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Puppetry while a visual art of sculpture-painting and engineering is also a performance
dramatic craft into which poetic ideas are merged.
Whereas a marionette laying on the floor in knots is still a marionette, his 'verb'
side is as much or more his existence than he is as object d'art. In other words the point
of his existence is not -to be- but -to do-.
Is he then just an artificial actor-the poor controlled creature often cited as metaphor
in literature? In Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, when two girls, Helena and Hermia, are arguing, as the name-calling degenerates, ‘puppet’ is hurled as an insult.
Whereas the word 'marionette' is of mediaeval French origin, the moving figure goes
darkly back to human roots merging into the classless 'expressions' later called
art-religion-domestic craft . The common ancestor to all was imagination, that strange
inventor-dreamer-projector.
Most cultures have included 'the puppet figure'.
Dancing to drums-on walls-as footless headpieces they came into the external
world's expression of the inner magic of imagination.
Puppets have ever since tagged along through centuries like camp followers on the carnival fringe . They grew into raggeds-to grotesques. Beggary and mockery replaced awe and ritual. Slapstick became their name and finally in many places only children (not unspecial connoisseurs) were still fascinated their unreal-reality.
There have been exceptions in some world cultures-especially in Asia, east
Europe, Italy, while African cultures preserve some of the origins.
In truth the Puppet is still everywhere redefined, reborn out of new media.
This makes it more difficult to give a definitive answer to "what
is a marionette" .
As all things are defined by default-in their own time, we will playfully
adopt the 20th century loose fitting garment-that anything we use to make a little
drama or act out poetry is a marionette. This can be a drawing-a stark snap shot
single frame theatre-or animated thousands of frames.. Even a sound can be
a puppet.
So we race up and down a ladder of definition.
Puppetry may be the father of the other arts or so separate a whimsy as not to belong anywhere, surely with none of the classical muses-east or west. Can this be false? What about the mask? Can it be separated from ‘puppet’. What about control-strings? Marionettes must have strings- but must they be twine? The Internet called the Web has no silken string, but lots of spinning!
We are not here to evangelize, resurrect or redefine a place for puppets. Our thoughts are simple. We choose to widen the band of puppetry because the poetics are the same. Thus a little animated gif is to us a strung 'marionette' no
less than puppets dangling from string control.
What is a marionette? Well perhaps that is why we have come to this new fair, the
Internet, to explore and in action discover more.
Thank you for joining us.
The Shakespeare Marionette Company
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