potential of the human, once they pushed through the limitations of consciousness and free will towards a state of grace. Kleist, like Plato, may have been ironic, as the puppet is more commonly seen as victim: the ballet Petrushka makes this point vividly, with a hero mercilessly punished merely for helplessly falling for a beautiful dancer. The true freedom within puppetry is perhaps in the hands of the puppeteer, who can manipulate his actors in ways beyond the fantasy of the most totalitarian director, or politician.

Manipulate elegantly describes itself as "innovative theatre arts for consenting adults," implying that their annual jamboree of puppetry, film and cross-platform drama leads straight into this particularly dark metaphor for determinism. The presence of Gisele Vienne, last seen in Scotland cheering up Tramway with a slow motion meditation on teenage suicide and drone metal, alongside Kefar Nahum, a Belgian story of Creation gone wrong, suggests that puppetry is a natural medium for bleak, aggressive theatre.

Although the festival had it roots in puppetry, Manipulate features film and performance that defies easy categorisation. The film selection emphasises the easy connection between video animation and live puppetry: the shadow puppets of the East could be seen as the earliest example of cinematic technique, using light to cast an image upon a screen, while stop motion animation clearly comes from puppetry itself.

Yet many of the live performances push at the boundaries of what can be regarded as puppetry. Mossoux Bonté, the company behind Kefar Nahum, strive to integrate dance and theatre while grappling with the implicit gender relationships between their twin directors, Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté. Rather than being puppeteers by vocation, like Scotland's Tortoise in a Nutshell, Mossoux Bonté come to the form to further their own performance philosophy.

If the bonds to a specific medium have been loosened, Manipulate is held together by certain themes. The sense of control, or lack of control, is easily invoked – Vienne's Jerk uses glove puppets in an examination of a serial killer, while 1927 evoke an oppressive, brooding city through the use of film.

Both the short film selection and French compilation movie Fear(s) of the Dark investigate the horror lurking beneath the surface of apparently mundane relationships: Fear(s) includes a contribution from underground comic star Charles Burns, another master of black and white horror illustration.

As an object, the puppet easily lends itself to hybrid creations: metamorphoses and protean creatures litter the programme, whether it is Mossoux Bonté's alarming spider deity or Matthew Robins' half boy-half fly battling to live a normal life (part of the Snapshots cabaret event). The elegance that Robins brings to his storytelling, accompanied by live folk music and told languidly, supports von Kleist's assertion that the puppet is capable of a fluidity and grace precisely because it is not troubled by human self-consciousness.

The brilliance of Kleist's essay, perched gingerly between notions of free will as positive and the problems caused by having consciousness – he did go on to kill himself – is reflected in the cunning programming of Manipulate. 

It is the idea of puppetry that serves as the festival's starting point, rather than any rigid adherence to a particular medium, and from this blossoms a diverse, sometimes enchanting, sometimes troubling programme. If theatre's function is to stimulate discussion, or challenge audiences to look beyond their own assumptions, Manipulate challenges the meaning of its own art form and presents artists who are willing to poke around in the darker zones of human experience.

Moaning about Derren Brown

My investigation into the power of puppetry has taken a wrong turn. Originally fascinated by the ability of a motionless mask or puppet to appear to have a wide range of emotions - probably projected onto the face by the viewer - ended up in an investigation into the possibility that free will and consciousness are illusions. I've been wondering whether humans are actually just puppets, which encouraged me to try to find out who was pulling the strings.

I'm blaming Philip K. Dick. Over Christmas, I indulge in too much television and, in a desperate attempt to escape from endless repeats of The Big Bang Theory and that crap starring the Kardashians, I tuned into Moon. After nearly two hours of spectacular shots of arid landscapes and dialogues on the relative humanity of the clone, I was ready for Blade Runner. Of course, the "puppets" in Ridley Scott's films are automatons who have smuggled themselves into human society, leading to typical Dick discussions on the nature of the soul.

Blade Runner's take on "do androids dream?" inevitably opens up humanity to all manner of robots, with Roy Batty's demise suggestive of redemption (a dove flies into the air, like his soul ascending to heaven): I decided to check out Derren Brown's The Experiments for a counter-balance. Four episodes, which I ought to have watched over a year ago when they were probably still controversial, in which Brown 'demonstrates' that the belief in free will is just an illusion.

It's probably unfair of me to have such a low opinion of Derren Brown - ever since he did that seance, which was too transparent in its trickery, I have regarded him as the Stephen Fry of mentalism. That is to say, he is painfully pompous and replaces celebrity for talent, mistaking the espousal of a belief in natural selection genuine scientific curiosity . In The Experiments, however, he has a good crack at exploring four of the ways that the mind can be manipulated.

In the rather cool advert for the series, Brown has a bunch of people mocked up to look like ventriloquist dummies - I'm sure that I could fake an article on the semiotics of the dummy the next time a company don't return their email interview in time for me to write about them. It emphasises the promise of the series that here is a show ready to challenge lazy assumptions about our ability to make free decisions.

Unfortunately, like in Brown's previous investigations, a serious subject is treated with a show-business insincerity that undermines any possibility of actually fulfilling this potential. The ambition of each episode - it kicks off with an attempt to brainwash a man to assassinate Stephen Fry, although brainwashing Fry into forgetting to sign his next contract for Q.I. would have been a better public service - is so massive that it seems unlikely that Brown could manage it without resorting to TV trickery. The guy who thought he's committed a murder, that one where he predicts the lottery numbers: sure, he could have managed it through his combination of NLP and conjuring tricks. But it is on television, and it would be a lot quicker just to use a stooge.

Even if his goatee makes Brown look like a huckster, I don't really care that he is pretending to skills he doesn't possess. I don't own a TV anyway, and the worst he has ever done to me is waste twenty minutes of my time reading the first chapter of his turgid autobiography. Unfortunately, I don't like the way he presents his cod-reality shows as some kind of scientific investigation. Hoping to find out about guilt, I just watched episode three, which is chiefly memorable for the appearance of yet another one of those science fans, Tim Minchen.

When Brown shouts out that the mind is no so independent as we'd like to think, or that secret programmes can be written into the consciousness without permission or awareness, he is asking the same question that Philip K Dick provokes in Androids: but the format of television itself allows so much potential for deceit that his "experiments" are useless. He's quite entertaining in places and his banter about the ideas is worth a listen though, but my investigation into the way that the human mind imposes worth on two dimensional surfaces that lack depth or integrity obviously has nothing to do with television, does it?