Enchanting things: cultural object performance and practice encounters with material performatives
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Date
2022
Authors
Burton, Leslie
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University College Cork
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Abstract
Within the neoliberal, capitalist Anthropocene, over-saturation in material culture and passive acceptance of the overwhelming circulation of objects has led, quite literally, to a toxic relationship with (supposedly) disenchanted materiality. In this thesis, I argue that, in addition to being a performance practice that generates sites of potentially reparative enchantment, object performance also offers a neglected entry point for observation and analysis of the multiplicity of hidden material enchantments at work in contemporary culture. In all its forms, material performance, object theatre, puppetry – the performative animation of things – offers blatantly, and, sometimes, subversively, naive alternatives to hegemonic, largely digitized practices of representation. While its ubiquity renders puppetry arts forever familiar, providing points of profound connection between people (and their material-cultural environments), puppetry’s drama in performance relies on its inherent uncanniness, on its strange ability to unsettle us even when we know how it “works.” Despite its apparent simplicity as an art form, object performance presents us with the collapse of some of the primary binary oppositions upon which Western culture rests: subject and object, mind and matter, visible and invisible, truth and trickery, dead and alive.
Grounded in new materialist ethics and the interdisciplinary imperatives of performance studies, this practice-led research travels transverse paths of creative arts practice and cultural analysis in the development of a critical approach to object performance that I call puppeting. Puppeting is a way of seeing and thinking that arises from engaging with materiality to make and perform with puppets. Puppeting therefore takes as given that making is itself a kind of thinking, that objects and materials are active collaborators in the thought process, and that the union of imagination and material, as negotiated through movement, produces physical manifestations of thought that influence their surroundings by virtue of their presence. With these givens in place, puppeting allows us to understand the enchantments of particularly situated objects and performances, and furthermore to recognize that such performances are going on all around us all the time. Indeed, between the specialized space of the theatre, where artistic puppets inspire affective experience, and the “normal” space of daily life, where functional objects regulate lived experience (traffic cones come to mind), there is the in-between space of cultural performance (the political rally, religious ritual, community celebration, etc.), where performing objects like effigies, relics, and fetishes do both.
Through participant observation, autoethnography, and critical analysis, this study identifies different modes of enchantment, both “good” and “bad,” as revealed by puppeting. By participating in alternative, even utopian, practices of world-making in a marionette workshop in Prague, on a Vermont farm with the Bread and Puppet theatre, in her own studio in Ireland, and along the route of the All Souls Procession in southern Arizona, the puppetry artist encounters enchantments of liberatory interconnection conjured in the course of creating and performing puppetry. As anyone who has ever read a fairytale can tell, however, not all enchantments are delightful; the latter half of the study focuses on the puppetry scholar's analyses as she identifies oppressive, divisive enchantments in cultural performances including the historical European practice of effigy destruction, the hangings-in-effigy of President Barack Obama across the USA after 2008, and the display of fetish-like plastic fetuses by anti-choice activist groups, particularly in Ireland's 2018 Abortion Rights Campaign. In each of these sites, puppeting offers a new lens through which to analyse the performative power of objects in performance, exposing the reflective and constitutive messages hidden in their depths, in the hope that understanding how these kinds of enchantments work will help us to produce more of the “good” enchantments and to avoid falling for the “bad” ones.
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Keywords
Puppetry , Theatre , Performance , Enchantment , Practice-led research
Citation
Burton, L. 2022. Enchanting things: cultural object performance and practice encounters with material performatives. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.