golem, my love: the puppet
From the beginning of the project, we knew we wanted to experiment with puppetry. Puppets embody the exact dichotomy we wanted to explore: they are both familiar and unfamiliar through virtue of being simultaneously alive and dead, one with the puppeteer and separate from them, often anthropomorphic and uncannily Other. Using a puppet would allow us to blur the lines between characters with one clean gesture.
I had never done puppetry before; Haeyoung had a little experience. So with nothing but determination and the knowledge that there was a puppetry option available at Central, we began.
The first thing we did was collect together some inspirations and designs on Pinterest.
We were drawn towards designs which had one or two solid, structured elements and a large amount of fabric, because we felt this was both achievable and didn't try to conceal that there was a person inside.
Then we sought out Cariad and Fagner, who run the puppetry option. Cariad is more design and performance based, Fagner more in tune with making.
Fagner then recommended the easiest and most failsafe way to begin creating faces: get a bit of cardboard, start taping scrunched up paper onto it, cover it with masking tape and then papier-mache it. So that's exactly what I did.
The face and arm were actually surprisingly easy to make. I papier-mached them in the mezzanine above the small workshop, which Kristen from Scenic and a very generous Props student let me share for a few days.
For the fabric body, Haeyoung and I had discussed using some kind of sheer fabric – both for risk assessment ease and because we really liked the idea of being able to simultaneously see her and the puppet. During the Directing Text module, Emily (of Dubious) used some scraps of tulle she’d found in the costume department’s offcut bin for her piece, and when she said she had no plans for them after it seemed almost too fortuitous. I took these, and they became the sample and basis for the entire fabric body of the puppet.
I made the puppet as a sort of ‘first draft’ or prototype, with the intention of gauging feedback at our interim sharing. I was thinking after the sharing it would be painted or decorated somehow.
This is what people said:
So people… liked the puppet. As she was. Nohar raised the artificiality of the sound the puppet made as something to consider, but Haeyoung and I decided we liked it, and wanted to lean into that further. We decided to make some tweaks for functionality, but otherwise left the design as it was.
It was the performer and characters’ relationships with the puppet that was now our primary area of interest.
As a performer and puppeteer, Haeyoung had a really fascinating approach to working with the puppet based around our ideas of perspective, identity, and expression.
PERSPECTIVE: when does the character perceive the puppet, and when does the puppet percieve her? What do they see each other as?
IDENTITY: when are they separate entities? Are they ever? Do the puppet and the character want to same thing? For me watching, these different stages of merging identity were beautiful to watch. There was a very distinct moment in the scene when the puppet became animated and alive.
EXPRESSION: how does the performer communicate differently with the audience and her scene partner when the character is human, and when it is puppet?
Haeyoung was very thorough with her interrogation of what her characters’ intentions were throughout the piece, and I think this is one of the reasons why her puppetry was so brilliant and expressive. It was excellent from the moment she first put the puppet on, but I think across rehearsals she found a clarity in her performance, and seem to refine how she moved and expressed as the puppet.
For me, my relationship as a performer and character with the puppet was profoundly impacted by Haeyoung. I always found myself looking at the puppet's face rather than hers, even though the fabric was sheer, just because she made it so expressive and alive. It was so easy just to respond to what she gave, and I don't think I ever felt a barrier of artificially or had any difficultly engaging with it as a living being. Physically touching the puppet was interesting – holding its inflexible hand or touching its face did bring a shock of artificially, but because we had decided to keep the main body soft fabric, I could always feel Haeyoung’s real body beneath it. As a performer, it worked just as we had hoped: the puppet walked a liminal line in which it was both real and not. Based on feedback, I think this was the case for audiences too. It definitely helped that we'd spent so much time with the puppet and grown so fond of it: it was there almost every rehearsal, and when it had to disappear for maintenance, we felt its absence. I think this strange affection definitely contributed to our onstage relationship with it, and how it had become so familiar to us supported our artistic intentions and the story of the piece.
