ABSTRACT

In his message via the Internet to puppeteers for World Puppet Day on March 21, 2011, Henryk Jurkowski celebrates the vitality and diversity of international puppetry today. Yet he suggests that “from now on the object will replace the figurative puppet,” and ends with the hope that “the tradition of the figurative puppet has not disappeared over the horizon” and “will always remain as a valuable point of reference” (Jurkowski 2011). If it seems a rather wistful conclusion, it echoes a concern shared by some devotees of the puppet theatre. Many people at festivals of “puppetry and related arts” still complain that there weren’t any puppets. That might not trouble many of us, but the complainants do have a point – is it puppetry if there are no puppets in it? And just how are the “related arts” related to puppetry? Three classic short performances in which puppets or objects seem to commit

suicide might serve to illustrate the “death” of the figurative puppet, perhaps even of “the puppet” as a concept, in the contemporary Western puppet theatre. The death or suicide of the puppet is a recurring theme in puppetry, since it exposes the problematic nature of the puppet’s “life.” There is a parallel theme of the death of the puppeteer at the hands of the puppet, but it’s the puppet’s potential demise we’re concerned with here. In Philippe Genty’s famous short untitled piece, a Pierrot marionette becomes

aware of the strings connecting it to its manipulator and asserts its independent life by breaking them one by one until it falls “dead” when finally detached from the puppeteer.1 It’s the classic metaphor of puppetry – the godlike puppeteer both gives life to and withdraws it from a creation made in his/her own image. Genty, a blackclad figure manipulating the controls high above the Pierrot, is an impassive superior presence whom the puppet resists, only to invite its own destruction. When the last string breaks, Genty simply picks up the puppet and walks off with it, now just an object. But its reduction to object status is incomplete; even as it is carried offstage, it still retains that “after-life” that lingers around any figure with which an audience has emotionally identified. It remains a human form, able to be empathized with and to be revived and to “die” all over again at the next show. The piece has reduced many audience members to tears, yet it demonstrates, quite literally, that the puppet’s “life” exists only as an effect of the puppeteer’s control.