Afterwards, when I hear the inevitable daily “OK, what does it Mean?” I usually first ask them what they think, and sometimes get to hear everybody’s exciting narratives of linearized plots, and then I tell them I’m interested in semiotic collaging, the rearranging of culturally meaning-charged objects, or of breaking down the mediums of social normal. “What are you doing?” is my most commonly asked question, and the one I am still least able to respond in kind to. That is to say, I can Begin, but I must begin by opening a smaller door. I want to reiterate as a prelude that this layer is exclusively concerned with structure and inherencies, and not content.
I have a little suitcase filled with puppets and things with a chalkboard on it and I wear little constumes and write and draw on the chalkboard and create little bio-machinistic scenes with the contents of the case and put it live to a kind of modal soundtrack as I move around.
Is it that I “Do” non-narrative performance puppet shows using a bricolage of garbage objects, broken dolls and animal parts to approximate the false semblance of a miniature novela? Do the little bodies who hang from my hands represent the impossible actions I can never approach, a mimicked reproduction of my own little activities, the Aboriginal Dreaming, a ritualed precaution against “art-criticism”, can their bodies point to my body, or the bodies of the audience? Instead of story, does it fall to mood-ing? Emotional suggestion or representation? It was recently levelled that the action was indeed the evocation of mood-telling, and that it ushered a strange ominous captivity over its space because of that. ”Is that Voodoo? Can you kill those three white people magic?” It is hard to remember that all writing must be neither exhaustive nor a litany of superficial possibilities.
The “Puppet Show” is a convenient medium because of its marginality and its precise situation. As a category with few well known examples, it proffers a great amplitude of form-al ambiguity and allows viewers to approach the play, hopefully, with something of a more tabula rasa mentality (if i said comparisons are odious i would be complicit with another kind of devil). But it is also a blurry estuarry between different genres: it is the crossroads of sculpture, music, theater, dance, and so-called performance-arts (and in my particular, poetry and literary analysis); it blurs the animate from the inanimate, the living from death, zones of control between manipulators and their subtle parasitic wards. A uses-puppets-show was going to be the pragmatic intermediary between zones of personal interaction – but now I also wonder whether I am questioning the location or extension of my own bodily tendrils, or cementing myself in a corporeal and anti-social prison. [???????]
Structured improvisation is like building a language, where I play until I find a phoneme of movement I can repeat and mix with others to creat words, phrases, sentences… also though, it is anti-linguistic, the robbery of that constructed stricture, an openness in silenct viscerality.
Every so often I get run out and chid with the caveat that the distribution of religious materials is the only acceptably similar practice on the premises to my behavior. And every new chance I reitterate my stance that my actions do of course constitute a valid religiousity. Can I only use “art is the new afterlife salvation”? Other misdeeds include the fascination of child-types, the distraction of worker-types, the re-indoctrination of greedy-types, etc…
Vocabularies of insinuation, between puppets, marionettes, titteres, maques, and small gods, activiate yet another background of reference and situation, and allude to the constant question of childishness, whether as a Play-ing, re-Covery/Lapsing (through visitation?), or Critique & Analysis.
It is true that I am very taken with ruptures, evocations of the uncanny and a speculation towards possibilities of entangled bodies-on/without/towards-bodies, that I want to exc[o/e]rcize a politic, and divorce contexts, but I am bidden also with an urgency to mislead and fabricate. I am struggling with how much truth to spin with lies now – am I better acting out the metaphor of my extended intuitions or mapping the Venn graphs of connectivity between my “Art” and “Life” who are layered and woven into strange relationship? Bitter as I am to admit. I want you hear your threaded possibilities, your discovered sewings around these collaborative theories.
