 Gentlemen, welcome here to the little studio in the Fine Arts building. My name is Blair Thomas, I'm the director of the Puppet Festival, and we're so glad to be here for our second book talk with Paulette Richards and her book. And Marissa Finley is going to be the moderator. Marissa is a professor down at the University of Chicago, also a puppet scholar herself. We have a top secret archive on our website that nobody knows about, that I'm now telling for the first time that we're making documentation of each of our festivals, and we have scholars who write essays about critical essays about each performance. And Marissa is one of those scholars, Paulette as well, but Marissa is also one, so if you dig around in our archive, it's a kind of interesting, we've got some nice little juicy stuff we put there. But anyway, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Marissa and we'll begin. Hello, hello. I am very excited to introduce Paulette Richards, who is an independent researcher and has taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University in Georgia Tech. During her time as a 2013-2014 Fulbright scholar in Senegal, she began to focus her multidisciplinary interest in African diasporan cultural studies on puppets, masks, and performing objects. Dr. Paulette Richards is also the co-curator of the Living Objects African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut's Ballard Institute and Museum with Dr. John Bell. Dr. Richards has also curated a traveling exhibit on the Wonderland Puppet Theater, and her book that we are celebrating here today, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic, the United States, was recently selected as a UNIMA USA Nancy Staube Award winner for excellence in writing and the art of puppetry. And Paulette and I actually met at the Schomburg Center in New York while Paulette was researching this book. We were working on the same archive, sort of passing back and forth documents, so it's really special to now see that work in published form. And I'm going to pass it now to Paulette to say a little introduction. Okay. Thank you, Marissa. Thank you, Blair. And thank all of you for coming out. Unfortunately, we were not able to get copies of the book here for you to buy at the festival. However, although I'm not Oprah and I can't put a car under each of your seats, if you look on your seat, you have a premium, which is a church fan puppet that you can make. And on the back is the QR code where you can go to order a copy of the book. So now that we have that out of the way, I'll see what Marissa wants to ask me about the book. I have so many things to ask you. Okay. So my first question is sort of about the methodology of this project, which is super unique. And you sort of tell us in your intro that instead of looking for historical moments when an African performance tradition was suppressed under slavery, which I imagine would entail sort of looking at the history told from the perspective of the slave owner, or at least from sort of sites of racial conflict to sort of where history making happens, you instead look at pre-existing performance traditions in Africa and search for evidence of their reemergence within the Black Atlantic. And so I was just wondering if you could talk a little more about this methodology. Would it allow you to see that you would have missed otherwise and sort of what challenges arose in this sort of particular pursuit? Okay. Thank you. I'm having trouble getting into the full screen view of PowerPoint, so I'll just leave this up for now. This project actually started around 2017 when I started working with Dr. John Bell on the Living Objects African American Puppetry exhibit. One of our main questions was, is there a distinctive African American puppetry tradition? And if so, is there any persistence of African object performance in African American puppetry? And we immediately hit a brick wall because the material record did not exist in the period of enslavement. Enslave people for a variety of reasons were not able or not permitted to make the kinds of figurative objects they had made in Africa. And so I'm missing objects. What can I say about object performance? And so what I decided instead was to look at the whole complex in which the objects would have been performed. And I made this Venn diagram. So in the center, we would see a public ceremony like the Gelede mask spectacle, which encompasses all of these forms. So I saw that the primary function of object performance in Africa, as I understood it, were three, rituals for spiritual observance, storytelling, primarily for moral education of the youth, and masquerade, which was a phenomenal community building activity. So I figured, and those of you who are visual artists will know the concept of negative space. So in order to define the thing that I was looking for that was missing, I thought if I can define the negative space around it, then it will come into view. Yeah, well, I guess my next question does sort of, I guess, look at what comes into view when we look at this. And your collection of objects in the study are extremely eclectic, and we often don't think of many of them as puppets traditionally. So we have musical instruments, church fans, as we have under our seats, story quilts to name only a few. And when you include these, you also make a really strong intervention into sort of current studies of puppetry, and you propose that attending to the relationships between African object performance and African-American puppetry traditions, we sort of disrupt our Eurocentric definitions of puppetry. And I'm sort of curious, what new definition would you offer us, puppetry scholars, given this important reframing? Or also, what should we notice that we've been overlooking? What do we learn by sort of looking at these other objects as puppets? Okay, great. So I'm thankful to Frank Proshan, who back in the 80s came up with the term performing object. And then that's kind of capacious enough to include many things that are not figures manipulated on a stage in a theatrical performance. He was trained as an anthropologist and was also into semiotic theory. So he was looking at how objects mean, and particularly how objects could create meaning in performance. So I'm like, good, I'll take that, and then I'll start stretching this word puppet and see what I can stuff in there, since I don't have the objects that were lost in the period of enslavement. So what that offers, I think, to puppetry studies or object performance studies overall is that there are other, hmm, how can I put this, performance traditions around the world that also do not center performance in a theater on a stage. And so that gives us an opportunity to talk about what kinds of objects are people manipulating in those performance contexts. Yeah, I mean, can you actually, I think, at least for me, like the musical instrument and the fan, they both have animacy. Like we sort of see how they are both in performance contexts in certain ways, or at least get sort of moved. Can you talk about the story quilt? This one seems like maybe, like, how do you see performance in the story quilt? Okay, good. I'm glad you said that word animacy, because I didn't finish what I should have said for the definition. When we were developing the Living Objects exhibit, we had a discussion, the advisory board, about what is a puppet, what are we going to count as a puppet. And we decided it functions as a character in a narrative that has agency to affect the outcome. And so the quilt, well, the musical instruments, I shoehorned in there because my mentor Kalamuya Salam in New Orleans has argued that because Africans were mixed up from many different regions and not allowed to speak their original languages, that the mother tongue of Black America is music. Therefore, when we look at a tradition like the blues, which is a testimonial, and we look at musicians like BB King, I said, okay, I can argue that they are using the instrument itself as a character in a narrative with agency to affect the outcome. Lucille is a character, and therefore I can call that a performing object. So I took that ball and ran with it. As far as the quilts go, quilts are repositories of stories because they often have stories stitched onto them or into them, but in the tradition of making quilts, that was also an occasion for people to gather together and tell stories. So they were repositories of stories in that way. And then each piece of fabric, at least for the people immediately connected to that quilt would be a story itself. That was your grandfather's shirt that he wore when he was out plowing the fields. This is a fragment of the dress that your aunt was wearing when she met your uncle. And many families have those kinds of stories in objects like quilts that are handed down. But what has happened in my study of contemporary African-American puppeteers is that many of them are using quilts in much the same way that Brett and Puppet does with Conta Storia. And so they use the quilt to tell a narrative. And that way, I figured that fits into my definition too. I'll just stick that in there. Yes. Yeah, I mean, also I think you write about there use on the Underground Railroad as well, which seems like in terms of impacting the outcome of certain kinds of journeys as well, but that's that you're animating in that way as well. Yeah, so I have to give a caveat there because this is still controversial. There is some scholarship that asserts that the patterns that people stitched into quilts, and any of you who are quilters, you know, things like log cabin, frying geese, et cetera, that those were used as signals on the Underground Railroad so that people might hang a quilt outside of a safe house and anybody passing by who was trying to escape could see, oh, this is a place where I can stop and be taken care of. Or I can't stop here, but the geese are pointing in this direction, so I need to take this fork in the road and keep going. So that's the argument. We don't have the hard documentation on that, and so it's still kind of controversial, but it's plausible, I would say. And maybe since we have church fans, and since we've now talked about just a few of the different kinds of objects, will you just talk a little bit about church fans as puppets, like how do we frame those that way? OK, so I developed the church fans argument in the chapter on African-American puppet ministry, and so I don't know, some people may belong to congregations where there is a puppet ministry, and that's often a youth ministry, and so the young people will come out with their puppets during the service in the sanctuary, ooh, OK, and they might perform a little song or a little skit with the puppets. That became popular in the 1970s after the Muppets blew up, but, and as far as I could tell in my research, that was a crossover from white churches into black churches, but I was invited to look at what kind of performing objects were in black church services before the Muppets and all of that, and one thing was the fan. Fans had a lot of different ceremonial functions in Africa, and so this is an object that people had the embodied knowledge of how to make it, how to weave it from different kinds of grass, and it was also an object that people actually were allowed to make. I can't make a mask like we would have danced, but I can make a fan, and so the fans were in church even before the technology of chromolithography made it cheap to print them, and so fans exist in American culture as an advertising promo, first and foremost, and there are some really, if you look in the archives, some really disturbing blackface fans, but at the same time, in black churches, there were also black businesses donating fans to their local church, and those would be printed with positive images of black people, so you would see a well-dressed black family attending church or a hero of the civil rights movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I argue that those, we can look at them as rod puppets because during the service, okay, the first thing that a puppet does is breathe, so the fan is moving breath all through the church. We might have an Aretha Franklin fan, and the choir is singing an Aretha Franklin song, and people are gesturing with their fans during the song, and so it's almost like many Aretha's throughout the congregation are singing, and then if you were a little kid like me, and the service is long and boring, and you have your hand on one of these fans, you could be off on all kinds of adventures with this character, right, so that was how I stretched that definition and shoehorned the fans into puppets. Yeah, you keep saying you're sort of really stretching it, but it feels, I mean, like this idea of the fan breathing, I mean, it feels actually like it's quite elemental in a way that it feels like these definitions fit really quite perfectly with a lot of these objects. Okay, so another question I had is it's another sort of terminology that you offer us that I find really generative, where you distinguish between scripts and stories, and I just am curious if you could just kind of explain like what is the distinction between these two words and how might it relate to contemporary puppet theater and thinking about contemporary puppeteers, like how might we as a part of the puppet community today distinguish between scripts and stories in here within our own work? Okay, yeah, that's a good question, because when I was making that distinction, I wasn't looking so much at puppet theater, so I had my diagram and I was filling in things in African-American performance that fit into the different places, and then I got over here to the intersection between ritual and masquerade, and I was like, how can that exist without a narrative, without a story? And then I had a really bad moment because this was around, I think this came to me in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd had been murdered, and I realized that drawing on conclusions I had come to in the living object process of researching the living objects exhibit that one function of African-American object performance is primary one, the one that you will find in all African-American puppeteers work, and they are a very diverse group, they use all different kinds of puppets, etc., is resistance to the objectification of black bodies. So if I have the power to manipulate this object and tell my story and give it agency, then I am not an object myself, even though the larger society is continually trying to force black bodies into that object status. So then I read some scholars who were parsing the phenomenon of lynching as a spectacle drama. Lynchings very often took place in public squares, and they were kind of a festive event for the white community that attended them. And one scholar, I think Kirk Wayne Foss, even drew a metaphor of the black body, the lynched black body as a marionette. So I saw all of that in this place where ritual and masquerade meet without a narrative, because what happens when this script gets activated is that the people participating in it surrender their agency to change the outcome of the story. And so the book opens, in the introduction, I talk about a biracial police officer. He was Nigerian on his father's side, and Caucasian on his mother's side. He joined the Minneapolis police force, because he thought that his biracial status would enable him to be a bridge between the police and his community. So he joined with the best of intentions. Derek Chauvin was his supervisor during his training. And the day of the murder, he helped pin George Floyd to the ground while Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck and choked him to death. And so he surrendered his agency to change the outcome of that script. So that's where the idea of scripts come from. Yeah, and how does stories offer us a different way of thinking about narrative? Yeah, can you just talk a little bit about the story part? So in a story, and this is once again extremely important to African-American artists, because there's been so little space for us to tell our stories. And even though we have told them and kept them alive in the oral tradition, there hasn't been much space for them to be recorded or disseminated either. So the idea of empowerment through a narrative in which you present your experience, the experience of your community as people who have agency, who are not objects, is extremely important. Yeah, so it seems like in this instance, you're thinking about how scripts and stories actually are a lot about the agency of the person telling them through either objects themselves or objectified people. And that you're sort of actually recasting where we understand the agency to sort of lie. It's now in the actual narrative process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this actually, I think this leads well into my next question, which is a bit of a big one. So, I mean, you attend really carefully to the differences between sort of stereotypical objectified representations of Black people in different kinds of performing cultures, and then performing objects that represent Black people with beauty and agency, as sort of you were just describing. And the providence of these objects are often unknown, as you've also sort of mentioned. And so you do a lot of really careful parsing to sort of distinguish those objects that stem from a harmful tradition, from a liberatory one, given that even just within artistic practice, both these sort of scripts and stories are very present. And I'm just wondering if you can talk about the methodology you use when sort of actually identifying these two traditions from one another, especially because the performance repertoires are often lost. And then how do you attend to moments where they intersect and overlap and come into conflict as there's multiple instances in the book where they do. Okay, I'll tackle that. The first thing I want to do, well, I have to give a trigger warning because I'm going to show some ugly pictures. And I want to ask everybody to take, let's take three deep breaths together so you can find your center. When we deal with blackface and racial issues, up to, you know, recent times, if we deal with it at all, it's been at an intellectual level. And we're not going to move the way that people think and the way that they respond and act unless people tap into the emotional level. So when we look at these images, I'm going to ask you to let the emotions rise, but I don't want anybody to get overwhelmed. So we're going to take three deep breaths, you can find your center first, and then we're going to go in. Okay, ready? And okay, so this is a puppet by Ralph Chasse from a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And the character is Topsy. So if you're familiar with the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Topsy is an enslaved girl who has no parents, and is kind of feral in a way she just grew is the way she explains herself. So on the one hand, we can look at this object and see that it matches closely. The kind of stereotypical imagery that was common in I think this show was from like 1933. In the 1930s, so it has the exaggerated big lips and the broad flat nose and the bugged eyes, etc. But Ralph Chasse was from a mixed race Creole family in New Orleans. And in the not his father, but his grandfather had kind of made an arrangement with the census taker to classify the family as white. However, when his sister became engaged, someone sent a postcard to her fiance, showing her with a black pic in any child. So outed the family. And they all moved to San Francisco, where Ralph was already living to get away from the persecution that they would have felt if they had continued to live in New Orleans as people so New Orleans is complicated to because in its French and Spanish colonial history, the racial categorization was three part. And under the American system, you're black or you're white, and there's no space in between. So they moved to San Francisco, and they did this show. And by a stroke of luck, I found in the Center for puppetry arts, the play bill for this show, which I meant to put in the slideshow, but I forgot. So I looked closely at that. And I noticed that even though this is a family that is passing for white, and has suffered a tremendous consequence for being outed as not white, when they put this show on, the Chester family members took the roles of the black characters. And the white members of their troop played the white characters. And so then I have to look at this image a little differently, knowing their family background and knowing the rest of Chasse's opus. So let's look here at the image I got for the cover of the book. And I think that what Chasse is doing is referencing both the stereotypical blackface imagery of African Americans, his own lived experience in a multiracial community and African masks in order to create these stylized faces. So then if I go back down here, you can see the planes and angles that are often in the kind of stylized masks that Africans had created. And also we look at Topsy's demeanor. Topsy was often played as a comical character in theatrical productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And she was meant to be laughed at. There's nothing laughable about this Topsy. It's full of pathos. And when you see her, you feel her pain. And so this production then is not doing what a minstrel production would have with the character. Let's get away from that image because it's disturbing. Okay, there's another one. But yes, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, we have a little, I think we have time to sort of dwell a little longer with this question as well. If you want to look at one more example of where this collision happens, because I find it really fascinating how you do this kind of tracking. Okay, so I have juxtaposed here to images is another way that I know what I'm looking at. So in the living objects, the criteria we established for counting this puppets as black puppetry is it was built or performed by an African American artist. And so on the right, we have a jig doll, which I don't think anyone would choose to represent themselves like that. And on the left, we have two jigmen by Garland Farwell, who deliberately nailed their feet to the platform. And explicitly, in his description says they don't dance. They refuse to dance. It is their resistance to this long tradition of minstrel representation of black characters. And then I have some more, you know, juxtaposing how the African American artists choose to represent themselves compared to how they were represented. So this, these are two of the figures that John W. Cooper, our ventriloquist friend, used in his performances. Now, both of these, he didn't make them, but he had them custom made for him. According to his instructions. And so to the same dollmaker as Charlie McCarthy, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. And the the there's a letter in the archive where the the fabricator says, Oh, I can make you a beautiful black boy. And that's what he has produced at Cooper's behest. And then on the other side, this is a dig doll by a master carver at master African American carver from North Carolina named George surveillance. And it is in the lineage of African American tap dancers, elegant tap dancers of the 30s, like John Bubbles, who was the original sport in life in poor game best. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is incredibly fascinating to I mean, just like the richness of these objects are also it's really wonderful to see. Oh, yes, of course, I've seen Sam perform with Yes. So then one more shout out for local Chicago artists. This is Sam Lewis, who was leading the catapult last weekend. And he got hold of a menstrual puppet that was sold as Jambo the driver and developed a show which is very unsettling to watch it first because Jambo the driver cave with a record. And the record is a white artist approximating jive talk. And so he comes out manipulating Jambo. Well, he calls this character just hand bone to the recording. And then he gets rid of the recording. And just hand bone gets into a rap battle and a dance battle with a tap dancer. And it completely changes how we understand the character. So this is a very fine line to walk. But some African American performers are willing to take that risk in order to reclaim this imagery that has been extremely harmful in the past. Yeah, so I think now would be a good time to transition to my last question, which is also a very exciting one, which is that you are also puppeteer and filmmaker. And you write a little bit about your own practice in the book. But I am curious to just hear a little more about how your own artistic practice has influenced, of course, the book project, but also your perspectives on puppetry writ large. Okay, so yeah, I gotta be fast because I want to show this and I want there to be time for questions. Basically, I wrote the book because I wanted to know what tradition am I in. And I wanted to be able to give that to the artists that were in the exhibit, and also that I talk about in the book. And I'll give one example for why this is important. There is a wonderful artist named Marjuan Kennedy, who lives in Washington, DC area. She has a whole she has a basically a media company. So she did a stage production of one of her children's books, which is a retelling of some rare rabbit stories. And there they are kind of Muppet style puppets. But you can see the the performers are kind of carrying them around on the stage and the legs are just dangling. And according to traditional Muppet performance technique, that's not good. You know, what first thing we learned in puppetry besides breath floor focus breath. So having the puppets legs just dangling, that would look like poor technique. But Kennedy's family is from Trinidad. And she's rooted in the carnival tradition. And so what she has staged is a procession, like a street spectacle. And so being able to articulate that in the book, then when she's applying for grants and other things, you can say, This is what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. So that's, that's the inspiration. Yeah. Amazing. Are we going to see some of your work with your indulgence? I'm going to take five minutes to show. And once again, this has a trigger warning on it. But this is a piece of my work. And then we'll have time for questions. Is that your voice, Paulette? Yes. Yeah, that was beautiful. Okay, I think we need our three breaths again. Okay. Okay, floor is open. I can bring the mic around. And Taylor, do we have any from online? Okay, great. Oh, I'm just trying to find the title card. But first of all, thank you, having had the privilege of hearing a little about your process and the recording, the track for Blacks and Bays. Thank you for putting yourself through that, frankly, so that we could, you know, see this beautifully realized work, your vocals really wrecked us all. But then the actual question is, you were you spoke a little bit about the use of church fans initially as advertising promo. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the use of, like, horrible, the appropriate kind of the white gaze when it comes to those awful racist characters such as like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. And because I recall you saying something about Aunt Jemima as puppet, and I love to hear you say more about that. Okay. Thank you. So thank you for that question, because it lets me tie in with the first author talk in which Colette Searls spoke about this concept of material characters, which we're building on top of Dacia Posner's essay about material performance. And Dacia was the moderator for the second artist panel. So things are coming together. This is great. So there was supposed to be a chapter in the book called Healing Our Brands that was a deep dive into this history of blackface material characters. And it went from the literal branding of flesh to show that this person belongs to the person who claims to own them to these characters that were created like Aunt Jemima, sometimes performed by live actors, very often spread through the culture in mass media as either performing objects because you could get dolls and all kinds of other toys, or as illustrations in advertisements, or as even animated characters. So that chapter was supposed to be in the book. And the outside reader had some objections, and I had the evidence that I needed to respond to those objections. But I was already 5,000 words over what the publisher was giving me. And I needed at least two or 3,000 more to respond to the outside reader. So I just said, I'll take that out. But in the chapter on mechanical negroes, which is specifically about the Limberjack puppets or jig dolls, I was able to address some of that. So maybe there'll be a future edition of the book where I can put that chapter back in or I will publish it somewhere else. But thank you for the question. Yes, Jackie. Thank you. Beautiful, beautiful work. Question. Can you talk about activism and puppetry and white gaze? And who has the right to present activism about a culture versus another group? Okay, that makes any sense. I think so. So Jacqueline Wade is one of the artists I profile in the book, and she's in the chapter on African American puppetry and social activism. So as the creator of a giant parade puppet that represents Mumia Abu Jamal, a political prisoner, who's been incarcerated for over 40 years now, 42 years. Jackie is one of the prime examples of how African Americans are using this art form to advance political protests to be heard in a way that was not possible without this giant puppet who has the right to perform those objects. That was a huge discussion that we had when we were developing the living objects exhibit and during the living objects symposium, which happened in February of 2019 while the exhibit was up. And I think that, you know, that question is not entirely settled at the moment. For myself, I see racism as an economic system above all. And so my question is always who is profiting from the performance? And is this performance keeping the people who developed this culture from profiting? Is that a satisfying answer? Yeah, so I'm not mad at the person in a community where there are very few African Americans who decides to introduce the Anansi stories to their community and tours the libraries doing that show, unless they are blocking someone who's directly connected to that lineage from doing those shows. More questions? No, I have many more questions. I'm just fascinated by the use of objects and storytelling traditions. And that there's such a distinctive tradition of African American culture in a variety of different ways. And if there's if there's any evidence you found of the doll functioning in storytelling, like this whole notion of the storyteller is its own tradition and own line, you know, and it exists, etc. And just and it makes me think, I think about that because there's the in Japan, it was several hundred year period between the storyteller and the in their emergence of the Banraku doll, right, the Ningyojori, it be several hundred years before they finally came together and became and then became a highly refined form. But for many years, it was they were separate. And then eventually, so it must I was wondering if you found any evidence of that. Yay, my favorite subject dolls. So I come to puppetry from dolls. I'm a Barbie girl. But the things that I was doing with Barbie are not what people usually imagine that little girls do with Barbie. So and I always wanted her to come alive. And that's why I started making little videos with dolls. And then I realized that I was doing puppetry because stop motion is just impossible amount of labor. And so I started finding ways to manipulate the figures with my hands out of the frame. And that's puppetry. So in the historical record, when we hit this brick wall, looking for objects that were performed, I put puppet, I put Marionette into the Library of Congress has digitized all of the WPA interviews that were done with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. And so I typed that into the index to see what I would get nothing. So that doesn't mean that people didn't have puppets, but nobody asked about it. So that's lost. But when I came back and I typed in doll, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, us had dolls is what people said. Some of the dolls were made by parents and given to their children. Some of the dolls were made by the white mistress and given as Christmas presents, or sometimes they even purchase dolls to give to the enslaved children as Christmas presents. So people had access to dolls. And the other thing about dolls is that you could keep them and assign your own meaning to the doll. And it would not be visible to the outside society that might feel a certain kind of way about the dolls. And so the dolls were very important for carrying particularly spiritual meanings. I'm currently part of this exhibit, the calling the transformative power of African American doll and puppet making, which is at the City Lore Museum Gallery in New York City until March 3rd. And it's it's a really phenomenal show looking at how African American doll makers have used dolls to tell stories, and also as a spiritual practice. So your question is right on Blair. This is the figure that I have in the show Madame Caffour. And I have fortunately in this day and age, the latitude to be open about spiritual practices that had to be hidden in the past. So Madame Caffour is a Gede figure in the Haitian Vodun Pantheon. Gede is the keeper of the well he's actually a spirit of death. And the transition between the spirit and the material world. So it's made of recycled materials, you can see the water jug as the face. The dress is made of energy drink cans, which my partner will not recycle. And so I was trying to keep some of them out of the waste stream, and by turning them into this dress, and then they are strung together on cords that are I cut plastic bags into strips, and braid them. So and that's also what her hair is made of. I have actually a quick follow up question just about you talked about your doll into puppet. And just thinking about the film you showed and your decision to have your presence in the film just be the voice and to not show your hands. And just given your focus on the puppeteer's relationship to the object as being a really crucial part for you. I'm just curious about that choice. It was a really powerful one. I'm just curious to hear you just yeah about why not show the puppeteer. Okay, yeah, that's that's a fair question. And it's one that I've been playing with. I have not had as much time to make videos as I would have liked in the last like five years, because I've been researching all of this stuff. But I have asked myself, will the audience accept it my medically if they can see my hands in the frame manipulating the dolls, which would be easier and faster to shoot? Or do I need to maintain the fiction that the dolls are moving independently? So that's a good question. And as far as the I did have one hand in there, which is the white child. But I deliberately wanted to show that white hand manipulating the black horse, because the horses stand for people who were treated as chattel. Thank you so much, Paulette. Mine is not a question, but it's just a follow up because when we're talking about dolls, there's a tribe in Kenya, which is called Turkana, which they have dolls which are given to young girls, they're called fertility dolls. And they give them to the girls so that they take care of them so that they are able to bear kids. I don't know if you also followed upon that story, because that is something that has been there for for many years. Yes. So I had a wonderful book about dolls in Africa. In the United States, we're more familiar with the Ghanaian aquaba dolls, which serve the same function. But what I got from my reading on dolls in Africa is that they have served both as play things and as ritual objects. And those ones in particular, they kind of occupy both spaces. And so that helped me think about, okay, people in the Americas were able to own dolls. And so what were they doing with them? And how would they see them coming from these African traditions? So that's really helpful. I think we have time for one last quick question. If there's one more question out there. Yes. It's kind of a comment too. But I just, it's so interesting to me, you know, we'll see movies or they portray in real life slavery. And we've all seen movies like that for some reason with the puppets, it's kind of more disturbing. And I thought, why is that? Because it's a secondary. It's not the primary sort of an actor. It's a puppet. But for some reason, it really feels not good. And I don't know if it's because I don't know. Do you know why that would be? Do you see that too? Or no? So I'm in dialogue with a number of African American artists who are using performing objects to delve into these really difficult, painful stories. And one in particular, Nefri Amini, has said that she prefers to take the weight of trauma off the black body and put it into the puppet. And so as a performer, I did 17 takes of that song before I got what I could use. I cried on every one of them. And I could not have done that piece on stage because I would have broken down. So to go into that space, to ask an actor to hold that kind of trauma in their body for an audience is really, really difficult and painful. But also, because we see so much violence in film and television, it's really easy for people to turn it off when it's an actor. But because it's a puppet, we know, okay, this is awful, but it's not real. And that actually enables you to sit with it and experience the emotions in a way that you probably wouldn't if it was a live performance. Okay, thank you for that question. I think that we've come to the end of our, I'll continue, but we're done with the live stream. Yes, because, because, because we have a set window for that. But yes, I'll take one more and people can trickle out if they need to. No, thank you so much for it for for that wonderful, wonderful talk and, and fascinating. I was thinking about the fact that you mentioned how difficult it is for the African American puppeteers to find the space to tell their stories. And I think we face a kind of like a similar situation also in Africa, because it's always been, if you've been enslaved or colonized, then part of that narrative was taken away from you. But again, we know, for example, all over the world, how popular hip hop culture is and has gotten, you know, the entire world. And I was wondering, now, is there any attempt to reclaim that narrative? And what what is being done? Are there African American puppet festivals, you know, where people can come together and, and share some of these stories? We wish. We had one at the University of Connecticut, during the run of the Living Objects exhibit, we had a festival and symposium in February of 2019, Black History Month. And for that, we have to be thankful to the Black students who occupied the student, you know, the administration buildings at UConn, I think in 1968, and demanded that the university start including their culture in the curriculum and the campus life. And so it was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Studies Center at UConn. And that was how we had funding to do the exhibit and the festival and symposium. So you never know, you come back to activism, you never know what the results of your activism will be. It's just important to stand up and do it. If anybody knows of anyone that would like to sponsor an African American puppetry festival, we would love to put it on. And we would love to have this is called object performance in the Black Atlantic, the book. I could only talk about the United States in the amount of space that they given me. But really, this is Europe, it's Africa, it's the Caribbean and Latin America, and North America as well. And someday I would like to see a festival encompassing all of the Black Atlantic. Thank you so much, Paula. This was such a great talk.