This is an extract from an article shortly to appear in Puppet Notebook
When Russell Dean first approached Good Chance with the offer of support for The Walk, its director Amir Nizar Zuabi suggested an ‘intervention’ in the form of a fifteen minute interaction between a puppet from Strangeface and the 3.5m tall Little Amal. The intervention would take place in Dover Market Square during Little Amal’s procession to Dover Castle accompanied by the spectacle of a lantern parade. Dean’s initial thoughts were to create a puppet of a similar stature to Little Amal, perhaps representing a volunteer from one of the myriad organisations devoted to helping refugees. However, in the end, Strangeface settled on something a little more unexpected.
The intervention was to be from a Jewish refugee awaiting his daughter’s arrival on a kindertransport in 1939 at Liverpool Street Station, and Strangeface’s bunraku style puppet was to be a mere 0.75m high. Born on a trolley of suitcases, Eli Edelman’s story was initially inspired by that of Lord Alf Dubs, distinguished campaigner for child refugees, whose father fled Prague and was reunited with his son at Liverpool Street station. Though this was the starting point, Eli’s story incorporated aspects of many other testimonies of Jewish refugees provided by Mia Gordon who wrote the initial ‘script’ which eventually became distilled in a collaborative process by all involved into a one act puppet play (performed at Trinity in Tunbridge Wells and JW3 in London).
The intervention (and the final play) started with Eli mistaking Little Amal for his own daughter amongst the throng on the station platform. This juxtaposition of size served to open an imaginative door to entertain other contrasts and commonalities. Strangeface’s intention was to highlight to the universality of the refugee’s plight – the loss of home, disintegration of family and dislocation of culture. By having a Jewish father address a Muslim child, the focus could be on common factors across time and faith. Though World War ll is only just within living memory, it remains a powerful influence on the British psyche. However, as political rhetoric illustrates, myth and reality are often at odds. By bringing a Jewish refugee to life, Strangeface were able to examine the fables that have arisen about British treatment of refugees by pressing them up against real testimony. It was important to reiterate the many acts of kindness shown to those arriving (which often forgotten), the willingness of the town of Sandwich to integrate with the some 4000 Jewish refugees housed at the Kitchener camp, and the extreme trauma and effect on mental health (fatal to some) that accompanies fleeing for one’s life. It was also necessary to look at the disproportionately loud voice (compared to the numbers of refugees) of the British Union of Fascists as well as hint at contemporary parallels, as a subsequent tweet following the Dover intervention indicated:
The Amal walk and the events at Folkestone and Dover have been great, but Amal meeting Eli was so powerful. Eli's character, handlers and great narration were all brilliant. Such a resonant & powerful story for today's Britain.
So why should puppets be an effective tool in addressing the refugees crisis? According to Dean, audiences appreciate a puppet through different cognitive paths. Ultimately, they are more complicit in the illusion of a puppet’s life by engaging their imagination which creates a more immediate and necessary empathy. Moreover, there is a fragility to this illusion of life that lends itself to the subject matter of the refugee. The following conversation explores Dean’s theories of how puppetry can activate audience’s imagination and marshal their empathy.
Gordon: I’ve always been intrigued by what took you into puppetry. Was there a moment?
Dean: I was designing and making masks for ‘Bitter Fruit’, a show by Trestle Theatre with City of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. I was thrown in the deep end with a request to additionally make some puppets. I began to realise that, rather than being at the periphery of theatre, puppetry (and mask) can at the very centre because it reveals how we function as human beings. Audiences work cognitively in a hugely different way to bring a puppet to life compared to watching a live actor. We collaborate with the puppeteers in giving life to what is obviously a dead object. As spectators, we have this incredible urge to believe the puppet is ‘real’ and enter its story. Having read Leon Festinger, I was interested in cognitive dissonance - that unpleasant feeling which emerges from the clash of incongruous perceptions. However, I wanted to generate a ‘pleasant’ dissonance by exploiting the idea that the spectator knows that the puppet is a lie, an inanimate object, and yet wants to give it life. This was the starting point of Strangeface’s 2018 show, ‘The Hit’. I wanted to explore the two decision making processes in our brains: the neocortex, the seat of rational decision-making, which enables us to decipher, in the case of ‘The Hit’, that a bunraku puppet is a construction moved around by three people, and our survival or lizard brain (adrenalin-fuelled and closely related with our amygdala), which judges whether something is a threat and reacts in the moment. Puppetry hijacks this process by giving the audience clues that the puppet is alive, for instance, breath, balance, movement. When you first see a puppet, your lizard brain is engaged and your response is fight or flight, faced with what you initially perceive to be a living creature and consequently a potential threat. Your lizard brain processes rapid fire responses such as do I run away from the puppet, do I hit it, or do I possibly eat it? And then your rational brain catches up and you realise you are safe. This interested me because this process has connections with all sorts of other things. If you look at advertising, political speeches and soundbites, for example, they hard-sell you a narrative by engaging your lizard brain by playing on your stronger emotions such as fear and anger, rather than selling you the dry facts. And this, ironically, is how puppetry works: it sells a narrative stronger than the fact of watching three people manipulate an object. We enjoy watching puppetry because we experience what’s in front of us by oscillating between the two brains: our rational apprehension of what's actually going on and our emotional response. As human beings we quite enjoy that process of having our cognitive processes revealed to us. Our next journey as a species is that we have to become aware of our own cognitive abilities so that we are not quite so swayed when our lizard brain is hijacked by others.
Gordon That’s a really interesting observation – the deliberately simplistic messages in social media tend to condition people to solely engage with the world through their lizard brain - and you can see those online interactions entering face-to-face communications and exchanges. You could say, we are being groomed to live in our lizard brains.
Dean Exactly – there was a book by Nir Eyal called ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products’ which was a basic admission that we are now in a world of addicting people and creating passive consumers. Puppetry can disrupt that conditioning by activating the imagination, critical thinking processes and empathy. For instance, the spectators’ role in ‘War Horse’ was to co-create the puppets by engaging their imagination to fill the gaps and allowing the puppets to live. The horses only ‘lived’ in the audience’s imagination.
Gordon There’s also something interesting about seeing the commonplace delivered in innovative ways. There’s a moment of making the familiar seem strange which, far from alienating, is emotionally engaging. So for me, watching War Horse, it was the ingenuity of the puppets and the art of the puppeteers that activated my curiosity as well as my emotional belief in the fiction. As you say, the oscillation between the two brains spark against each other.
Dean Yes and you can't work both at the same time; it’s like a seesaw. But your point about strangeness is interesting because when you are initially faced with the puppet and your lizard brain kicks in, it’s a very similar reaction to the way in which we decide whether a new person is in our ‘tribe’. There's a very definite cognitive connection between the way we perceive the otherness of immigrants or asylum seekers and puppets.
Gordon With performance, do you think part of our willingness to empathise with a puppet is that when we watch a live actor we engage with the character via the ego of the actor whereas the puppet is a blank canvas made live through the collaborative processes of the puppeteers and, of course, the audience? I remember Alfred Jarry’s preference for puppets as conduits for the auteur to connect directly with the spectator without going through the filter of a performer.
Dean Audiences will give more of themselves to puppets than human actors. In Strangeface’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’, our Tiny Tim puppet, elicited more emotion than the actors on stage with him. A puppet carries no baggage, unlike the actor. To engage with a human performer we have to block out their previous roles, and our speculation about their off-stage life. Moreover, we sit back and say ‘come on, entertain me’. But with puppets it’s a completely different relationship because we project so much onto them through our imaginations and our brain’s ability for predictive coding: when we encounter something new (like a puppet) our brain speeds up from 24 frames a second to a 100 to process and store multiple shots and possibilities. When the brain slows back down, it starts to project the stored images back onto the puppet - filling in the gaps. And far from sitting back, the audience actually leans forward to engage. I really love empowering an audience with what they naturally have - imagination - because in our present society imagination is discouraged; if you don't have an imagination it means you have to buy something to make up for it - be that a material object or a narrative. There are all sorts of ways puppetry activates the imagination
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