Bestiares as Theology?

Duda Paiva is a perfect example of how blurred lines are far more acceptable in performance than in pop videos. Paiva was trained as a dancer (in Brazil), arrived in the Netherlands, discovered an aptitude for puppetry and mixed it all together into art that is choreography, puppetry and something beyond the two. A series of shows have developed his distinctive style, which encourages a dialogue between puppet and dancer: like a good post-modern artist, Paiva reveals the way he creates through the way he performs. And while his website boasts that he has represented the Netherlands in many festivals, it is fortunate that manipulate has a wide yet clear remit: Bestiares is unlikely to fit into a simple category.

Bestaires plugs into two competing ideas about the nature of gods and puppets: one I nicked from Grant Morrison's Invisibles, the other from Jurkowski's survey of European puppetry. Bestaires offers an evening's entertainment hosted by the god Cupid - in puppet form - and brings the gods of the classical pantheon back on stage. It's not just that, as a former classicist, I am always pleased to be reminded of things I know a little about. I think there is no better place for divinities than in a performance.

Following Morrison, Bestiares is a sharp reminder of the fiction of theology. While Morrison's post-modern mash-up of paganism, conspiracy theory and action adventure can be difficult to follow, there are repeated hints that the various gods and demons that appear are little more than masks or puppets. When one Invisible is introduced to magick (sic), the question of 'who is wearing the mask of the gods?' suggests that these gods are puppets and the strings are being pulled by people. A dancer and a puppet of cupid would be the perfect visual representation of this...

Interestingly, Alan Moore, Morrison's great rival for magus of the UK/best British comic book writer, has a similar theory. He spent some worshipping a snake god because - and here's the catch - he knew that its original incarnation was as a puppet in a Roman con-man's religious rip-off. The reminder, for Moore, that this was not an animate being, was crucial as a balance against his various encounters with what appeared to be supernatural beings. 

Jurkowski goes the opposite way: noting that the medieval church was a bit touchy about the matter of puppets, he postulates that they held a religious potency - that they represented the divine. While the idea of a puppet as an icon might clash with more familiar religious art, the mystery of the puppeteers art lends the uncanny to their performance. 

Bestaires is the start of manipulate: and what better way to begin than with a ritual that is, in both of these senses, fundamentally spiritual?

Curation as Process etc

Today, I am pondering 'curation as an artistic process.' I noticed that Summerhall are advertising for an events coordinator, and wondered how this differed from an artistic director. I guess that the coordinator is a practical, hands-on type role, while the a.d. has a vision... one is a managerial role while the other is all about the leadership.

Recent years have seen the rise of the festival as an 'aesthetic unit': that is, an entire series of events linked and connected by a theme. The Tron's Mayfesto is coming back later this year - it began as a 'political' festival, although that definition has been stretched over time - and Buzzcut, now in its third year, has a clear identity as a place for emerging artists to experiment in the region between 'theatre' and 'performance.'

Manipulate is almost traditional in its emphasis on a festival as a place to explore a single genre - fortunately, the genre (visual theatre) is broad enough to include object manipulation, puppetry, physical theatre and even dance. There tends to be an assumption that manipulate is 'about' puppetry (probably because Puppet Animation Scotland are behind it), but the choices of Simon Hart, artistic director, are bounded only by imagination. It remains as one of the last great Scottish festivals that have an international pull and is determined to include challenging performance - although the Edinburgh International does a fair job (and I don't count the Fringe, since it lacks an overall curation).

Some part of the importance of manipulate comes from the influence it might have on Scottish artists: in Europe and beyond, theatre supports an industry of performers in more experimental practices, and the scale of companies like Editta Braun (Luvos) reveals that Germany, at least, can sustain intriguing work at a high level. While the National Theatre of Scotland is not afraid to play with form and format, and the Citizens is defining itself through radical imaginings of familiar stories, the larger independent companies tend to be in a script-based tradition.

Back in the days when the National Review of Live Art was still running, it was a truism to say that it was important not to pick and choose events, but dive in, almost at random. Manipulate and Buzzcut deserve the same advice - it might be the only way to work out how the curatorial process operates.

Grit: An Interview with Ross MacKay

Tortoise in a Nutshell have had a good few years: 2013 saw the tour of Feral, an ambitious look at the impact of consumerism on a seaside town, while 2012's Grit gave them a public profile that must be the envy of other Scottish object manipulators. 2014 kicks off with the return to Manipulate of Grit, and the charming Ross MacKay spoke about his joy at returning to the place where it began...

What was the inspiration behind Grit - the seed that blossomed, so to speak?

I was working at a school and was really intrigued by the children's perception of war. The boys were constantly playing armies over lunch and their conversations revolved around video games and TV shows that portrayed war quite brutally. 

When I brought this to the team we started exploring the relationship between children and war. We developed this into a ten minute piece about a boy in a sandpit transforming into a child soldier as his environment changed around him. We really liked the piece and thought we could explore the themes further. 

We researched a lot and WarChild gave us access to a lot of first hand accounts.  We were aware how our ideas of innocence and childhood were often in conflict with a lot of experiences of childhood throughout the world. We wanted to examine this but we never felt we could get completely inside these stories having no real concept of what war was really like. 

This is where our story of a war photographer and his daughter become vital as it allowed us to examine the stories at a distance but still hopefully capturing the emotions we felt reading the true stories a lot of the piece is based on. 

Can you tell me a little about your process? I am studying dramaturgy at the moment, and can't get a grip on how a devising process might work - do you define as devising, or is the structure more scripted?

Our pieces are all devised but the devising process for each one is incredibly different. With Grit we started with exploring materials we were interested in. We played a lot with projection and shadow puppetry as we knew the show would be a lot about images. We also played around with paper - it's in some ways quite a fragile material but also very resilient and one we all associated with childhood - drawing and school work. From this exploration we paired up any materials or techniques we discovered with our research: combining real life stories with different techniques to create fragmented scenes. 

These fragments were then shaped, tweaked and molded to fit a narrative that we developed along the way. Our process is always bumpy and full of starts and stops, there was a lot of material for Grit which we explored but left out but hopefully it creates an interesting and imaginative piece of theatre. 

And let's go for the classic: are you 'visual theatre' or object manipulation - feel free to tell me neither, since I know that this is the sort of thing critics love to discuss and and artists hate?

Your right - we do hate this. Mainly because we are never quite sure. We always describe ourselves as visual theatre makers and I suppose for us it just means our initial inspirations are usually quite pictorial. However what we are really inspired by is responding to the world imaginatively. 

Sometimes a scene is led by an object sometimes a piece of music or an atmosphere but I'm never quite sure how to describe that so sticking to calling ourselves 'visual theatre makers' usually does the best job.  

You do have a distinctive style in all of your works... what makes you stick with the 'objects'? And who is inspiring you at the moment?

So many people inspire us- I think one of the main things that unites us as a company as that we seem to often be pulling on the same references. We all love Studio Orka who have been to Imaginate festival a few times and create these amazingly fun and imaginative worlds and we absolutely adore Blind Summit's work. 

Closer to home Shona Reppe has an imagination we are all envious of and we also love Vox Motus who really have carved a way for creating exciting visual theatre in Scotland. 

We also draw a lot of inspiration from sources outside of theatre -  we  went to Jupiter Artland  a few months back and Scaffold by Sam Durant really provoked a lot of discussion amongst us. 

Pixar seems to come up a lot in our conversations too.

And the inevitable... can you say something about your relationship with Manipulate / PAS?

We really are indebted to Manipulate - it has allowed us to seem some great international work  we never would have seen and taken part in some really inspiring workshops. We have really close ties with the festival - one of our first shows The Last Miner was part of the festival three years ago and our latest show Feral was shown there as a work in progress last year. Grit also started its life with Manipulate. Simon Hart approached us and asked if we would like to create a 10 minute piece with support from Dominic Hill. 

We jumped at the chance and started playing around with some of the ideas we were having about Grit.  We then developed the piece into a fuller show for the Fringe and a tour with support from PAS Creative Fund. Coming back now with Grit is great, it really feels like the show has come full circle and we are really pleased that Manipulate are proud enough of what we have created from their support to invite us back.

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.

Manipulate! 2014!

Being a former classicist, I am a traditionalist at heart. I may not have turkey at Christmas, and I saw the New Year with a copy of Simon Murray's book on Jacque Lecoq, but some things are sacred. So, when manipulate  starts gearing up, I feel it is time for the annual 'Puppets are not just for children' article.

There isn't much left for kids these days. Comic books, which taught me to read and have an idiosyncratic view of good and evil, have been occupied by adults. Not that they have had to be aimed at children - William Burroughs noted that the visual image, combined with words, was far more likely to engage and inform than any other mix of media (which is why they were used for propaganda in World War II. But sitting behind me in the office, half of big-hearted Black Hearted Press are prepping for their workshops at the CCA, and there's a 16 plus age warning on the session with writer John Farnam (author of Daily Mail favourite Royal Descent).

Manipulate has been making the point that puppetry is capable of addressing adult themes without slipping into XXX predictability. Last year, Neville Tranter took on Hitler and provided a meditation on the Fuhrer's last days that was terrifying in its portrayal of the monster as a human being. This year, Planet Luvos explores the idea of humanity's eventual demise, Grit thinks about the impact of war on children and Stephen Mottram's Seas of Organillo may be beautiful, but owe more to Freud and scientific theories than The Water Babies. It only remains for Vile to state the obvious, that manipulate has become one of the most important festivals in Scotland, providing international, exciting, experimental performance.

In the next episode, Vile asks 'what is visual theatre?'