 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for coming here for our final book talk I'm Blair Thomas the director of the puppet festival and really glad to be here for this It's at our penultimate day Whole evening of lots of performances tonight in the city and then tomorrow more performances Closing out with Yael Razuli doing her Edith Piaf cabaret performance at six super fun and exciting but before that we have here two guests and Paulette Richards who is my Co-conspirator on putting together the symposium as Will now take over so go ahead. Thank you Thank all of the intrepid people who came out at this hour of the day when we're kind of a little a little tired Exciting things that have been happening here at the festival a lot of puppets. It's my great pleasure to introduce the editors of this wonderful volume puppet and spirit Ritual religion and performing objects another wonderful puppet book from Rutledge and Also, this is just volume one so all the work that went into this There's still more work going on and there will be another volume when Hopefully by the end of the year Which actually has a chapter in a wonderful chapter about wood on Excited to have in the book. Yes, so since you're sitting next to me. Yes, I will introduce you first This is Tim Cusack accused that you're an adjunct lecturer in theater at Hunter College He was the co-founder and artistic director of theater askew an independent theater company dedicated to the exploration of representations of queerness on Stage puppetry has always been an aspect of his creative process And I also want to signal that Tim is an extremely gifted and Dedicated copy editor and he is responsible for making sure that the reviews that are now in the festival archive are up to snuff and Then on the end of course is Claudia Orenstein Professor of theater at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY CUNY She has spent over a decade writing on contemporary and traditional puppetry in the US in Asia She was very modest in her bio blurb for the book and her CV goes on and on, but she has many important puppet publications to her credit and so Without further ado because this text is so rich. We're going to dive in. Did you want to start with your PowerPoint? Yeah, well actually I wanted to start with a little statement So I follow this writer on medium David Price and if you guys don't know him I really recommend him. He's really fantastic and he's very very disciplined about his writing every morning He comes out with a new thing and I kind of dare I say religiously read him every day It's like that's how I start my day and I kind of had a feeling that my my boy Dave was gonna Give me something fabulous today and boy. Did he ever and I wanted to just read you The the first two paragraphs of what he wrote today because I really feel like it Gets to the heart of what this book is about and I felt like this would be a really beautiful way to Sort of set the vibrational field For this experience that we're all about to have together. We're told that matter Doesn't actually exist Except in a very transitory and illusory way Evidently there's a grand and intelligent energy that shape shifts into infinite different forms Creating universes and all its denizens I Point taken right There it is right there Our physical world which looks so literal and obvious isn't Nothing is as it seems Everything is expressing or wants to express something that has implications of the infinite of the divine Our mythology has demoted matter to the profane realm which allows us to imagine It's available as dead clay for us to use any way we wish That belief system trains us to destroy the world by refusing to admit. It's a manifestation of the divine a Whole civilization built on such a mindset is now reaching its logical conclusion to the shock and horror of millions and I know for myself personally Why I wanted to work on this book is to fight against that Fight against that way of looking at matter that way of looking at how we as human beings as I feel embodied Divine beings deal with our material world. So I just wanted to like I felt like that really kind of said So far do it I Might have more modest So we're talking about Interest in working on the book My way I came to this book is really because I was Pursuing my own research in the puppetry and suddenly kind of reflected on the fact that the puppetry that was so exciting to me What were these forms that were connected with ritual that there was some other dimension and some other kind of Maybe vibration to use your word coming out of them and I Wanted to Think about that and I found if when I was giving talks like in places like this, you know to puppeteers about these Puppet traditions that people were really kind of excited and they wanted to know more and That that was a topic and it's not as though. I mean a puppetry. We were always talking about, you know, the puppet and spirit and These traditions are known, but I didn't feel like there had been really a Like let's like I came to the idea of like a ritual puppet like that's a thing a ritual puppet and that wow We need to talk about the fact that there is the ritual puppet and what that means and yeah And that the ritual puppet Can be very entertaining, but that it also serves all these other myriad functions to exercise of space that's been contaminated with evil spirits to to celebrate the birth of a new child to Launch a new business to heal a sick child. I mean Throughout the book and this is across the board no matter where these puppets are manifesting. They serve these incredibly powerful Functions that really go to the heart of our human needs for shelter for safety for health for community for For peace of mind to ease our passage into whatever comes after this reality that we all think is reality Thank you Now we had Talked through a set of questions that we were Intending to get to but I think maybe we should start with the declaration of positionality Which has become important I think in theater and also in critical work Because of course the notion of objectivity is a convention and so where are we coming from visa v? Spirituality and how does that inform our experience of puppet and spirit? So I'll start and then we'll go down. Yes, so I was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church I was educated primarily in Catholic schools. I taught in Jesuit institutions for 13 years And I consider myself to be an animist Well, I was raised Irish Catholic in Scranton, Pennsylvania And if you've ever been to Scranton Joe Biden's hometown It is white ethnic Catholic and If you're Catholic if you're Irish you don't go to the Italian Church if you're Polish you don't go to the Lithuanian Church, right? So it's a very specific form of Catholic working-class white Catholicism And it's interesting because in Claudia's first book first collection Rotledge Companion, which I was the assistant editor on There's an essay in that book that talks about the use of the crucifix in the Good Friday services and and I still to this day think about that chapter even though this is like ten years ago we worked on that book because When I was a kid in church on the Good Friday services when and if you if you aren't Catholic What happens in that on that day is that the priest they basically do the stations of the cross and they carry the crucifix Around the church to all of the the images of the stages of Jesus's crucifixion, right? and I remember as a kid that having this incredibly profound experience of almost this multidimensional Portal that would open up for me on that day where that cross really became Jesus for me almost like this living entity and and so when I was working on Claudia's first book that chapter just really kind of drew me in and I think in some ways kind of was the hook that pulled me into this book, right? In terms of where my spirituality is now I left Catholicism 30 years ago I'm now more of a new age person. I'm actually a tarot card reader and if anybody wants to read after them I can go do a reading and so I've kind of really gotten more into new age mysticism and Sort of this idea of the quantum field and I talked we talked about that in the introduction to the book and that you know All of this reality we are constructing and creating in the moment in our consciousness And I think what's beautiful about puppetry is that there's a way in which the creation of the puppet is a Manifestation of the bigger reality that we're manifesting all the time the puppet. We just can see it more clearly Well, let's see my background. I guess is ethnically Jewish I was not raised observant except maybe to like have a Passover meal or a Hanukkah. What do they call us? Twice a year Jews once a year Christians or something like we celebrate, you know, he's Christmas and Hanukkah and my my father grew up in France during the war and had to live it was sent to live with a Christian family to pretend he was not Jewish in order to Survive the war and we have family members who did not survive that and he really, you know Didn't feel probably still doesn't feel that like, you know, it was unsafe to say what your religion is and to express that and my Mother was all into surrealism and wrote about surrealist, so I think that was that's kind of her been her, you know ritual religious Connection and was very involved in the women's movement and writing about Goddess artists artists who sort of started to talk, you know Articulating the idea of a goddess rather than goddess of a kind of means of empowerment and so I guess if I had any Relationship to anything spiritual or ritual, you know kind of in my early childhood. Those are sort of the Points so so I didn't have this kind of like religious upbringing and I guess if I For today, I think if I feel anything, you know, the religious world that I think I are traditional I would say Established kind of religious ideas. I gravitate towards a pearly more Buddhist, you know wisdom and compassion is something I think that you know we could all learn from and Maybe my religion was the theater there's a kind of ritual aspect and really you know kind of passion there and and you know these the puppetry forms that are You know connected to ritual something about them really draws me to them and I spent You know, I spent a lot of time taking students to India to do Study abroad and then did research on Indian puppetry and I have been to a lot of Temple rituals in my life for someone who didn't grow up with any kind of observance. I've been to a lot of Buddhist and Hindu and all kinds of rituals and I don't know. It's so I guess they and I don't know exactly like to say if they speak to me or I'm rejecting that You know, it's more like this book and these kind of works. Give me a chance to think about that and reflect on it Yeah, I mean, it's funny growing up Catholic And and our second book Frank Mogheri who's I think you guys many of you know So you know Chicago puppeteer Frank has a chapter in our second book about growing up working class Italian here in Chicago And and that chapter for me really resonates because I absolutely relate to all of this stuff Like growing up Catholic having objects be an expression of spirituality is that just part of it, right? You didn't even think twice about it And it was funny I was coming here on the airplane last night from New York and I was sitting next to this kind of big burly bold white guy kind of really big guy and at one point out of the corner of my eye I saw him go like this and I was like and I of course caught my eye and I realized that he was saying the rosary and You know for those of you who grew up Catholic, you know The rosary is this prayer to the Virgin Mary and it's like there's certain beads and you there's just you say The Hail Mary and each bead and it represents this journey and it just really struck me that here's this guy in the plane like expressing spirituality in this very material way and Then we also have a chapter in the book So I'm a sanny and we'll get to some in a moment but she talks about the use of the rosary and Islamic traditions and that it probably came from Buddhism so that like these Threads that kind of go through all of these different spiritual traditions and yet somehow There are these echoes that that reverberate amongst all of them Okay, thank you. So now we've established where we're coming from And you said the M word materiality and so I'm gonna skip ahead to This question the theme of this year's Ellen van Volkenberg symposium series is the materiality of the puppet And yet we are closing with a discussion of material performance and body less presence Please give some examples from the book of performance in which the puppet becomes a nexus where the material and spiritual realities realms meet and So I would just actually kind of just start by saying it's pretty much all the examples from the book Yeah, and one of the things we talk about in the introduction is you actually get this Triangular kind of relationship because there's some kind of spirit. There's some kind of object and there's some kind of human And that I we felt that that was like So that the human and the object is something that we talk about a lot in puppetry But this kind of more triangular like how do you think about what those ontologies are and how they relate to each other and That they're all affecting each other this connection Yeah I mean because I'm a big new age guy so sacred geometry is really big in the new age world and I actually was funny because I was Re-reading the introduction my way here and I that caught my eye that I remembered that it was all right And I kind of think it's like again this idea of a portal It's like somehow this portal gets opened up when these three Consciousnesses all in Iraq and there's something I'm kind of getting more and more interested in this idea Like again as a kid like I felt like in church on Good Friday Like I felt like I was in this other world and it's kind of hard to Describe it, but you know what I you know what I mean And you know sometimes I mean the different ways that sometimes in some of the traditions We look at like the object the puppet is thought of as or rather I would say you know in the In some of these established views. There are some places where Objects are thought of as having spirit and others as places where spirits are light You know that they become a conduit So those are two slightly different ways of thinking about Animism and the animated material yes, and in the hula key tradition, which is Hawaiian tradition and again I was reminded of this yesterday The the puppeteer as the puppeteer is making the puppet they are transmitting their own Mana, which is the Polynesian term for spirit into the puppet So there's even that idea right so the so I'm going to actually put my life force Into that object as well, but let's go back to materiality Because I think for me what's more interesting question is that in so many of these traditions What you make the puppet out of or in they're not all puppets the object really matters So for example, we have a we have a and how you make the puppet matters So for example, we have a chapter on the Torah as as a performing object in Jewish ritual and like That that that's got to be kosher It's got to be the the the the material that's made from has got to be treated through all of the kosher rules the when the The Torah scribe is is such it's all done by hand and it can't make a mistake And if you make a mistake you have to go back and start all over again And then even in who I mentioned hula key the wood that the puppet is made out of these are very specific types of wood and Those are the only types of wood the puppet can be made out of and I know you you also talked about that Yeah, so I have a chapter in the book called the matter that matters And it's about the Nangai Thai tradition But it's also kind of an investigation that there are traditions lots of puppets Well, what makes one puppet special special or a ritual puppet or somehow more embodied with spirit like what what's required Is it the kind of material that's used? Is it something that you say over the puppet? Is it something about the way the the puppeteer is anointed? You know, so there are even There's an example we give also of from Matthew Cohen those talks about how Indonesian puppeteers That there are some puppets that are really powerful, you know, even in a particular collection So even where there are puppets that are being used for ritual then there are some sort of very specific material characters either as a Tradition or either just a particular puppet you have to happen to have that seems to have these other powers or to be more You know so you have something something extra with more charge Right and don't you also mention Claudia in your book on on the Thai form that the the animal that is that made the leather is made Out of has to have died like it has made me be hit by lightning. They can't be actually slaughtered Yeah, so well, there are all these you know, I was trying to find out what the actual what what the rules are I started I mean, I don't know when we jump into some of the text, but I had a very wonderful Master's student Patara Denutra who years ago wrote a wonderful master's thesis on the Thai Nang Yai and it was all about the role of Buddhist priests in preserving this tradition even though they're telling kind of Hindu stories and and the one of the reasons was because the Buddhist priests are so powerful that they can somehow manage the power of these Puppets at least that was the story that was being told and so they were they were being preserved at the at the monasteries or at the temples And so I was like well what makes them so powerful, you know and wanted to know and yes So there are you know, and there are there's sometimes and I think actually this gets to I think a bigger question about the book which is the Interest an openness or reluctance to talk about this kind of thing like something that's spiritual or something that is about the unseen or is about a very particular mystical or religious view and so Did I always get the same answer from everybody? No, did I get you know? How clear was the where the answer is about whether that's still it's still the case So this is the idea that the puppet has to be made out of leather from a cow that has died in a way That is unusual like being hit by lightning or you know died With a still birth or something, but wasn't you're not slaughtering the cow somehow to get this leather for the puppet Yeah, it's almost as if certain materials are better at containing and channeling the energies than others That's a good way to put it. Yeah, and probably what I skipped over there. They shouldn't have was What definition of spirit are you working with what energies are we talking about? Oh? Oh Boy that was that was a tough nut to crack Well, it's a it's complicated and I think it's really hard, you know, I think any the minute you actually try to Freeze it into a linguistic form. It immediately flies away, right? But the the the approach that we took was to try to ground it in some academic discourse, right? Because it's like well, we're you know, what is it and you know I personally and this is again because of my my sort of new age bias to me It's consciousness, right and that if you really we brought in stuff about the quantum field And if you kind of really really look at quantum theory, you know, we not none of us We're all kind of all just electrons just like buzzing around each other, right? Like none of us are really here, right like Claudia and I are just like inter like we're not actually here, right? So if you really kind of follow that logic Then there's really no division between me and my book, right? Or me and my phone true In this water bottle, right? So then if I'm using these objects to like have a little conversation with each other, right? Then like it That's spirit like spirit is just everywhere. It's it's within everything I'm gonna say that you know the book is also and I think the writings are also an investigation of that question The there's an article. It's a it's an interview with the Hakomawashi these wonderful puppeteers in Japan And I've written on them elsewhere and here we have an interview with that Tomoe Kobayashi and Simon Mers did with Nakauchi and Minami who are these puppeteers who go house to house over New Year's and visit a thousand homes blessing homes with their puppets They're about the most wonderful people I've ever met and I have been asking like trying to when I was writing about them myself trying to get this answer this question like so when you take this puppet They have a puppet that gives blessings, you know Do you feel like a spirit or an energy going through you or like I wanted to know like what does it mean to be this kind of You know powerful person because they go to all these houses and sometimes people will tell them about their you know Health issues and they're there to give the blessings And she was like, oh no, you know, like I just you know want to bring joy my job is to you know, bring good spirit and You know sometimes I come back and people say oh then my health thing can't you know because you came it fixed it But she says I was not that I feel anything special. I just you know I really want to kind of be there for them and Bring this joyfulness for the new year and Listen to them and it's almost a kind of social work that they do Especially in these mountain areas where there's a lot of elderly people now who live there and a lot of the young people have Left and maybe they're living alone and so once a year they're coming by you know and doing this But they do it with the puppet and the puppet We will get to photos later actually have a bag here. You'll see it doesn't have Ebisu on it Does it maybe not the Ebisu puppet that brings the blessings It's about the most joyous puppet face you've ever seen like and to have a puppet, you know Pat you on the head and say good blessings to you. There's something they go around to everybody in the house So I don't know what is the spirit in that? Is there a real spirit of the God Ebisu who's there? Is it something just about the joyfulness of that moment? I mean, I think it's an invest for me It's an investigation. I don't don't have an answer to it And I think sometimes I do know things where like everything I need to be doing falls into place And you feel like something is right and so there's got to be Something going on because it's not just me right? Yeah, but I don't know I don't have a clear view of what that is and I think that This the the title of puppet in spirit for me is more an invitation for questions. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's You know one of the we we we deal with a there's a Sociologist whose name I'm not gonna remember at the moment But he kind of create this definition of spirituality versus religion and and the first in that definition The first thing he talks about is that it's it's spirituality is very individual Right that that's the that's the biggest difference between the idea of spirituality versus established religion that You're figuring it out for yourself each one of us in this room is figuring out our relationship to what these things mean on Our own right and your answer is not going to be her answer is not going to be his answer is not going to be your answer Right and that's the beauty of it And I think there's a real direct correlation to the work of the artist in the puppeteer Which is that you know you are manifesting these bigger themes that we've all dealt with as humans But the way you're gonna manifest is not the way you're gonna manifest is not the way he's gonna manifest is the way she's gonna Manifest it and that's the beauty of being human and just to tag on to think about one second. So That's beauty. I love and I those women are so amazing But as opposed to someone like yaya kula Bali who's a Malian Malian puppeteer and for him It's about this this obligation to continue the the spirit of his people That that he must continue with the show go bow because that is what's maintaining the the the ancestral energy of his entire Not just village but all of his people and so it's a sort of different sense of responsibility and What spirit means in that respect? I was just also going to add in that I think it was also surprised for us when we put out the call for papers And we kind of give this offering and actually that that quote of the disembodied I can't remember what the that was in soul in so yeah, that was a big sort of from the earlier title that we had Got you know didn't end up using but I think we were surprised with what people came back to us Like people were responding you know to the words in their own ways and especially you know The reason there are two volumes is because we got so many responses, and I think you know I was probably thinking of traditional forms, which is really mostly what's in the first volume and then we had artists and Scholars and all kinds of people responsible saying I want to be talking about this and Can and you know with things that weren't necessarily at least what I had originally thought And as we're working on the the second book there are we won't necessarily have talked about that today But there are things that are very confessional sometimes by professors, you know who want a kind of path for discussing something that is Whatever this effin innocent thing is that we're all trying to talk about or characterize Yeah, and I think so I see and you know one of the reasons why I wanted to start with that quote from David Crisis because I do actually even though this is an academic book and there's all the reasons why you need to do it when you're in Academia, I mean to me. This is also a spiritual offering To the world and to the community and it's an opera. It's a place in which people are Given permission to talk about some things that maybe in our rationalistic Western materialistic capitalistic world is Suspect right and so I think that making a space for these kinds of conversations It's actually really a spiritual effort. Yeah, so we had talked about how Approaching it as an academic subject makes it a thing a thing right Now it's a thing see you call it like a ritual puppet like now that now that's a term you can always but but also We talked about the labor that goes into producing this work And not just the labor of the puppeteers who are going around dispensing these blessings with their puppets But also the labor that you all put into this book. Yeah, and you just answered that question by saying that you see your work as an offering and I was going to Talk about how is this a devotion to you so see we're in the Catholic realm And I actually wanted to say something about that because you know actually working on this book Like I had my own sort of shape and view of what I thought would be interesting to look at and Sometimes things came back to us like when I when you wrote those questions you wrote the word devotion I had to sort of stop and and I think this is part of the work of the book too, which is I had to stop and like I have a sort of Very like step back Reaction to the word devotion. This is not a word in my growing up vocabulary to being devoted To devote although I devoted myself to the world of puppetry, you know But in that in that religious sense and I had to sort of stop and and the way you characterize it as you know Doing a kind of work for for something that you know is a kind of offer I would have said offering and and so it allows me to now Like absorb that word and accept that word like yeah, that's a great like devotion. Thank you. So I've expanded my connection to other maybe I Don't know if you want to say it's spiritual if not religious ways of looking at things And I think if we talk about like a devotional or some kind of Positive labor of the book that sense of creating conversations and understanding across cultures and across Spiritual models and religions. I think is certainly one of the interests of the book And I feel it working when I as I work on the book because there are other few things that I kind of had to I step back from and then I sort of had to think it's actually the same Thing as you know, some of these other traditions. I look at so it forced me to you know, confront those things Yeah, good. So I want to make sure that audience has an opportunity to join Yes, and you all brought these beautiful pictures. Yeah, and at the festival here. We always want to see yeah I want to see them. So let's get into your slide pictures worth a thousand words Yes So so this is this is a priest of shungo So this is a Brazilian form called momo lengo not Isabella Pichardo was the scholar who wrote the chapter on this book And this is a puppet booth hand puppet tradition very much like a lot of the the the puppet with traditions There's the puppeteer. There's the intermediary between the puppet booth and the audience and their musicians, right? So it's kind of that tripartite structure that you see in a lot of forms around the world and You know, this is a it's a It's a syncretic religion like like voodoo, so it's it's bringing together the old African European gods Catholic gods and in Brazil specifically a lot of some indigenous deities from the indigenous people from South America and You know, he is the orisha of thunder lightning, but also justice and law and and there's very much a racial component to this as you know Obviously, this is an African puppet And oftentimes in these shows the puppet is interacting with the white colonial rulers, particularly the women the wives and the daughters and Possessing them and making them, you know, do all sorts of things that proper white ladies of Portuguese descent should not be doing And I want to as before we go on to the next but I just want to take a moment because we really do there's we have 17 Articles in this book and some of them are interviews or co-authors So that's a like 20 people plus a one really beautiful preface I mean a forward from Jane Marie law, so we really want to honor and shout out to all these these huge It's like a just a huge troop of Congregation thank you of collaborators who have put their work into this and they should all be honored here We're talking to us This is Lona II Kanani. He is the Hawaiian or Polynesian Riddler God, so he's a trickster God and So this is the hula key. This is Ali E Mitchell who Is the pot he wrote he wrote he is an interview with Ali. He also created. This is puppet that he created I love the eyes on this guy. Isn't that so cool? Right? His eyes are amazing so intense and The hula key is actually a seated form of the hula, so it's a hula. It's it's just like hula Except the puppeteer so the way it kind of works is I'll just get up here So like the piece the puppeteer is kind of seated on the ground and they've got the puppet on the lap and they're like Doing this thing where like I can't think you can do it like they kind of getting up and going down like this like I can't even imagine how they do it but and then the The they're they're speaking the text they're telling stories from Hawaiian legends They're speaking the text in this very secret form of Hawaiian. That's highly coded. It's a lot of puns. It's a lot of secret messages and That's um, that's that's the hula key dance of the sacred image You so this is one of the Articles by Bill Kondi and Yasuko Senda is about Karakuri aningyo, which are puppets that are part of these that they're usually on these big Dashi or floats that are pulled through the streets at these festivals about labor The puppets also do transformations that are sort of encoded in different stories There are a lot of different traditions of this in Japan and yes, actually the Yasuko and Bill Kondi in this article they talk a lot about that the labor itself of you know pulling that Needs the community to pull these carts through the streets and that that is actually Thought of as you know, you're giving a devotion Through the community creating this labor of the festival as well as the interest of the puppets that are there And this is a shinto specifically on the other thing to not only is that people pulling the float But there are teams of puppeteers inside of the float who have and then musicians also So there's all these different teams that are all working simultaneously to make this happen and the coordination That's required among these teams of puppeteers to make these very elaborate effects So for example here you can kind of see the girls on his shoulder But they're doing the girls are doing all those trapeze and then at a certain point They land on his shoulder and then he kind of reacts to it. So it's very very elaborate Great, so you guys get three more minutes to show Okay, you keep us on time what we're gonna do is what people's interests that they want to buy the book Got it. Got it. Okay This is now a Sima now Sima is a avatar of Vishnu If you know anything about Vishnu Vishnu are all these different avatars. He's half lion half human This is the boanna full body mass tradition from Majuli Island in the northeast of India These are monasteries of devotees that kind of devote their whole lives to creating these very elaborate stories Of the life of Vishnu and all his different avatars and this article is by our colleague at Hunter deep seek a Chatterjee This is from my the article that I told you about so this is the nangya the Thai puppetry and the article is again about Inquiries into you know, how does one kind of puppet become more Encharged than another kind of puppet and these are the wonderful Hakka Mawashi puppeteers that I talked about going house to house And here's Naka Uchisan and she's carrying Ebisu So she has four different puppets that she brings carries them in a box Well in the mountains, it's just on a backpack, but you know what traditionally in these boxes over their shoulders and At the end the ceremony the first three puppets sort of take out all the impurities from the last year And then Ebisu brings in all the good spirits for the good for the year to come And he goes around to every single person in the house and you put out your hands and he puts his His hand in yours he says it by it by which means like filling up your hands with good you know good blessings and These are the Tulpava Kutu performers in Kerala, India who do a puppet shadow puppet show for the goddess Badra Kali And in this book we it's an interview with Ramachandra Pulavar Who's the older master puppeteer from Raul Kunutara and Sangit Sakhar and Rahul is actually his son so and now studying at Yukon and so it was nice I had written also about these puppeteers, but it was like you can ask your dad all kinds of questions I can't ask what else can we find out and it's a really beautiful piece Yeah And just the screen is supposed to represent the clock the close of the goddess just so the whole thing is sacred This is a Tizia procession from if you guys know Tizia it's traditional Iranian performance form It commemorates the battle of Karbala when Hussein the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was killed by his son I This is a full-body puppet I just you got it and admired the commitment of this dude that he's like walking down the street on his hands and knees Talk about devotion and of course if you're Catholic a lot of traditions have that thing where you crawl in your knees to something Right, so that kind of made me think of that through line of all this paper and this is Sama Okay, so we'll look at this one and then we'll okay good got it This is Samar he's a clown Sufi saint clown God So interesting Kathy the great Kathy Foley. I'm sure a lot of you know Wrote this beautiful chapter about how these Sufi Islamic saints have somehow found their way into this Hindu Hindu stories and what I love about this dude is that like he's totally holy But like he's flatulent and he drinks too much and he has too much sex and he does drugs and like he uses bad language And he's like he's like but he's like so bad-ass that he's actually good Thank you. So Blair has picked up the roving Mike. Yes Roving Mike There's a there's a powerful If you have a question, please raise your hand and he will bring the microphone to you so that we can hear it and The people in the live stream can hear it as well And as you're doing that I might just say that you know We have different sections in the book that focus on different things So it's not just like an iteration of here's all these different traditions I mean each of the articles takes a particular approach to questions and ways of thinking about this these topics and One is more about shema shamanic traditions something as one was section is about community one is more about Storytelling and so they have different kind of themes too. So first question Come on turquoise So my question would be this In any of these traditions is puppetry applied to Spiritual guidance in its application to politics in any of these societies my thought being in our own society I would like to see political debates done by hand puppets representing each, you know, but I'm just curious Is there an application? To politics. Yeah, well, I'm gonna say that and you know in some of these traditions those those Spheres of what is you know that Religious and ritual isn't necessarily disconnected from other spheres, you know, it's not like its own thing So things are more involved with their community Yeah, I think specifically in way on Kulit oftentimes The the the Dalong which is the that's the name of the puppeteer who's also considered a priest Will get hired by the local health commission to you know, can you know try to Build, you know weave in a get your COVID backs into the performance, right? So that does that's I think specifically that that immediately comes and Matthew Cohen's article here is actually very much about Problem or issues that came up, you know with because of political issues that have Yeah circumscribed the tradition or made things go in different directions Yeah, and then of course, there's also, you know, you have issues where, you know Especially and Salma particularly talks about this because she's specifically talking about, you know, Islam And of course, there's a whole thing in Islam about representation and sort of how puppeteers have navigated That tricky thing in Sunni Islam, right and yet have somehow Paradoxically managed to do it quite successfully and Iran has we were just talking has like the most Unima members of any country in the world. So, you know interesting how that how that played out Yeah, do we have another question? Yes, the lady in the beautiful floral shirt. Thank you. I was just So the question has to do with sort of tradition and Verses if you will contemporary practices, so I'm just wondering There's a lot of Let's see now. I'm going on to question number two But so where do you see in what countries if we can make such a gross generalization? Do you see some of these forms? Very much alive even with a younger population and and not necessarily serving an older population Like where where are you seeing that or is is my assumption that they're Potentially dying out incorrect Well, I think in Indonesia things are they're still very popular tradition Yeah, and I think one of the things about the book is that all of these traditions continue And like the Haka Mawashi performers who I talk about this is a tradition that was dying out I'm not saying that it's not Maybe mostly that they're visiting elderly people, you know, but it was something that was dying out There was one man who was still doing it and it had actually comes from a They come from the original families who do this come from a background. That's very discriminated against in Japan They're called the Buraku mean and they live in these very Different villages and it's there's still stigmas attached to them So he had not wanted his children to do it And when these folks started studying with him He didn't even want them to take his photo or to you know use his name So they wouldn't give me his name But the people who are doing it now are not connected with with that tradition But they are now going to a thousand homes He had stopped going like he was when they first took it over they were going to many fewer homes And they took over studied with him took over his route and so they've actually been expanding it It's still maybe mostly elderly people, but it's become a more thriving Thing and it also of course has these connections. So now it's like this is in Tokushima So now it's like Tokushima culture, you know So there's a different take on it and of course the performers are not associated with that You know discriminated community, so it's shifting, but they're really trying to get it To make it much more Accepted and bringing it back even to the villages where people originally did it and they give workshops and everything so they're transforming it Yeah, and I just add on to that What immediately came to mind now I don't really I we actually didn't really look at demographics So I can't give you sociological data about like, you know, how big the audiences are what the demographic You know make up all these audiences are we just weren't really that interested in that particular question But what I can say is that at least three forms off the top of my head hula ki So go bow and top of kutu that that then there is a next generation that has stepped up Who are very committed not they're committed to keeping this going forward So yeah, yeah Kulabali son Mr. Pola bar son rule who's now at the University who's at UConn All the Mitchell is training another generation to bring hula ki e forward And then Isabella Bacchato in Mama Lengo talks about how Mama Lengo would In that form they often used a lot of traditional Catholic the the what's it called the Whatever the yeah, no, no, it's there's a term for it. I forget what it is but So there's like stories of the Saints and that's people kind of aren't so interested in that anymore But they're really still interested in like the Eurubian stuff like shongo and the old African gods So that's still and there's a very much a rate sort of a Identification when people's African roots coming forward by supporting those particular stories in mama in Mama Lengo And the hula ki e was Was gone, you know, this is something that Lee is like he's doing a lot of had done a lot of research on and is actually Reviving so I think what you bring up is interesting is on the one hand your question is sort of about the audiences But it also has to do with the practitioners. Yeah. Yeah Do we have another question from the floor? Yes, please We're live we're live streaming darling Could you say something about how you define what a puppet is I'm a newcomer to this so I'm just wondering is any object? How do you think about what a puppet is is the first question and second? You referred earlier to three different kinds of consciousness And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about how what constitutes those three different kinds Can I take puppet and you can take consciousness? I Would say that I have a very broad view of puppet and in fact what's cured again I think of it as a kind of realm of investigation Because the last two things in the book are probably things that wouldn't in any way reflect on something you think of as a puppet One is the kava this box. I talked about yesterday. It's a kind of box that in Rajasthan people these particular practitioners go out to the Deserts of Rajasthan and it's kind of like a a traveling altar They sort of describe it as and it has all these stories painted on it and it opens up in all these different ways So it's a for me. It's a performing object because of its You know kinetic move yet the color on the screen and the very last one is about the Torah as we said And it's interesting because I told you I wasn't brought up religious, but it's like we can't call the Torah puppet You know like it was a pub tour is not a puppet So like but it's a wonderful But I you know it's like let's investigate this, you know How where is it in the Jewish religion and what is that material culture and the article? That wonderful Joe may bloom who was one of our master students at Hunter did is Very much a kind of performance studies analysis of how the Torah is used the way It's addressed often as a subject Because that's the way that I think in Judaism They feel that you understand social relationships with other people and so how can you understand a spiritual relationship with God? Well, maybe in that metaphor and so they the Torah is danced around the synagogue people kiss it There's it when it's it's dedicated to the to the synagogue. There's a kind of Yeah under hopa. It's a kind of wedding ceremony. It gets buried, you know So there are all of these things that that have this echo, you know, so It's in here as a way for us to reflect and think about Puppet as an idea as much as anything else and a way of you know, there are there are traditions where they they're Like Ebisu those are puppets. I mean, I don't think we have too much question. It's got a you know, it's a very figurative character. It's got joints that move It's manipulated and then there are things that I we at least for me I thought we're interesting in that realm of questioning that maybe wouldn't be so identified as puppet The echoes and the relationships are interesting and even the one other thing that we saw on the Michelle owing's Article on the Christ figure those were certainly not intended as being called puppets Right, but they're jointed jointed figures of Christ that were used in passion perform play performances Yeah, talk about materiality. We there's a there's an opening in the side of the figure that we're pretty sure was probably filled with the Animal skin with blood and water in it. So at the moment when the So when the soldier pierces Christ side, they literally would pierce in the blood and water would come out of the figure So talk about materiality now in terms of consciousness. I mean what you know again, you know that this is not an empirical I can give you empirical data on this, right? You know, this is all very theoretical but we're thinking about The the puppeteer the object and then God or spirit or the gods or whatever whatever non Discarnate entity you may be wanting to connect with You know, whether it's your ancestors Whether it's your higher self whether it's you know Shiva or Buddha or Vishnu or Jesus or whatever, right? That that somehow that the the object is Somehow again, I'm really liking this idea of a portal is somehow that these Three things me and the object and whatever's up there are all coming together somehow in this focus of this object And I'm afraid I can't really give you Responses that but does that is that help clarify things? Yeah Yeah well, if again if you if you go into quantum theory and really kind of go all the way into that idea and if all if if everything is energy and And and and we you we're bringing Hegel, right? We bring in Mr. Mr. Big German philosopher himself, right? Yeah, and then and that in Einstein also Einstein talks about how everything's energy and and it's just it's just these Objects have just slowed their energy down and we've all slowed our energy down to the point where we can now touch each Other and sit on things and pick up things, right? But it's all the same thing Fundamentally on the quantum level. It's all the same Yeah, I don't I mean, but but I think that once you've incarnate again I'm gonna go new age rule on you But like I think once you've incarnated now Tim Cusack has a different consciousness than Claudia Orenstein And that's the beauty of it. These two consciousnesses can then begin to understand each other better And if the book has a different consciousness than me I can I can understand the book in a way that if we're all just electrons floating around in space None of us our consciousness can't expand That's the puff puff pass But but also We're at the last minute and I did want to give a shout out to One of our sponsors for this whole symposium panel, which is Unima, USA And since Claudia is on the board of Unima USA if you could just say a few words about how conversations like these Represent and further Unima's mission. Yeah, I don't have the exact words, but who knows mission is something like Creating international understanding through puppetry something like that and connections and You know a book like this as I was saying before like it it it's about creating Conversations across cultures and across Religions and certainly we're at a moment historically where these are kinds of conversations We really need to have and we need to you know understand each other and find You know a different kind of discourse when you ask this question about politics and this certainly you know Religion has become so politicized and can we remember and go back to or find other models of Conversation or ways of communicating and talking about religion and So that wasn't you know exactly where we started with this book, but certainly by doing that through puppetry I think is a really wonderful way to take us in and you know Help us come to come to these conversations in a different way And to see that there are all these traditions across the world and you know, maybe the Torah is not a puppet Okay, okay, but Performing object. Yeah, and how does it how was there an interesting conversation that can be Had and people listen to each other and get to understand each other better So I hope I think that's it within the mission of Unima. Yes very much. So, okay. Thank you both. Thank you all so much You're wonderful audience. Thank you