 Good afternoon everybody. Hello. I'm Blair Thomas. I'm the artistic director of the Chicago International puppet theater festival and Welcome to the final panel of the Ellen von Valkenberg puppetry symposium I want to start by saying The building on which I'm sitting the fine arts building as well as all the other venues that we're presenting our festival in here in Chicago Are on the lands that were formerly of the Ashinaabe peoples of the Great Lake area Which includes the tribes of the Pottawatomie the Peoria and the stock Peoples and for centuries they steward in these lands and for this we have our gratitude Today we have an excellent dynamic young panel Doing a presentation that is going to be led by and moderated by Dacia Posner Dacia is an associate professor of theater and Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University And she specializes in Russian avant-garde theater directing dramaturgy and puppetry She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in at the directing MFA and the interdisciplinary PhD and She's got some great books. Let me tell you here There's the one of the foremost one is one that's really had a great impact on the field of puppetry is the Rutledge companion to puppetry and material performance that she co-edited with Claudia Ortstein and John Bell and People are using that still today in many ways Additionally, she has written The directors prism about ETA Hoffman and the Russian theater avant-garde another book on Prokofius the love of three oranges with gotsy and Meyerhold in the title and she's currently working on a book on our company called the Moscow Khmerney theater that's an it's an artistic history in political times So but Dacia has worked as a dramaturg at Steppenwolf at the Connecticut Repertory Theater And she has performed herself as a puppeteer with the first night in Boston Children's free opera dance of New York bread and puppet theater underground railroad the puppeteer puppeteers cooperative and Luna theater Before I pass it over to her. I'll just very quickly say though that this Online panel is being recorded by howl around and so in its being put together in collaboration with the school of the art institute and the puppet festival and You can ask questions at the end the panelists are going to do their presentations and then we'll have a You can do this through the chat either through zoom if you're on zoom or through howl around so both of those Ways are which questions can be posed to panelists at the end and without further ado Dacia Posner I don't know how long we have to be into the pandemic before we forget to Before we remember to unmute so thank you very much everyone. It's a pleasure to be here Thank you to Blair and Paulette and everybody else who had has made this symposium happen I'm very excited about today's five presenters Each of them has a really I think groundbreaking perspective on how puppets and objects Function in performance in in our world today I'll be introducing each of our presenters in the order in which they will speak with you and then I have a few questions for them and They may have some questions for each other and we want to save plenty of time for a robust conversation with you the audience as well But we had we had a brief conversation the the five presenters and Paulette and myself When we were planning this event and I thought I'd share some of the most generative questions That came out of that conversation so that you can have them in your mind as They're presenting one was how do the materials of which a puppet is made shape the stories it tells How can listening and responding to objects shape the creative process? How does puppetry allow us to both see and remake the world differently? And what is unique about watching puppetry performance that's distinct from watching any other kind of live theater So keep those questions in mind and it is my great pleasure to introduce our first speaker today Marisa Fenley is a phd candidate at the University of Chicago in English and theater and performance studies Chicago based puppeteer and currently a fellow at the Frankie Institute for the humanities Her dissertation puppet theory the mechanical infrastructure of personhood argues that puppetry performs the limits of what it takes to qualify as a person She positions puppets puppets within intersecting historical legacies of objectification The denial of a subject position to colonized racialized gendered and infantilized peoples and the subversion of these legacies As a puppeteer Marisa explores how puppetry assigns agency to objectified bodies And produces work that investigates power and its historical sedimentation Marisa Fenley's paper today is Ellen van Volkenberg's disarrangement of a mid-summer night's dream Hello, thank you so much Blair and Paulette for inviting me to this panel and thank you Dacia for facilitating this conversation that we're about to have First slide please So today I'm going to share a little bit about the work of Ellen van Volkenberg Who's the namesake of this symposium and in particular her production of been summer night's dream, which was the first to stage Shakespeare's play entirely with marionettes in 1916 First however, we need to learn a little bit about a guy named edward gordon craig next slide please His book the art of the theater served as the bible for volkenberg's company the chicago little theater Which happened to be housed in the fine arts building on michigan avenue Where blare addressed us from today and where the chicago puppet studio is housed The main thing to know about craig other than that he was a very big deal at the turn of the 20th century Is that he hated actresses He hated actors in general, but he especially hated actresses And he wasn't alone the modern theater was marked by a skepticism of the female body In his essay the actor and the uber marionette next slide please Craig tells us. Oh, this is um an old power point. So um That's all right. We'll we'll work with it. Um craig tells us that female bodies are used for reproduction Reproduction is just making copies of stuff And copies are not art. Thus the logic goes the female body is not a suitable medium for making art What's the other thing that female bodies do on stage? They attract lovers and for craig sexual pleasure is the death of aesthetic pleasure And thus the sexualized Reproductive body must be banished If this was not enough to convince you that women should be banished from the stage It turns out that women are also very bad at controlling their bodies They are at the mercy of their nerves This ideology, of course, was not invented by craig the hysteric dissembling woman has a much longer history in the anti-theatrical Imagination, however, it was leveraged by craig as the reason to rid the stage of people And to replace them all with puppets All in all he found that the female body was distracting from all of the stuff He wanted the theater to be about Any search for what lies behind and beneath the body's histrionic gestures will point back to the body's surface And craig wanted to access all those mysterious things that lay beneath the actor's skin All of those disembodied abstract aspects of the human experience One of my favorite words that craig uses to describe the actress is that she gushes And actually we can just sort of flip through these next slides rather quickly since I won't be using them So she the actress gushes craig's allergy to the female body can be perfectly summed up in the word The body excretes things. It's fleshy chaotic and convulsive. It's messy and reactive and excessive Well, people who write on craig labor over his elusive and baffling descriptions of his uber marionette I actually find craig's description of the actress not only infinitely more detailed But more interesting and even useful in understanding the work of his contemporaries Those who were actually in the business of making puppets not just writing on them So let's turn back to alan van bulkenberg and let's go one more slide There she is. Okay. I want to think about her little theater as a disarrangement of craig's manifesto And I actually borrow this word disarrangement from wokenberg herself who used it to describe her adaptation of shakespeare's play I find it really interesting to think of the like the word disarrangement instead of rearrangement Because it suggests a reordering and recombining of elements into a new form But one that is actually less organized rather than more so I find that the material and mechanical processes behind wokenberg's innovative puppet construction and manipulation Make her puppets gush to borrow craig's pejorative phrase We find on her stage convulsing jerky wriggling Neurospatzin, which is the greek word for marionette meaning involuntary nerve movement Returning to wokenberg's work today teaches us to think of the marionette not as a replacement for the actor But a mechanism that can heartfully disarrange the gushing nervous convulsive body And in doing so liberate these characteristics that have been historically feminized from their conscription Not only as inherently gendered, but as theatrical liabilities. All right, let's see what's on this next slide. I don't remember Oh, yeah, there's her disarrangement. All right one more Okay, cool um My work in general is interested in the ways that puppets mechanisms and techniques influence the kinds of persons those puppets come to represent So rather than seeing puppetry as a technology to replace the human actor I find that puppets can usefully calibrate our attention to specific assumptions and beliefs that we hold about what makes People believably seem like people So what kinds of little people populated wokenberg's puppet theater? And let's check out the next slide What techniques did she use to create the rules for how personhood works on her stage? I'm first going to give an overview of how she and her collaborators built and manipulated their puppets And then I'm going to look at two moments in her show that help us think about how wokenberg used these techniques to create gushing disarranged bodies Kathleen Wheeler who carved the puppets quote left the heads purposely rough in finish Because the broken surfaces of the puppets faces carry their facial expression Farther out into the audience and you can see sort of that rough broken carving on puck's face here Harriet edgerton who designed the joints and controls added a waist head and arm joint to the traditional knee hip and neck To make the puppets more pliable next slide There we go All right, so we have broken surfaces that can better reflect light and show facial movement And we have added joints to make the puppets bodies more pliable The brokenness and wiggliness of the puppets aided in their expressiveness two features of bodies that craig condemned But were intentionally emphasized by wokenberg and her team And in fact, she created two additional characters who we saw actually on a previous slide Wagon wag who just say wiggle waggle as they swarm across the stage Then we have a cast of actresses. That's right actresses Who were selected not for their abilities to perform feminine personhood But for just the lightness of their voices, which wokenberg found were better suited to her diminutive marionettes The female voices disarranged and then resynchronized with the puppets gestures material qualities and theatrical role And wokenberg was unique in that she had all her puppeteers trained dramatically She drew upon the exact training and techniques of theatrical performance Those embodied emotive and reactive qualities that craig wanted to dispense with Only after learning the roles themselves and their own bodies were the puppets allowed to pick up a puppeteer And puppeteer were allowed to pick up a puppet a process that she called synchronization Let's look at the next slide Okay, great Wokenberg translated transformed and disarranged those qualities of the female actress into puppet form No longer distinctly feminized Rather the body's ability to gush wriggle its capacity for rupture like the broken textures of the puppets carved faces Were all positioned as celebrated material qualities of the puppet ones to be captured and incorporated I will now briefly leave you with two moments where we see the convulsing gushing puppet break down Disarrange itself and resynchronize into a performing body In other words where we see wokenberg capture the puppet's material body behaving like feminized flesh This is at the um, this is during rehearsal and in the recollection of morris brown wokenberg's husband Suddenly the forest shimmered with new light nelly van and nicknamed for gokenberg grabbed my hand Oh, that's beautiful. She explained well done But I was as startled as she the effect was none of my making Bewildered we examined the set inch by inch Finally we discovered the edge of a cutout had become slightly frayed the silken threads Trumbling in the tiny breeze of pucks wings had caught the light chance had dealt us a trunk card And at the opening moment of midsummer, let's see what's on the next slide The king and queen were to be discovered seated at the foot of a tree in the forest and let's go one more slide The queen was all right But the king was caught by the rising curtain in the act of adjusting his hip joints And became so nervous and uncontrolled that he convulsively seized the queen by her back hair And they both toppled off the mound and hung over the footlights The nervous convulsive king seizes the queen in a moment of spontaneous passion The fraying of silk flutters as puck flies by and those lamentable qualities of the actress her capacity to hemorrhage the qualities of theatrical performance rather than control and organize and arrange them I find to be a better rubric to understand Volkenberg's puppetry practice than craig's designs for her replacement Thank you very much Thank you very much marissa Our next presenter today is dr. Skye Strauss Skye Strauss recently compete completed her phd in the interdisciplinary phd in theater and drama program at northwestern university Her research spans devising puppetry contemporary circus design and synography To highlight the role materiality plays in the creative process across performing arts Aiming to expand beyond the usual focus on directors and actors To include stage managers and designers and craftspeople who are also present in and around the rehearsal room When she's not in the library or the classroom, you can find skye making magical things or Hanging upside down at the circus dr. Strauss's paper today is a shift in mindset from mastery to material listening Thank you. Dacia Hi everyone I'm just going to go ahead and get started Puppeteers already know that the material world can be notoriously uncooperative Exploring what a puppet or an object wants to do is a necessary part of the process if you want to bring it to life Taking a step back from the finished puppet. There are also the materials the puppet is made of materials like this paper The same puppeteer who's willing to work with their finished puppets natural tendencies Much like these stories of valkenberg that we were just hearing Will likely find themselves Similarly prepared to follow the propensities or honor the limits of any given material My research takes principles from puppetry and new materialism And uses them to explain how other performing artists can also learn to actively work with the material world To discover and found objects and supposedly form less materials valuable sources of inspiration When it comes to theory I found bill brown's theme theory particularly useful It proposes a distinction between objects and things that proved revelatory in relation to the creative process In brown's examples, we look through objects As long as they serve a purpose A window that frames our view A knife sharp enough to cut or an unassuming typewriter eraser that is standing by to rub out our mistakes The objects physical properties align with its function So they go unmarked for instance today if we were in person I might have a piece of paper that was holding the words of my talk for me Things in contrast are recalcitrant and unexpected A foggy window A dull knife Or a sculpture of a typewriter eraser that is so large you can easily stand in its shadow I didn't catch the show, but I heard that bill's 44th Featured some particularly friendly things What makes this distinction between object and thing More than a semantic game Is the changed relationship that it describes between human and non-human Instead of a subject firmly in control of an object There is a subject confounded by or encountering a thing What if instead of being seen as a stepping stone to a finished product The material itself were taken as a source of inspiration During the creative process What does it mean exactly in practice to collaborate with the material as a thing? First and foremost it is important to deliberately seek out Non-normative uses for the airstrile object or common material Brown describes a process of productive misuse Wherein quote the experience of sensation depends on disorientation or dislocation Which is to say on both habit and its disruption The devising process that leads to the creation of new performances Particularly in puppetry and object performance Engages in just the right kind of playful questioning to turn an object into a thing If I stop treating paper in the usual way and start to explore its material properties I find that it's capable of much more than holding text The first thing that comes to mind for me in a puppet context Is a little bit of paper mache You might have seen much bigger examples than this one if you caught the bread and puppet performance But the paper itself can also be great fun to play with A pristine sheet moves and sounds and feels different than a crumpled one A crumpled one moves more unpredictably and feels and sounds a little bit softer You can hear in my voice how that engagement with the physical properties of paper A sensory exploration starts to take on an emotional resonance That could be nurtured in rehearsal and then capitalized on in performance In this kind of process the meaning a thing makes on stage arises from its physical properties Which become integral to the dramaturgy of the finished performance The formlessness of the thing uses affect emotion and free association To create new meanings that probably wouldn't adhere to the object as we once knew it It is also important to allow the thing itself to capture the audience's attention The performances I study all ask human performers to share the spotlight with non-human performers And it is important to clarify that the artists in question like the puppeteers you've watched throughout the festival Do not see those things as seen stealing competitors Rather a human and non-human performer are mutually elevated when they begin to successfully collaborate Allowing for on-stage action that accommodates ongoing improvisation This is where it helps to be dealing with things in abundance I can play with paper in various ways on my tiny zoom screen But I want to invite you to imagine with me a stage filled with reams of paper rescued from recycling bins Or coated in the contents of an industrial paper shredder Perhaps covered by sheets of paper Or construction grade tyvek that are so big that when they're raised up to meet the lighting battens They can reconfigure the stage space And thinking about the Blair thomas and company bobby dick as I give you that last mental image Training both physical and mental teaches the human performer in that scenario To improvise with that mass of material To accept that the piles of paper might make for a slippery floor To learn to dance along with a crumpled sheet so that it seems to float or fly Or to master the ability to twist the tyvek just so so that at least for an instant it can support human weight Allowing someone to lean off balance or rise a few inches off the floor And do something that would otherwise be impossible Expressive action arises out of hours of dedicated practice As the scale expands human control and primacy naturally fall further and further into question But by enlivening the material and allowing it agency the energy of that mobile human body Also flows outward through the whole stage space I've reached the end of the spoken part of my presentation And I would like to give you just a couple of seconds with my one slide if you want to catch my citations Slide please Thank you very much Thank you very much. Dr. Strauss our next presenter today is kasaya waters Who is an artist from what they like to call the deep south? They're an mfa studio art performance student at the school of the art institute of chicago And they also hold an mfa in acting from ohio university Time traveling is not only a subject matter in most of their work But also a method of creation and praxis and pedagogy They often push against and overlap and reject syncopation Growing up in the black pentecostal church tradition They think of their work as trying to find that which is holy whole holistic and or holds within black and queer functionality They do this through spiritual surrealism And traditional folkloric techniques and they have created and fostered techniques based on mythology archetypes ados rituals underground queer performance culture and visual aesthetics and trans poly rhythms Please welcome kasaya waters and their paper or their presentation. What makes an object sacred or black functionality through objects? Hey um, so i'm going to talk um, I talk in circles And I don't talk linearly and also I speak in um AA ve so I won't be um adding any extra academic uh fluffness and everything um So i'm going to start with um a story and i'm not going to start with the slide yet I i i'm growing up my grandmother used to have us like collect um collect leaves in the fall and um And put them in these 10 cans that were used for like I think they cataloged um the popcorns that used to be separated between like the cheddar and um regular popcorn and some caramels and anyway So those were emptied out and every year we will collect um our favorite Our favorite leaves and I was um yesterday. I was with my friend and They had some leaves that a plant had died and and they started moving the leaves around and immediately Immediately the the leaves um were we're we're singing they they made a sound they they were they were um It was almost a siren um that activated like this memory in my body and uh memory I believe is architectural architecture um And it lives in your body. Um I also will say My grandfather this tractor trailer um this red tractor trailer Um, so I grew up in the southeast parts of North Carolina And they're all my grandfather and his brother are always working on this tractor trailer since I've been alive So I don't know when it's ever going to get fixed It's always like Something's always going on wrong with it. I don't even know if it's totally something that's going wrong with it Or that is the place That they have community in So they always are trying to you know, especially for black man, you know And being in a place where you can be soft enough and vulnerable enough I think the meeting place of working on that tractor trailer. Um, that object is uh significant Fast forward. I'm also thinking about Playing with my grandmother's wigs, which if you know anything about wigs, they are actually very stubborn You know, I do some drag performance. I've stepped into a lot of drag performance They actually very you know, like this idea of like they're getting in your your mouth and you know You're trying to pull stuff back the laces pulling I've been in I've been in performance is where the whole wig just comes off and I'm like, okay Well, you know, like this idea their wigs are rebellious. Just like me in a lot of ways. Um Um So growing up in the Pentecostal tradition, you always hear this phrase the rocks will cry I won't let a rock cry out in my name, which is a biblical um Saying, you know that the rocks can actually cry out in our in our names if we don't um If we don't praise, you know this idea, um, so I always had this mystical like this mystical idea that non-animate objects Can actually saying can actually cry out can actually do things right anything could be used um And I was like, we're just we're just where does this come from? Um, and like this idea the carolinas are actually very influenced by the congo region If you actually do a lot of the tracing back. Um, and there's a lot of, um philosophers and scholars Catherine, um hazard donald has a book called mojo working and also Robert ferris thomas who was an art historian Has a book called flash of the spirit. Those are two books that are like really integral to like, um my scholarship Um, and then also I believe that people's life experience is there is a primary resource on Truey to what um academia might say, you know, I believe it holds true Um, so I speak from emotional place. Um, and I'm and I'm a storyteller So which I'm going back and forth with all those things, but I started with the first slide now um next Actually, no stay right here because I actually want to talk about this. Sorry. I actually want to talk about This um, so um feyland is a piece that I created. Um, and this right here The the cloth is actually a what what uh, it's coming out of a their prayer shawl tradition, which is actually um something that it started in the um the um like a jewish tradition of actually wearing a prayer shawl to actually transferred into the charismatic pentecostal black church tradition Um, but I through queer evolution. I've changed it. It's usually white with tassels on it I've actually just created. Uh, well the object created itself. It actually instructs me. Um And um, so this is actually my my my prayer shawl or what I use and performances and I activate the space with this It's also becomes a security and architectural space that I could put over if I need to um Go back into myself And that's my stubborn wig Next slide Um sacred entitled to reverence and respect dedicate our set apart for the service or worship of a deity Set apart in relationship to action in relation and relationship to um richard schekner's um This idea of richard schekner. Um the performance uh studies He started a performance study program at nyu But he talks about this idea of a restored behavior um things that you do so much that they basically that they become part of they become things that they do they They you use they become things that you do often and so like shown that you're so he has this thing called being uh showing Showing that you're doing um, and then people who talk about showing that you're doing But I wanted to talk about action in relationship to set an action aside um Um amongst actions that are restored behaviors, but if you set an action aside Um that becomes the spectacular that can become the ritual space. Um an action that breaks This uh an action that first breaks and then repeated enough to become a restored behavior But it first has to break so That's the spectacular like if i'm if i'm talking um, and I stop if i'm if i'm talking about something And then I continue to talk that pause right there becomes a spectacular becomes the oh, what is that? don't focus um next Um, this comes from feyland. Um this this object I mean this thing that i'm writing on the ground is actually how I activate the space is a it's a cosmo gram Which comes from the congo region. Um, and it talks about this idea of uh, the crossroads are this limited space um that life and death meet at um And these are some of the costumes and and I don't even think they're custom because these These spirits are the fairies. I use fairies, especially because of the queer tradition of fairies But also it allows me Okay, I'm gonna go back I'm gonna go back and actually talk about my experience with um tom lee who I think is probably in the room today but I actually worked on a play called um holly down in heaven and That was the first time I actually was worked with puppets. Um, which in beginning. I hate it I hate it because I had internalized toxic individualism that comes with uh, oh Oh, I have to go talk to individualism that comes with uh, you know this idea um This idea that you have to be seen that you have to So anyway, what I learned after working with the puppets was this idea that I can actually escape Into the background and that and that does not mean that I Am not valuable right and that also that I share breath with objects I share breath with things this interdependency Um of objects and that humans are not above objects or animals or anything else that we actually have an interdependency And a shared breath with these things and that um and also allowed me clear It allowed me queer evolution because I actually embraced the multiplicity within myself Um that I can be multiple people that I am every woman is all in me aretha franklin, but um But that I can like that I can That I can um or was that when he's sorry, but I can I can be everything right this idea that working multiple puppets was like Oh and All of this is coming out of me all of this is truthful and all of this is coming out of pumping We have this interdependency thing and I can also bring this outside off of the stage. Um I'm gonna skip skip skip skip skip or skip twice This tambourine is a sacred object for me. I'm gonna go back to the last one This tambourine is a shake sacred object for me. Um because uh, I activate the space and also brings back That it's a sonic experience and uh sonic is actually one of those things that like is not tangible, but it touches right So it actually has stability because it's vibration to touch you um I work with a lot of feathers and these objects um that I work with so I work with feathers saw uh the prayer shawl um and also Ornaments are adornments. Um that that realized my gender when I say that I'm talking about the wigs I'm talking about the makeup. I'm talking about these things that are realizing. Um me Everything that I wear all these things are first objects all these things are first cotton, right? And what is my relationship as a black? Um as the senator slaves with um cotton material Um and clothing myself and having the ability to adorn myself with that material now um So what is the sacred object? So I'm gonna skip You know because I actually ran out of time. So I have 10 Oh, okay. Okay. So I'm gonna stop right here. Um, so what is the sacred object? I think when we when we eternalize this idea that uh that Everything could be sacred Everything could be sacred and I think we eternalize the idea that we have to earn our worthiness But actually everything is sacred and when we set apart set apart that realization set apart um being a relationship with something and set that apart That is when it um that when that's when we realize that um That we don't earn sacredness. Um And that every everything is sacred. Um, so Thank you Thank you very much. Cause I it was so interesting. Um, I've written down all of these thoughts for us to to discuss some afterwards Uh, the the next presenter today is just bass Who is a current mfa candidate in the sculpture department at the school of the art institute of chicago Her artwork has been exhibited at spring break art show new york. Detroit artwork art art week site gallery and comfort station and featured in the new york times hypo Allergic art news paste fader and mtv She uses play to anthrop anthropomorphize every day in discarded materials in order to build mimemic And uncanny performances and installations. Uh, just bass's presentation today is called what is around? Hi everyone. It's great to be here with you all. I'm going to be speaking with this plant panel Um, I'm really excited for the conversation afterwards. I've been taking notes and everyone's been saying, um, it's really inspiring so far um, if we could bring up the first slide, I'll be talking about several projects um and the um first two are like Definitely a hundred percent puppets. Um, and then I'll move on to some experimental puppets in terms of defining what is a puppet to me and what is the puppeteer? So this is um a stuff from a music video. I did last year for a chicago band called moon type I did the costumes and the props and the choreography and video editing It was shot at the indian and dunes And the song is about lost friendship And finding one stuff again. And so I wanted to work with the mask as a double persona But also as a sense of protection And the song is called fairy Next slide, please Um in the summer of 2020 I made this 30 second animation to address police violence that was happening across the u.s. It's civil rights protests. Um, so um if we can um play it with the sound on that'd be great That's okay um Well, um I can definitely um um It kind of goes like Wake up it's time to wake up It's time to go away and so wake up And that's what we would do and that's what you would do That's what we would do and that's what you would do It's time to wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up Wake up It's time to wake up, um, and so I have these um it's a a black and white animation with Sharpie of this kind of snow white lady, like waking up. And then these sheep puppets that interact with her and at the very end, as it builds up in them, music is kind of like getting more mysterious. That's when you see a bunch of imagery. The New York Times had posted 100 photographs of police violence that was happening at these protests. And so they kind of come at you, I'm ricocheted. And it kind of gives you this like eerie sense at the very end. That's the hope. Next slide. Oh, but what I love about puppets is that they can like seem really cute and welcoming. And then they can kind of lure you in with their innocence and sensibility to address things that are less comfortable to get to things that are about real issues and real feelings. So those were the two classical puppets, projects that I've done, and now we're going to get into some larger things. This is the installation view from Spring Break for a project I did called CISA. The sculptures were made out of paper mache, half of them were kinetic, either rotating or swaying or falling. And next slide. And if the video will work, amazing, but if not, that's okay too. I thought that the Instagram version is better because you actually see people interacting with the space. It's the physical engagement of the audience of the viewer entering into the stage or the set that makes these puppets become part of them. And then it's just like weird sense of like, what is the puppet? And are the people who are entering into the space also the puppets that they need this, the audience, the real presence of the living body to make this actually successful. And then the next piece, if we go to the next slide. This is a video called Still Life Chronologically. It was made at the beginning of COVID in Chicago and for one day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. I set out to document all the things I touched with my hands, creating a list of the things I touched in the order they were touched. And I'm guessing the video won't work, but I can also, I can act it out. It starts with like chronologically, like cat, plate, dishwasher. So like cat and there's an outline drawing for each image and the image will remain on screen until the word has been said completely. And so the whole day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. kind of it went from 12 hours to three minutes in like 41 seconds. And I wanted to contextualize this as being an artifact of puppeting that accumulated over the course of the day, that the things around myself, similar to what Sky was talking before, my bed, a coffee mug, my cat, my partner, the toilet paper began to control how I was moving and being in my own space. And at one point in the day I was just avoiding touching anything because the power of the things, of the objects had such an immense control over me. And the things took on these new personalities and this new power dynamic emerged where I was a puppet in my own home. Next slide. This is a, I'm gonna be a clip of this piece I did with Silly Putty. I'm interested in using what came first, the chicken or the egg or the puppet and the puppeteer. And in the clip I mimic Silly Putty and the Silly Putty mimics me. And Silly Putty is this Namutonian gook and it like holds itself and then it wants to become what it wants to be, which is like held together. And I was thinking about facial expressions when I'm not speaking, when I'm just looking at my face kind of like a Namutonian Putty. But in the way that it follows, my face can make the same gestures as a Silly Putty. Next slide please. This is called framing. It's a performance piece with over 15 cardboard costumes where the face hole was removed and I tried to wear them all at once. The more I put them on, the harder it is to move and my flesh body becomes masked by the cardboard bodies. And at the very end, like the last 30 seconds I tried to act out all these bodies together that these puppets as one would perform using multiple identities. Next slide. Thank you. For this past train, Vanilla, I curated and was part of Garage Sale 2.0 at Alive the Gallery. I took over this wet Camry and I parked it on the opposite direction of traffic. So there was a bunch of cars facing this way and then my car was facing this way. And inside of the front seat, I placed a blue inflatable man. Someone, like one of the ones that you would see in front of a car dealership. But I placed him, because the term is inflatable tube man. So I've given him key hem pronouns. So I placed him at the steering wheel and then the air generator was below at the, where like the gas and accelerator are. And so when the air would blow up, he would kind of go like, like as if he was having, he was like stuck in traffic or like he had had a really bad day at work. But through gesture and air, he took on these human qualities. Next slide. In the back of the car, I had a trunk popped open featuring a Hot Wheels collector's box that I had found at a Garage Sale. And it had been previously labeled by the previous owner in pink pen. I'm not sure if you can see it clearly here, but the categories for the collector was car and color. So I use a previous owner system of categorizing to make finger puppets of many tube men. They then placed in the corresponding sections. So like for instance, on line 13, car was truck and color was yellow. So I made a yellow finger puppet and truck became a qualifier for its personality. But in also in the labeling, there's also old orange or tow truck, but tow is spelled T-O-E. And I was interested in how a name also acts as a puppet does. The name of the thing gives insight into finding character. And this is my last slide and I'll wrap it up. Oh, next slide. But I was interested in thinking about what if all character specificity is erased? So I took a guess who board and I painted over all the faces on the same face. And if you haven't played this game, it's a two player board game where players, each guest, the identity of each other is chosen character. And it's all based on facial characteristics like beard or blue eyes or wearing a hat. But by painting all the cards basically the same it makes the game almost unplayable. And this I also believe is a type, it's a functions as a puppet as it investigates power dynamics and requires a presence of players to bring the game to life. And I think in all of my work, I'm trying to get into that tension puppetry creates between control and recognizability. And at the fun and the joy and sometimes the simplicity of the puppet becomes a mean or an entry point to get to a stickier conversation. And like Dacia said, for me puppetry is an anthropomorphization of the everyday allowing objects and things to perform and take a new meaning in different contexts. And that's what I got. Thank you. Thank you so very much. I'm also excited to present our last speaker today, Ana Diaz-Burriga, who is a puppetry practitioner, scholar and doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary PhD in theater and drama at Northwestern. She is the recipient of a cognitive science advanced research fellowship and has an MA in advanced theater practice from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She co-founded Beyond the Wall, for which she built giant puppets at the US-Mexico border. Her research investigates what the minds and bodies of puppetry audiences can tell us about the ways we make meaning out of contemporary puppet performance using methods from both cognitive science and theater studies. Ana's presentation is where you look versus what you see, a cognitive approach to puppetry spectatorship. Thank you, Dacia, and a big thank you to Paulette and Blair for inviting me to be here. Hi, we could show the first slide, please. Yeah, so I wanna talk to you all about my research where I use methods from cognitive science to understand how processes, which we might not be aware of, help us make meaning of puppet theater and what these reveals about the work that puppeteers do. My work is inspired by neurobiologists, Amir Sekhi, who in the 1990s suggested that painters were inadvertent neurologists because through their creations, they had discovered principles about how our vision works that were later verified by science. Similarly, I believe that puppeteers are already cognitive scientists because through their practices, they have developed a deep understanding of how the minds and bodies of spectators work. And puppeteers use these understanding to guide our perception and curate, so to speak, our experience of spectating puppetry performance. So I know this sounds very abstract when I say it like this. So let me give you an example. If we could see the next slide, please. This is a quote from my review of Blind Summits, The Table by Tracy Sinclair, where she says the following about Moses, the puppet protagonist of the piece, quote, this little puppet is utterly compelling. You forget the very existence of his handlers except when he engages with them, end quote. Next slide, please. You might have had a similar experience while watching some of the performances here at the festival where you were so immersed in the performance that you forgot the puppeteer or they seem to disappear even though they were in plain sight. I certainly have had that experience. If we could minimize those lights and come back to me, please. Yeah, our forgetfulness of the puppeteers might be an issue with our awareness so that for example, we might have looked at the puppeteer at the puppeteer at a certain moment of the performance without even realizing that we were looking at them. Or it could be an issue with our memory. Maybe we looked at the puppeteer briefly, we looked back at the puppet and by the end of the performance we don't have a recollection of whether we actually looked at the puppeteer or for how long. But I think that even when we are not seeing the puppets or think we are not seeing the puppeteers, I mean, when we are not seeing the puppeteers or think we are not seeing the puppeteers, we might be taking cues from them about what is expected of us when we watch the performance. For example, cues about where we should be looking or we might be taking information from the puppeteers about what the puppet is feeling or what journey they are going through in the performance. But since we sometimes have this experience of feeling like the puppeteer disappeared or that we weren't really looking at them, we might not be aware that we were drawing all of this information from them. Additionally, we tend to be pretty bad at reporting what we have seen. And this is problematic for people like me who are trying to research how we spectate theater and trying to understand how audiences make meaning of performance. Because it means that if we just interview audiences, sure, we get a sense of what it felt like for them to be in the theater, but we do not know exactly what they were doing while they were watching the performance. So the methods from cognitive science that I use begin to cast some light on these unaware processes and tell us more about how we watch even if we don't know what we are doing while we are watching. I'm gonna give you an example of a method that I use, but as applied to magic, which I think has a lot of principles that align with puppetry and can give you a better sense of what I do. And this example comes from an experiment done by scientists Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land, in which they had a video of a magician throwing a ball in the air and making it vanish. They had people watch this magic trick while tracking the viewer's eye movement using a gaze tracker. A gaze tracker, which you can see on slide four, please, if we could see the slide, thank you. Oh, the next slide. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so this is a device that has a camera that records where the eyes of the viewers are looking, allowing us to get information about the fixation path so where people are looking at different moments, pupil dilation, which is believed to be an indicator of whether people are engaged or distracted and fixation time. So how long people look at different elements in their visual field? And this one that I'm showing you is placed on the screen, but the one that Kuhn and Land use was placed on the participant's heads. And if we could see the next slide, please. Here you can see the results of their gaze tracking experiment. And what you see is the magician throws a ball in the air and the viewers are following the ball with their gaze. And they first look at the hand of the magician, which is at the top, in the top row. Then they look at the face of the magician, which is the middle row. And then they look above the magician following the ball in the air, which is the bottom row. And the magician throws the ball twice. And on the third throw, they pretend to throw the ball but don't actually do so. So the ball seems to disappear. And what the gaze tracker data shows for this throw is that participants' cases look from the hand of the magician to the face of the magician, and then they stop. However, when participants were asked about what they saw in this trick, 63% reported having seen the ball vanish in the air. And in fact, many thought that the trick was performed by having someone grabbing the ball from above. So this is an example of our eyes knowing better than our minds what has happened because a participant's eyes didn't follow the non-existent ball. But subjectively, many of these participants did not know that they actually had not looked at the object. And this is the kind of thing that happens to all of us when we report what we have seen. So just like Kunan landed this research for magic, I am currently working on doing this for puppetry. I am gathering data about the gaze of participants watching puppet performances. In the next slide, please. The next one, yeah. You can see some sample data that I have gathered. And this is data from me watching the table. So the red circle show you where I was looking at with the number showing where I looked first and the time that I looked both at puppet and puppeteer. And I think this is pretty cool because it lets us see people are looking at the puppet or at the puppeteer at any given time. But what I am more interested in is the tension that exists when we are able to compare these data with what people say about their experiences of spectating afterwards. Because by observing whether and to what extent viewer's accounts overlap or differ from what they were looking at, we get a sense of how the puppeteers are guiding our perception of the performance and the ways in which we are making meaning of it. So I can't go into much detail here, but going deeper into this inquiry can give us a sense of how different viewers watch differently. For example, it may be that puppeteers watching a puppetry performance spend more time looking at the performing puppeteer because we are more intentionally looking at the techniques they are using to animate the puppet. It could also be possible that some audience members are more aware of where they are looking when they are watching the performance, displaying different levels of awareness of what we do while we spectate. These varied modes of spectating are related to our backgrounds and our previous experiences of watching and or doing puppetry. The puppeteers can communicate with us across these differences, speaks to the sophistication of their techniques. And we could come back to me please. So if you think back now to those experiences I mentioned at the beginning of this talk where maybe you felt like the puppeteer had disappeared, the rest of the conventions in a puppetry performance are telling us that there is focus on the puppet. After all, the puppet is an important part of the puppet show. So these might reinforce our belief that we didn't look at the puppeteer. But those performance conventions and ways of watching are very much guided by the puppeteers themselves who through their own gaze and their own physicality are giving us clues as to how to watch, who to watch and when to watch what. So I am excited by how methods from cognitive science can show us more about the sophisticated expertise that puppeteers have and how they employ to create these amazing experiences we have while watching puppetry performances. And if we could please show the last slide. Yeah, so thank you very much. And I am really looking forward to continuing our conversation. Thank you very much, Anna. And thank you to all of our presenters. Such wonderful, interesting conversations. I want to just mention a few threads that I pulled out while everybody was speaking. Marissa talking about what does puppetry disarrange? And I wondered as a result of that, what does it rearrange and what does it reclaim? Skye talking about the mutual elevation of both human and non-human performance together. Kasaya talking about life experience being a primary resource and being in the background and sharing breath does not make someone less valuable. Jess talking about how puppets lure you in with their innocence to address things that are less comfortable, the tensions that puppetry creates and Anna thinking through what the work is that puppeteers do and how we have different levels of very sophisticated awareness while we spectate puppet theater. So thank you all of you for bringing up these, I think very important, very timely, very sophisticated questions regarding puppet theater. I'll return to, I'll launch us today by just returning to a couple of the questions that I began with that seem to me to be the common threads in your work. And anybody can jump in and answer and then we'll turn it over to our Zoom audience and our regular audience. And I also invite you to ask questions to each other. But how does listening to objects for you shape the creative process and how does puppetry allow us to see and remake the world differently? Anybody just jump in if you have any thoughts on either of these things. While folks are pondering their responses, also I wanna invite anybody who's on the Zoom call to go ahead and put any questions that you have in the chat or also you're welcome to ask your question live if you prefer, just indicate that in the chat. And then also any of our HowlRound audience members if you have questions, go ahead and sign in and post those questions and we'll try to get to those as well. Can you repeat the question? How does listening to objects shape the creative process and how does puppetry allow us to see the world differently and maybe even remake the world? Try to think of a way to start that doesn't feel like repeating something from my presentation. Eat away, it's not repetition, it's reiteration and distillation. I mean, part of the seeing the world differently part, I mean, we're doing it different ways and different presentations. There's taking something we encounter all the time, the cat and the dishwasher and having a different sort of appreciation for it versus in my case, that disorientation idea, can you take something that you pass by every day and have some kind of different experience with it? Although I think those are interrelated. But that's definitely part of that feedback between subject and object person and thing that allows us to generate artistic material in a lot of different contexts. So for instance, Marissa, the things that started to feel like they might be malfunctions or happy mistakes that can then get made into something useful in performance. Yeah, one thing that I noticed actually about all the papers in which, is the way in which you talk about navigating and destabilizing familiar relationships and then also just a kind of a humility and willingness to share the world with objects, something that I noticed across everybody's work. Yeah, if I could add on to what Skye said, I think that my work is also very interested in the histories that puppetry is able to reanimate and then often renegotiate on stage. And I think part of this is because it's one that really lays bare the actual processes of creation in ways that other theater does not. And I think Anna will probably have infinitely smarter things to say about how much we actually can be attended to those processes as they're happening. But I do think that in that way, puppetry is able to sort of lay bare a lot of the structures that we do assume go into making something animate or in my personal interest making someone seem like a person. And that there's all sorts of structures that we inhabit every day that end up animating our own personalities and different sort of techniques that we use to bring those personas into being that are invisible. And yet I think puppetry can make them visible in a way that is interesting. And then in really naming and sort of thinking about those histories, I think it can become a very interesting tool to renegotiate what those structures are and how they limit how we move, how we feel and how we think. If I could add on to that. Yeah, I think Mary's is right, like how puppetry makes visible the creation process. And I think it also like heightens these kind of like our relationship with fiction, right? Or what we think of as fiction. So because there's no hiding that this puppet is an artificial life. And there's always kind of like that awareness in the back of our minds. So we're always in this constant tension of like the immersion and the, oh, but I'm an audience sitting on the theater seat. So I think it also like invites us to rethink what our relationship with fiction and with art in general is, right? Like how much we're engaging in sort of fiction making our everyday lives and yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna jump on that one. Sun Ra, the musician says that the black body is myth already. And it's, you know, the black body is how always been rendered as an object. So to think of, so it's an easier window to think of when we think about like going into mystical or when we think about glitch feminism which offers us a way to like take on characters and actually make those characters part of our daily lives and live in a mystical place and live our afro fabulations like this idea of like I can actually create like I can be the, these objects are allowed or showing me that I can, these objects, especially when we think about puppetry work these objects are allowing me to put energy somewhere that actually lives in me. And then therefore, and then therefore have a conversation and being conversation that is transforming me into the object. For me to add on to that, I think puppets keep the imagination open. That puppets allow for constant re-imagination to what people were saying before about this, the creation process is possible on the stage but it's also possible. And when you take the puppet home what does the puppet do versus what it's on the stage and that these like various lives in different spaces allow for constant reorganization. And I wanted to go back to what Marissa had been talking about before with the wiggle waggle that the characters, the whole entire play just said wiggle waggle and how gender did that is and how that says enough and that you still understand all of the different means of what that can be within a context. I invite now each of you to continue the conversation with each other, ask each other questions if you have them. And also I really want to extend a warm invitation for the other folks who are on the Zoom call and especially the folks who are watching on HowlRound. Go ahead and post your questions. We would love for you to be part of the question in the 15 minutes, the conversation, the 15 minutes we have remaining. Hi, Dacia, this is Tom Lee with the Puppet Festival. We're getting some comments coming through HowlRound and one is more of a statement which maybe your panelists can respond to and it's from Bruce. Bruce is stating, is puppetry an illusion or puppetry is an illusion and it is creating a reality that is not often there. How would you respond to that statement from Bruce? I guess the question is, is puppetry an illusion and is or is it reality? That's a really good question. I mean, I'm really interested in what you all have to say. The first thing that comes to my mind is, I mean, maybe it's a reality that you make, right? It's a reality that you imagine. I love what Cassiah said about it allowing you to live in a mystical place, to live out in your words, your aphorofabulations and the way in which it allows you to choose where you put your energy and your attention and your imagination, just talking about it being a constant reimagination. But what do you think about puppetry, illusion, reality and imagination? I actually also think because I work really useful in answering this question and maybe it's because of your investment in the metaphysical and whatever ways that you've articulated it in numerous different terms. But I was thinking especially about this tension in your presentation, because I about the scarf as like protection where it allowed you to spend more time with yourself. And then the object is also an occasion to like withdraw from your individuality as well and sort of really de-center that sort of sense of American individualism. And those to me are like two actually opposite impulses in some ways. One is like a retreat into the self and one is a way of de-centering the self, but that the object can allow in both instances. And so I guess I don't know why this was sparked by the question, but it seems like the ways that the puppeteer or artist is showing up on stage and either making room for things that artist is not bringing, whether it's because they don't want to be seen and want to sort of be private or because they want to in fact de-center and sort of de-individualize and really make their way into the object. To me that speaks to this question of the illusion and the real. I also think part of what we're all talking about in different ways is what kind of illusion is going to be successful depends on your ability to negotiate with the physical reality of the things you have in hand. So the successful illusion that the puppeteer creates with the puppet depends on their ability to know what the puppet can and cannot do. But often the moments when we stutter when the illusion gets broken are about malfunction on stage in some way or another. So I think there's a way that those things potentially run into each other and that a lot of the skill of the puppeteer referring to it on his presentation is about keeping us away from the things that would punctuate the illusion and a lot of those are related to the physical reality of those objects. So there's a way that the way we think of illusion as imaginary competes with the physical reality of making puppets. Tom reports that there are some more questions coming through on Howl Around. Before you jump to those though Tom, I just want to respond very quickly to what Skye said in relation to Anna's paper. Another thing that struck me about that example of the table is that the puppeteer sometimes tries to steer you away from puncturing the illusion and then sometimes also deliberately punctures the illusion by drawing attention to the puppeteer. Tom, go ahead. Oh, really, really quickly. So sorry. I want to just jump off on that. I think an illusion, if you believe in the illusion, it's real. I think this, the economy between an illusion or reality, this is definitely like, there's tons of things that I think is real that maybe isn't, or there's like concepts or ways of being or habits that I have that bring things into the unreal versus real. But I think to make that dichotomy between illusion and real, I think what, because I said before about with the puppets, you breathe life into something, a thing, an object yourself. And so with breath, there's reality, there's life to that. I think for me, the real question is the responsibility of breathing life into something and what you do with that responsibility. Thank you, Saida and Chep, Tom. No, wonderful thoughts that you all are sharing. We have another question on HowlRound from Kalan. I'll say it very slowly. It's just so you know, you can hear it. Does puppetry destabilize our anthropocentric fetish or centric fetish? Of course we have animist ideas or cliches, but how can puppetry invoke or better invoke a divestment from our human ego problem? So I guess that's just throwing that out. It's a great question. And I think it is a really important question. And I think it's something that each of you in different ways has taken as a given that there's a value in destabilizing our anthropocentric fetish and that there's a value in divesting from the human ego problem and sharing the world with things. But I'd like to hear what your thoughts are. Well, if I could jump in just because this is a conversation that Ana and I have had a lot. So Ana, feel free to interrupt me. But I actually think that in some ways puppetry highlights our anthropocentrism problem. And it does so in very interesting and productive ways. And this might be biased by my interest in anthropomorphic puppets specifically. But I think that puppetry actually demands that we anthropomorphize the things that we're looking at in order to believe that they're animated. I think that that sort of mechanic that we have is a part of what makes puppetry happen. But what I think that it can do is highlight the different assumptions that go into anthropomorphizing and can actually lay bare sort of the different systemic qualities that anthropomorphism draws upon and feeds upon in order to work, which are problematic as I think this question assumes as well. But rather than necessarily leaving it behind and finding sort of a way to de-center the human, it centers the human in a way that really asks us questions about what is making that thing seem like a human. We have all sorts of assumptions that allow us to believe it's a human. So that's my personal sort of belief is that puppetry actually really puts the human front and center in a bare and raw exposed uncomfortable way. And I wonder if maybe that's part of the reason I'm always interested in more abstract things. So when I'm interested in these ideas of how do you follow a material instead of continue to impose what you imagined upon it, that I end up talking about not figurative puppets but paper, et cetera, et cetera, which also for me starts to connect to some of the ideas in writing like Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and talking about the fact that things like paying attention to ecology, the fact that I was giving examples in the talk that were about recycling was intentional. That there are ways that if we're willing to follow the track of the materials we already have instead of making more materials, that there's a way to create the kind of social change that can come out of some of that shifting away from anthropocentrism. So that hovers around my work in a different way. I think that's really productive. I have two contradictory answers to this question. Yeah, one is like, there's this weird thing I think that puppets do. And I actually had this experience last week when I went to see chimpanzee very clearly where suddenly I could see the chimpanzee think. And I think like puppets let you do this thing, right? Where you're just like, well, this is not a human subject but I can understand the thinking process and I can see that the thinking process is different from the thinking process of a human. But at the same time, of course, my understanding of that thinking process is limited by my humanness and the fact that everything is filtered by my own humanity. And so I think there's kind of like this door that puppets open, but it also lets us acknowledge as Marisa was saying, right? Like the centrality that we give to our own ways of thinking and to our own ways of being in the world. Having said that and also related to the question of puppetry being an illusion, I think that even when we are hiding the puppeteer, we know that this object that is being animated is not alive, right? Like there's a puppeteer and there's a person behind it. So like there is no illusion but it doesn't mean that it's broken. Like for me, it draws it more into reality, right? Like this object that is animated, it is doing things in the world and it is engaging with the world. So I think rather than puppetry being an illusion, it like creates a different reality. And so in that sense, it can like, invites us to see the agency of the objects in this way that moves us beyond our human ego. I also think going off of that, like this idea of that. It's really hard to answer that question without actually hearing it from the object itself. You know, with this idea, like can we create safe spaces when we're, you know, like the idea of if we are, we've created a world where we are the ones in power, that we actually have to listen to the object itself for the answer for that question in the objects. You know, so it's a very esoteric way to look at it. But I think objects, you know, I think it goes back to that, that the question about sound, like does the object actually talk? I was thinking about this also in relation to our idea of Pluto. Like it's not a planet anymore. Is the planet, it's a planet, it's not a planet. It's not, and like this idea of Pluto is just somewhere still existing and being. Tom, it sounds like there's another question from Hal around. Yes, there is. There's one from Adam Wilson. Adam says, throughout everyone's fascinating talks, it seems that two uses of puppetry continue to resurface the activation of imagination and cultural pedagogy slash identity formation. Are these uses of puppetry connected with one another? Once again, it seemed that two uses of puppetry continue to surface, the activation of the imagination and the cultural pedagogy slash identity formation. Are these two uses connected? I'm hoping I'm making that clear. So imagination and identity formation and how they might be, and if they might be connected in puppetry. I mean, I think so. I think so. I think you have to have the imagination in order to form the identity, right? Or reform the identity or remake the identity or disarrange the identity in Marissa's term from the Ellen Vanzel Convert presentation. What do you all think? I think they're, yeah, I think they're intimately entwined. I think, you know, I realized like that I have this sort of, I don't know, curmudgeonly attitude that I am bringing to this channel right now, which I don't know why, but it's just happening. Which is like, I think I'm a little bit skeptical of, like, or at least I like to try to remain a bit skeptical of like people's imaginative capacities. And at least like maintain that I think that the ways that identity has been formed historically ends up being, it's infected our imaginations. And I think that the ways it's infected our imaginations are highlighted by puppetry, especially by sort of asking us to believe in the identity of a thing where it can't actually completely reimagine every aspect of that identity. It has to borrow from histories that have previously allowed that identity to become legible and to become visible to us. And so I think that in some ways, puppetry can exploit our failures of imagination in ways that can be really dangerous and damaging. And like I think that there are historical examples of, you know, like I work on ventriloquism, which is just straight developed from the minstrel show. And you can see like Jeff Dunham still doing this today. I mean, like there are ways that it really co-ops our failures of imagination. And then I think that when it can be really productive and pushing against it, it can do it in a way that really allows us to realize our own limitations of imagination. And I'm more interested, I think in that struggle, that place where we confront our, you know, why do I believe this identity to be so real in a way that is actually limiting? So yeah, I'm more interested in that failure than I think I am in its capacities, which of course it is also true. I'm gonna quote, well, the Nat Ministry, which is a performance group out of Alana, started by Trisha Hershey, who was a Chicago, she was first a Chicago based artist. But this idea that a lot of people don't know this, that Harriet Tubman actually had a condition where she was, where she will fall asleep often. So a lot of her, so she went from enslaved to like a free woman through the dream state, like through the imagination. Like she actually was the instructions to get to where she was actually, was a lot of times spent in a dream state or just imagination. So she literally transformed through the imagination. So I believe, honestly, I believe it's the, I believe it's the primary tool of any type of evolution and identity. My understanding is that there's one last question on how around and that we are, you know, we've got 30 seconds left, a minute left. Tom, did you wanna ask that question quickly? Yes, I hope I can. This question is from Mikhail. He is asking, isn't the whole point, at least at times of modern puppetry, the relationship between the live visible artist or performer and the object puppet? Question mark? Hmm. I guess is that a relationship which you all see as kind of present in the work that you've discussed or researched? I guess I would reframe that slightly because it seems to me that a number of you were talking about the responsiveness of that relationship, like the nature of that relationship. I think I also wanna expand on that statement too, to see myself also as an object or a thing, and to see myself as a puppet and the means of manipulation within myself, that relationship between both like thing as cup but also thing as dress. Yeah, I think also now there's not always visible artists but even when the artists are not visible, they're made visible by the movement of the object perhaps. And I think that's interesting. And what I would add to this question is there's also the audience, right? There's that piece of the audience and there's also, okay, sure, there's a relationship between the artist and the object but then there's also a relationship with the audience that comes into play in puppetry. Yeah, I love that. I wish that we had all the time in the world to continue this conversation because I have so many more questions and thoughts for each one of you. And I think that that's always the best time to end a conversation is when everybody has their head filled with more ideas that keep them thinking. So thank you so much to each of you. Thank you to HowlRound and Paulette and Blair and Tom and Josh and everybody who made this possible. I'll turn it over to the festival organizers and thank you very much. Thanks so much everybody for being here. I'm just gonna jump right in. Oh, Blair, here, you jump right in. No, Paulette's gonna jump right in. Oh, okay. So I will thank everyone, our Zoom audience, our HowlRound audience, our panelists, our lovely moderator, Dacia Posner. Especially want to thank the tech crew, both at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on the HowlRound side for making our pivot to the virtual format of this symposium seamless and then finally I want to make a request of the audience which is to make your friends jealous, tell them what they missed and then let everyone know they can find recordings of all four Ellen Van Volkenberg Puppetry Symposium sessions on HowlRound. Those recordings will also be archived on the Chicago Puppet Fest website as we enrich it with new content for the 2020, from the 2022 festival. And then another note of what's coming, the young scholars from our panel will be adding their critical insights on the festival by contributing reviews of all the shows. We look forward to continuing conversations with you throughout the year and hope that you have, we have wedded your appetite for the next festival. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you, Dacia. Thank you, Paulette and Blair and Josh and Camille. Oh, yes. Guys, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody.