 Good morning. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Thank you for coming out on this Saturday morning, first of our panel discussion. My name is Blair Thomas, and I'm the director of the Puppet Festival. And I'm here with my colleagues. One panel this morning at 10, and then we have another one at 1 p.m. as well. And I will just sit here and use this mic. We have the symposium happening today and the next Saturday as well. So I would like to just go ahead and begin by introducing the moderator for this morning's symposium. And that's Paulette Richards here on my side, my colleague. So Paulette Richards has survived a 10-month stint in Senegal as a 2013-14 Fulbright scholar without contracting any tropical diseases. But sometime during her service as an artist in residence at the Institut França in St. Louis, the puppet bug bit her hard. After returning to Atlanta, she became a docent in the World of Puppetry Museum at the Center for Puppetry Arts. When fellow members of the Decatur makers introduced her to Ardino's microprocessors and stepper motors, she immediately thought of the animatronic dogs and dozers in the Henson Gallery at the museum and began designing her own rudimentary robots. Richards has taught animatronic puppetry workshops at the Friends School in Atlanta, Decatur Makers and DeKalb County Public Library, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and the Puppeteers of America 2017 National Festival. During the 2017-18 academic year, she worked for Georgia Tech's Center for Educational Integrating Science Math Computing as an innovator in residence at the Hollis Innovation Academy. Her mission in this on-core career is to engage students who might not otherwise see themselves as innovators in STEM disciplines through animatronic puppetry. But she is also a scholar who's been working on a book and at the Puppet Festival we've been very honored to have her as an instructor in an online class over the past year and where she's been trying out the ideas of her new book. And the book will be published shortly by Rutledge. It's called Object Performance in the Black Atlantic, the United States. So it's very, very excited to have this scholarship come forward soon. But today she has put together, along with myself, we collaborated on this idea of creating a panel discussion entitled Boundless Bodies. And so I'm going to pass it on to Paulette Richards. Thank you. Thank you, Blair. Thank our panelists. And thank the audience for coming out so early. This panel was sort of born in conversation with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And they indicated an interest in addressing some of the more theoretical approaches that students in the art school are exposed to. And one of the hot topics in the art world these days is the whole realm of what we call post-humanism. You may also have heard of object-oriented ontology or agential realism or the new materialism or many other buzzwords like that. This morning we are in kind of an improvisational mode because it took us some time to pull our tech team together but we have excellent panelists to help us start wrapping our heads around these ideas. And Boundless Bodies is the first subject that we came up with. The notion of object-oriented ontology, ontology being the question of how do we know what's real, is especially, I think puppetry brings a special lens to that line of inquiry because we're dealing with objects all the time and we are negotiating with objects all the time. And even though the Western tradition does not admit the agency of the object, as object performers we are always wrestling with objects that seem to have agency. Welcome. Thank you. We're glad you could make it. Because regardless of what you have blocked, when the puppet does not want to move this way instead of that way, then you have to work that out with the puppet. So we are constantly running into the material world in a way that forces us to think about what are the bounds of our own human bodies and consciousness and what is the agency, existence, animus, whatever you want to attribute to the material objects that we encounter. So Boundless Bodies, we're starting with this question centered in the body and the shows that we have represented on the panel speak very directly to those questions. So I'm very glad to have our presenters with us. I'm going to introduce them and then they will each speak for about 20 minutes. Then we will have 20 to 30 minutes of conversation within the panel where I will be trying to connect what they've said more closely with the philosophical point that we're trying to explore. And then we will open the floor for questions. There are microphones in the aisles on either side of the center here. So when we open the floor for questions, if you have a question, please come forward to the microphone so that you will be heard. And then we will take your question from the floor. So looking forward to beginning this journey with you, thank you. And now I'm going to introduce Ishmael Faulke, who is our first presenter with Liv's Medlet. I practiced before. Liv's Medlet. Yes, I practiced beforehand and I blew it. But anyway. Okay, so you are in the Google Drive. Yeah, so I'm looking on my phone because I want to keep pretty things on the screen instead of all the junk that's on my computer. So Ishmael Faulke is a puppeteer and performing artist as well as a teacher. He is interested in stories told by materials and spaces in redefining the body, in contradictions, in the breaking down of old and familiar stories, and in their reconstruction. Born in Israel, Palestine in 1977 and based in Finland since 2001, Faulke's works were presented in various venues from national theaters to garbage cans in about 30 countries around the world. And we were awarded both in Finland and internationally. He also published literature of both practice and theory of puppets and theater art. So we are in good hands with Mr. Faulke. So I'm going to let this little screen go and bring up his website so we can look at some of the images from the show that he's doing here at the festival, which is Invisible Lands. So without further ado, let's welcome Ishmael Faulke. True, or is it, do you hear me? Yes, good. So thank you for introducing and let's see. Right, I will sit close. Okay, so thank you for introducing and big thanks for the festival, for inviting. I'm very happy to be here and performing Invisible Lands. Paulette gave an introduction about me. I will give a brief introduction about our company, which is actually Duetto. So I work with the dancer choreographer, Sandrina Lindgren. And our theater duo is called Liv's Medlet, which is a Swedish word that is tough to pronounce, but it means groceries or essential grocery, elementary things that you get. And this, my background is in puppetry and her background is in dance and choreography. And what we are doing for already about 12 years is that we try to create, we are creating different kinds of hybrids between puppetry and dance. So the topic of our symposium Boundless Buddies is, I feel, relating quite directly to our work in different forms. Just a few words about how we work together. We try to avoid dividing the creative process in this sense that, okay, you will do a dance scene, I will do a puppetry scene, and then we just put it up together. Instead we try to really work on each element of the show, starting from very, like discussing the concept and up to the very last details. And from both perspectives of puppetry and body, and eventually as the more we work together, the more we find out that they are not separate objects, but they are together. So what is uniting is that we are object-based. Whether the object is a live organism or what is kept as inanimate, it is still an object, it is a material, and in this sense we are materialists that manifest in different ways. I feel that it is richness in this work to be able to step out of one's own art discipline conventions. So I know myself that since I've been educated in puppetry and working also outside of our theater duo with a lot of puppeteers, so for good and bad there are many conventions on how we should approach a play and also on traditional roles within the working group. And then again, Dance Field has their own conventions. When you're working with someone from a different field, you have to go over these conventions and find out what is working in practice. And often it becomes something new. So I'm going to present our work through three different shows that we made. I will start with Invisible Lands that is here in this festival. You can still see us three times today and tomorrow. Invisible Lands is a show that we created in 2015, in spring 2015. We started to work on it just without a theme, just with artistic inspiration to combine miniature figures and create body landscapes for them. So we experimented for quite a while with this material until we developed a certain language, but we still did not have any direction or theme for it. And as it happened, we were scheduled to have a premiere in Finland in April 2015 and as we are approaching our premiere, the big crisis of refugees coming to Europe was happening around. And the images of refugees, long lines of refugees in different landscapes and boats of refugees at sea, the images were overflowing from the media. And then we realized that if there is one thing that we should tell at this moment, it's this, it should reflect what is happening in the world. So this is how basically the theme and the medium came together in our show. So it is a show about refugee travels and we play very strongly on scale using two parallel visual narratives, one very miniature scale and the other on full body. And we try to use this physical duality of the big bodies and the miniature puppets in order to suggest many different perspectives on this phenomenon of refugee travels. Without judging it, we don't need to, without adding any drama to a phenomenon that is already dramatic enough. So we found out that working very intimately with the audience, the audience is actually surrounding us in a public seat that is a little bit formed like a boat, a small refugee boat, so we are sitting all very tightly together and people are very close, it's very sensitive in a way, but very rough. And we use images that, for example, we use a view from a binocular. So a person watching from binocular over landscape and seeing something else, we use video projection with this, but we also offer the perspective of a single person that is running for their lives, but also a perspective of a pilot of a helicopter that is hunting down these people and also the viewpoint of a news anchor. So we try to use all these different viewpoints and we found out that combining the physical body with these inanimate small figures that are not really puppets, they are tiny little bits of plastic, but they are bodies still. So combining these two opens up ability to connect with this phenomenon in many different ways and this is what we wish to give, not to come up with a certain slogan or saying, but just to offer the audience a possibility to watch. And the bodies, they become a platform for private events, very private intimate events, somebody physical actions, somebody is holding their breath under water, for example, somebody is taking care of another person which is wounded, but it's also a platform because of the different scales, it's a platform for a whole geopolitical event or many events, actually. We did it originally for Europe, but as we were performing it here, there already came up comments about people immigrating from Mexico, for example. And we created it 2015 thinking that we will connect and comment on something which is relevant now. We did not have any idea that it's going to be relevant for so long, unfortunately. It's still relevant. Yeah, I think this is about invisible lens. Then I will give two more examples of different shows that we did where we are combining bodies and objects. So the next row I'm speaking about is called Full Measures. It's a duet, but it's actually a trio for puppeteer, dancer, and foldable measuring sticks. I'm not sure how do you call them here. It's the kind of sticks that carpenters use, for example. And it discusses how our culture's obsession to measure everything as much as possible is affecting our body and transforming our world and how our body is actually becoming measured all the time. It's not a new phenomenon, but I think it has been taken to the extreme in the last years. There is a kind of movement called the Quantified Self. And probably everybody here recognized this from your mobile phone is counting your steps and some smartwatches are counting whatever pulse and tell you how did you sleep at night and advise you to. So we are measuring all the time everything. Also on sociological levels we are turning everything possible. All different values of, just as an example, values of care or togetherness or affection. Whatever kind of abstract but existing values are put down into numbers, grades. And once you quantify everything into numbers then you gain certain kind of knowledge but you lose a lot of other knowledge. So in this show, could you pass the next picture? We play, we create a world that is made entirely of this measure sticks and we depict how two random people kind of transform from a very intelligent or kind of socially aware people that can have a conversation, how do we regress as people into a primitive stage while the measure sticks just come more and more and transform the whole stage. So this is another way to approach connection between bodies and objects. Now you actually will see a short kind of lightly adapted scene of it in tonight's nasty, brutish and short it's called, the cabaret. So yeah, so welcome to get a small impression. Then another show which is called Inevitable translated from Finnish and Swedish. In English it would be inevitable and this is a show that is made out completely from objects. It's a story of, a history of 100 years that the whole show is one very long domino effect of chain of reactions. So what you see here is the 40s and you see 30s maybe, no 30s. And then basically they are not actors, no actors. They are just objects dropping, pushing, like whatever, causing other objects to react. And the audience is following the reaction through a very, very big space. But there are people there and the people are used as objects also. Could you pass on to the next one? Sure. So we do use performers that are located there. You don't see their face and they are doing kind of everyday actions, but their actions are also part of the whole chain reaction. So what we are, from this point of view of body and objects, what we discuss in this piece is how our body and how we as kind of entity individuals are part of a random chain of reaction and how do we build our different narratives of history, politics, whatever, based on a certain perspective that we have on this great domino chain that is life and the universe. And where our bodies that we try to define as ours, that we have the agency on them to decide what to do with them, they are actually just a part of this reaction chain. So that's inflicting also on our decisions. And the point here is not so much a fatalism as it may sound, but more maybe to kind of create a certain kind of empathy. From this humble point of view that we are all connected through this chain of reaction. And throughout this or like in the different shows that we create, our main message, hidden message that we try to kind of plant is that through the bodily aspect of both objects and humans, we can create a certain kind of empathy because for theater viewers to watch things, you can watch something on an intelligent level, you can process text and other ideas, but then there is a certain level of physical identification that we do, physical empathy that our body feels and it's a kind of route that passes by the intelligent part and goes directly to our lizard brains, but does affect us deeply affect our opinions and how we do. And we find out that through having the physical and the bodily on a very prominent place, we can access much more this kind of empathy. I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you. That was wonderful. Great. I made notes. You did a very good job of linking to the overall theme and so I have things to talk about with you afterwards. So our next presenter is, let me get into the bio. So this is Julie Lecoeur, who says that during her higher education, her passion for the performing arts saw her gravitate towards assisting artistic programs and cultural engineering. A graduate with a bachelor's in cultural outreach, she joined the National School of Theater Arts. Sorry, this is tiny on my phone. I can't see it. Yes, the National School of Theater Arts and techniques, which is abbreviated as NSAT, where she trained in production and administration jobs. After graduating from the school in 2008, she took up an assistant job at the budget and payroll department of the Theater Nationale de Chayoux, where she assisted the executive director with managing the budget of the organization. She soon became head of budget and financial controller. In 2013, she became the executive director of the World Puppet Theater Festival in Charleville, Mezier, thus combining her appreciation for the arts of puppetry and her desire to expand her core line of work. While supervising the administrative and coordination aspects of the event alongside management, she encountered many French and international artistic teams and promoted the art of puppetry, which decidedly contemporary dimension revives, challenges, and breaks down the boundaries between the arts. Artists who are spearheading this revival include Elise Vigneron from the Theater de l'Entrouvert and Violene Fimbelle, Compagnie Yokai, both of whom she has assisted since 2019. So we are very honored to have Julie to speak about Anywhere, which is Elise Vigneron's production, which has now been set on the U.S. company that presents it to you here at the festival. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Well, can you hear me? It's okay? Okay. I'll try to do my best to represent Elise. She unfortunately cannot be here in U.S. with us. So I'm not the artist, but I think I will do my best to pass her way to her puppetry approach, which is a very specific way to work and approach the puppetry and the art with proposing a very sensitive experience. She puts the ephemer of our existence in the center of her work. She's doing that using the materials. She has always used the ephemer lives of materials since her first show. It was in 2010. Her first show was created and called Traversé. We have some images of Traversé. Sorry, I have named the different pictures. Yes, I see. You can have this. Okay, great. Thank you. This first show was Traversé means going through philosophical some things. It's like a path between different moments of life. She used for that many different materials that we know that they are supposed to fade away quite quickly, like leaves, natures, wood, everything that you can find in nature in your environment and they are supposed to disappear. It's something that is always a parallelism between material and our human being lives. Puppetry for that is the way that Ellie is trying to share with this experience. There's human experience, but I'm living experience. For that, she's involved in puppetry, but she's calling her approach a martyral movement. It means that she never named it like object. She named it like a martyral. Sometimes we can find a martyral embodying the nature or embodying the lives and sometimes we can have in their show human being shapes too. So there is puppets and materials. Definitely these puppets are like, I think we can see in our approach that the puppets is like a double. We were discussing yesterday with Paulette about is it an extension of human or is it something else out of the human being? I guess it's both, of course, but it's really have to be considered like a double of the human in its metamorphosis and its way to disappear. So this traversé show was married in many different stations and the spectator is invited to being there through. The first version was for indoor, but after she recreated for outdoor and now it's performed in outdoor space, like very natural spaces like in wood or in forest wood and including now there is a human manipulating the puppets but there is also an animal. There is a horse going through the scenography and this is something really strong because you know this human being manipulating the puppets is both a fellow and someone that we have sometimes to forget. Ishmael talked about this convention with puppetry and this horse is really embodying the animal life. So this traversé show was the first one from Ellie's approach work and then after this experience with this material she begins to start to work with this very intriguing and very autonomous material which is ice for her next following shows. So that's how Anywhere was born. Anywhere's show was created in 2016. It's based on the novel Eddie Pearson The Road from a Belgian author called Henri Bouchaud. This author proposed to write what happened between the moment of Edipus as just left his city and becoming blind by himself and the moment he arrives in Cologne and it's the end of his life. So this is the journey and this is the path of this moment because it didn't exist in the tragedy's first rights place so this is the proposition in this show to accompany this journey from Edip and Edip's journey with his daughter Antigone. And Ellie's proposed to make this Edipus embodied by Ice Puppet. This Ice Puppet is of course because it's ice melting during the show and this is something that she proposed to the spectator to questioning his FMR passage I mean being here on the earth and it's questioning the fragility of our lives but the fragility of the relationships too. This is questioning what is visible and invisible because Edipus is fading away but is still here with his soul and this is something that it allows with this Ice Puppet tree and it's questioning too the trail, the mark of our passage present on earth and it's just something that I think it's one of the answers for her about how she wants to bring the questioning, the question of our metamorphosis and the relationship between what is present and what is absent of our lives it's kind of dealing with the shadows world too. This is something very particular here in Chicago's festival this year because Ellie's and Blair decided to transmit this work to a US young US team and so that's them who's performing the show here in the festival. It was three weeks of rehearsal to transmit this show. It was decided and thought during the pandemic moment I guess because Blair is here of course this is something very strong he could tell and chat with you. It is a very successful and emblematic show of the company and it was transmitted to, it was important for Ellie's and Blair with this whole pandemic issues to find another way to create and transmit and travel all around the world with our artistic proposition so that was a great and amazing moment to share with you this new form, this new shape so it's supposed to travel all around the US then and it was very interesting as Ishmael said before for this show it was a meeting between a puppeteer for the puppet part and a dancer performer so we are again thinking, speaking about these different conventions and this is something very interesting in this new show because this is the encounter between this Martial World embodied by the puppeteer and this human body and it's another relationship in this new show because of this different knowledge I mean skills before then the French shows so that's something I guess we can discuss after just to, I don't know exactly maybe a guess at the end of the presentation but this show with the ice part this ice, yes the ice reflection created a new cycle, ice cycle in Ellie's artistic approach so she created a long residency with people in habitant it's called Lance and she worked with again this trail this way to be here or not to be here anymore and this ice is really interesting to work on that with people during two months they molded feet of people to embody the presence of this person because feet is where you stand from and this is where you are grounded and in the same time this is your trail this is your trail, very material trail that's of course your philosophic trail and it smells of course because it's ice so that was very powerful to share it with people they didn't see for lots of them they didn't see anywhere, they didn't know the puppets the puppetry or they didn't know Ellie's approach and this is something that was very strong see this feet just before, the one before with someone quite aging with this like if she was being in her shoes but it's the feet disappearing and there's something very strong that is pictured here and the next show she's working on it will be created in October 23 there will be ice puppets but there will be human sized ice puppets for five persons, five manipulators like doubles of them there's still this questioning about doubles, metamorphosis and it's based on the novel Le Vague the waves from Virginia Woolf which questioning this theme that we have again there about the ephemer presence of the human being and questioning and there is a very strong work done with the voice, the sound of the waves and this material ice becoming water what is not nothing because the ice is not just disappearing it's something else, it's water it's about the metamorphosis I guess I'm pretty done okay thank you so much next we have Camille Trouvé from les Angeaux Plafonds I'm going to introduce Camille and then there will be a little moment where I'm fumbling to open the Angeaux Plafonds website so that we can get some images of Raj while she speaks but bear with us we will get it all together so Camille Trouvé had her training in puppetry in Glasgow and then founded the company Les Angeaux Plafonds with Bryce Berthoud they have 12 shows that they've created together and they have been touring all over France and in international puppet festivals since 2021 both Bryce Berthoud and Camille Trouvé direct the National Theatre in Rouen so that was what we got very quickly and there are many more credits to her name but that's what we have for now and just give me a moment to jump on the Blair did you email that to me? okay just jump in there don't look at my email email Fred's we will be, yes, honored to hear from Camille here we go okay can you hear me? yes I'll try to do my best in English to present the company Les Angeaux Plafonds so we founded the company in 2000 with Bryce Berthoud which is a great puppeteer we met in a festival in a puppetry festival and we decided to form the company together and the strange thing is that we decided to exchange the role all over the creation travel sometime he's performing on stage and I'm directing him and the reverse thing is surprising when I'm performing and he's directing me and at first it was like a game we choose this way of working and it became a real link in between all the shows of the company and we've been building 12 shows on this theory and then after at first it was like a little solo of puppetry and as years go by shows became bigger and we had a whole team around us and we take a whole stage we started on the table and then after we expand the universe of Les Angeaux Plafonds on the whole stage we were really inspired with master of puppetry I mean I think puppetry is something like a shock when you first met a master of puppetry or an image of puppetry that really shock your imaginary I'd like to talk about Ilke Schoenbein for example or Philippe Gentil or Fabritio Montecchi or Galvin Glover from the I mean many master of puppetry I really appreciate and that inspired my universe and the universe of Les Angeaux Plafonds is rooted in transdisciplinary practice so that we are mixing the language of the body the language of the material the language of the music and the text and we are trying to connect all these practices into on stage into the show and everything is created at the same time this is quite a way of working that is we are not starting with a text a right text that is written we are starting with a vision of manipulation vision of the space scenography is like our main puppet it's like a big puppet on stage we are manipulating the scenography with a lot of strings and tricks and trap and things that pop up and appear and expand on stage so scenography is designed by Brice Bertoux usually and is like creating the space as a huge puppet and then I usually design the puppets and I'm trying to really go into the link in between the puppeteer and his puppet to try to make a language what is in dramaturgy what does it mean to manipulate a puppet on stage on this story and what will be the role of the manipulator and what is the link in between the two for example in Raj we could say that the main character is an actor is performing the role of a writer and all the puppets are part of his imaginary world is getting out of the book so there is a link in between the actor the puppeteer and all the puppets on stage the main in the company we we routed our imaginary world into the Greek myth as we start we started and it's very nice to hear about Eudipe sur la route from Henri Bouchaud because it was one of our book reference book as well because we've been building two shows about Antigone and Eudipe with this kind of game with Bruce and I so I directed him in Eudipe and he directed me in Antigone and it really gave a ground for the company like a place where our imaginary is working and then after we choose two contemporary myths which are Camille Claudel which is a great French artist's sculptor from the 19th century who faced a really hard censorship in her work because at that time in France sculpture was not allowed for women so she had to really fight hard to find a way and to impose her vision artistical vision and independency apart from men and from masters of sculpture and the second character we talk the life of is Romain Garry and that is the show we are presented actually in the festival Rage is the show, the story about Romain Garry which is a great writer in France but his story is incredible because he is a magnificent swindler he was born in Russia in the early 20th century and at this moment in Europe he went through whole Europe with his mother because of the pogroms starting in Europe and then the mother has the idea of taking her child to France and it was like the first part of the show is the big travel through Europe and the mother protecting her child from the violence and the absurdity of fascism she is building for him a world in which everything is a story and she is protecting his imagination from the violence of the world so she creates in a part a vision in which reality and fiction are really close and mixed and there is no borders there are no borders in between and at first it was like a treasure for the young Romain Garry because she was believing in him raising him saying that he will become a huge man, an important guy but at a certain part of his life it became like a wound and he had difficulties to make the difference in between fiction and reality and the promise that it gave his mother at the dawn of his life became a kind of difficulty to get through and he reinvented himself around 40 years old into another character another writer another... and he became this kind of swindler a war, a warning twice the Gonco Prize and making a big... a big... intrigue around his writing Did I manage to explain all this in English? Thank you Thank you That's the show we are presenting now in Chicago, Rage with a human-sized puppet made out of papers and built about the imagination of this author, Romain Garry Thank you Panelists have given us a lot to chew on So let's see if I can find a path for us to start digesting and connecting some of what was said I'm looking for a file because we had a description and thought for what this panel would be and I just need to find that Oh, yay, it's there Okay, I'm just going to read you what we originally wrote on the idea of boundless bodies and then I'll start weaving things together The other thing about the exploration of post-humanist object-oriented ontology et cetera, et cetera, theory which I sat down in September and read a big stack of books and then made a report to Blair is that most of it is extremely Eurocentric and in my mind was an excuse to keep talking about Heidegger so recognize the fact that cultures all over the world have been asking these questions throughout human history and so I went to Hindu philosophy to find another perspective on it and so this is what we're getting here in Hindu cosmology the rhythmic energy of Shiva Tandavas of Shiva's Tandava dance is the source of all movement in the universe propelling the cycle of creation preservation and dissolution so there goes the ice puppet the purpose of the dance is to release humans from illusion and our biggest illusion is that we are the center of the universe since the puppet body can be an extension of the puppeteer's body or a separate object that forces us to negotiate with matter that is distinct from our human bodies object performances such as Leaves-Medlet theaters I think I got it this time Invisible Lands can readily explore how human consciousness might transcend the boundaries of our own bodies so that would take you outside transcendence but the Tandava dance takes place in Chidambaram the center of the universe which actually lies within the heart, the human heart thus the theater de l'entreverse anywhere stages a journey that illustrates how we can find transcendence through immanence I'm a dancer first and foremost and so immanence is important to me because as a dancer you have those moments where you are so connected with your body that your consciousness expands to a feeling that you are the whole universe or the universe is a part of you there is no separation so instead of stepping outside of the body you go within to find the whole of creation so with that preamble then I'm going to go through I think what I'll do first is ask each panelist to reflect on in their practice the extent to which you use the puppet as an extension of the body or where you work with the puppet as something that is separate from the body does that make sense? alright so would you like to go first? Yes I think that there is a certain definition visual definition that you need to make between the puppeteer and puppets but it's not the same as something that we would like to achieve in this sense that we want to make a difference between the object and the body I think mostly we would like to blur the image sometimes we would at some places we would maybe hide the object and expose more the body but it depends maybe we would put the border not between object and body but between different for example if I'm holding on to this microphone so it's not me or the microphone it can be like this part from the sleeve and then this and this is important but this is not important and this is not important as an example so we can reach some kind of hybrid that will tell us something else that's beautiful Julie I would say that's my understanding of Ellie's process that is some kind of mirror I would answer that it's not an extension it's a mind extension but it's not there is something definitely separated between both of them but it's the double so that's the figure that we maybe we recenter our humanity on this on this on this material to get the consciousness of our very short time ephemeral time on earth so I would say that I would say that it's the human body is kind of disappearing to let this material being the center of the proposition in my opinion as long as I'm building the puppets I've got a sort of animist thinking when I'm in my working place I used to put little candles and stuff like that when I will make the thing alive and it's not an extension of myself it's rather a projection of my imagination on the material thing which is completely inert and then with this kind of little ceremony I must admit I'm still doing I give to the material to the sculpture the light of life I really still believe in this this magical thing and then after I give the puppet all the responsibility for telling the story on stage in front of the audience I'm really like relying on the object to be the medium in between the audience and my imagination and sometimes I'm talking to the puppets before the show saying go for it you will be great you will just have them in the eyes and when I'm performing I'm really like hiding myself a little bit behind the puppet and saying go for it be brilliant so I still got this animist thinking which is also in the Japanese theater very important they believe that when you perform with the puppet many many times it charges itself in energy and if you don't manipulate it it will become an object again and this way in between object and magical object on stage is something I just keep being fascinated about it okay thank you that's great so I have three prongs to come in which is wonderful unfortunately one theorist name has escaped me at the moment and I'm supposed to keep this screen up during the things I can't go searching in my computer there's a concept called entanglement between objects in the material world and what Ishmael described illustrates that exactly so as you're performing with objects then these entanglements between them create a new object which could have its own entity as it were okay and that's actually written and I'll dig up the name of the theorist that talks about that later but so we're in the same field then Julie when you're talking about the double and also in your remarks earlier the concept that come to me is one that philosophers talk about in the realm of phenomenology and do not get afraid of that word I hang with it I think about the muppet sketch with the cows going phenomenon do do do do do okay so every time I have to deal with phenomenology I think about that and then I'm able to say it and not be put off by because it gets really esoteric but phenomenology is the study of consciousness and what is the relationship between our human consciousness and whatever may be outside of human consciousness because we can argue back and forth about whether there's anything outside of your own consciousness or maybe you are all figments of my imagination and I'm dreaming that we're sitting here having this conversation but within that discussion we talk about apprehending and so this double that you have brought up is a way of apprehending whatever is other or outside of the consciousness would you say that's an accurate paraphrase yes okay so we're on solid ground this is something that has been hashed and rehashed for a good while and we can all have our opinions about it then Camille thank you for coming out as an animist I also consider myself to be an animist and so one of my frustrations in reading this post humanist theory is once again they all want to talk about Heidegger but they all want to link it to science and so they will also go to Niels Bohr the physicist who wrote a lot of philosophy and because they still think that they have to justify everything according to the paradigms of science and rationalism they will go to the very edge but will not admit animism it's like ooh so and yet your practice is one that resonates with many puppeteers and in many cultures the idea of the puppet having this life force is natural and normal and they would be wondering why we think that it doesn't yes so thank you for bringing up that point let me see if I can pull together one other question set to go through and then we'll open the floor for the audience because I hope that we've got your mind running in interesting circles as well so oh yes yes here we go a lot of my work in African American puppetry or object performance has been looking at how this is an empowering practice for people who have been objectified who have been commodity objects whose bodies have been bought and sold and so who was it that talked about the sculptor you yes I also wanted to ask you about whether that sculptor used her work to comment on the objectification of women's bodies and then from there I also wanted to go to the question of the extent to which since we have a lot of dance in the shows here the extent to which the human body itself can function as an object in performance on occasion does that make sense yes I think so yes very wide yes it's wide so I'm giving you plenty of rope to hang yourself okay would you still like to go first Ishmael yeah I try to climb the rope I try to climb on that rope speaking about the human body which is being well reformulated can we use it as an object in the context of Invisible Ends we are performing here we find out that there is a certain well we are telling a certain narrative but then we are also using we are using the body as the tool but then the body itself has a certain narrative because it dictates once you used it as the cinematography and as the part not only cinematography because as you were speaking about the entanglement it's not separate it becomes also a protagonist so it dictates a certain narrative for us to use and then it has also a certain memory and in this the idea of empowerment when we are dealing with this well we are dealing with a theme that is we are speaking about people that are I don't know what is the term disempowered the immigrants and refugees and we are giving them like memory space on our bodies and the objects in this and in this way it is I'm speaking based on feedback that we got from people that have been through this kind of things so they saw their own story in our bodies and the bodies of the objects in this sense it is the body can convey memories and narratives in this way it is empowering empowering okay great I think you got to the top of the rope and rang the bell great so I'm going to put a pin in that stories and empower people but I'll come back to that after we hear from Julie and Camille that's interesting how to answer that I mean I guess what is object what object means the first question did you study the first thing they do is oh we got to define the terms this is my philosophy training no I mean what is I guess what is objectified or defined by the others so that's interesting to wondering about for example anywhere there is adipus as a pipette there is antigone as a human being and which is the most defined by the exterior or the others between the two of them as adipus as antigone or really there are myths that are shaped I mean the subject itself adipus is shaped by the other his life it doesn't belongs to himself the same with adipus maybe is like more than defined by the others and antigone is another process she is trying to she is trying to belongs her life to get it from the others but it finally doesn't work neither it's myth not tragedy and I would say that's for anywhere I would say that for me they are exactly on the same level they are both objected objected by the others objectified I don't know how to say that sorry okay thank you I have stuff to work with there too okay come here okay I'll have a go maybe for me the question of having pipettes on stage will will give prevent from objectivation of the body because it gives more freedom to the body of the actor for example you can perform whatever you want as a pipette you can be male or female young or old and you have a real freedom compared to what your appearance is and for young actors actress it's like a playground a huge playground and not to be objectivized by your own body what do you look like how do you look like I mean it's like you can open the door and for me it was like a revelation when I was 20 it was like wow such a huge playground and I still believe now that in between the body of the performer and the object this freedom is active it's still active for me nevertheless what you're in real life you have a imaginary body revealed by the pipette on stage that's my feeling that was great these are all very rich answers so I'm going to wrap up the panel conversation open the floor for questions from the audience we hope that some of you have questions or comments or things you would like to interject into the conversation and I just want to finish with the point of what Ishmael said about stories with Ishmael or Julie that brought up stories and empowerment what happened in the case of enslaved people and refugees is that their stories get erased and the erasure of their individual stories is what turns them into objects to be acted upon instead of agents who can define their own lives so I like that alright please come up to the microphone if you have questions don't be shy yay come on up thank you for being brave and asking the first question hi thank you so much for your presentations it's an honor to listen to each of you as Ishmael noted centering the body in performance whether it's a puppet body or a human performer can elicit physical empathy from the audience my question is for all the presenters how does working with a puppet affect the body of the human performer how does your body feel or how does it change when you are working with a puppet and has that experience changed your day to day somatic experience thank you thank you would you like to take that first Camille yes of course the body is really at stake when you're dealing with puppets because depends on the size of the puppet the weight of the puppet the manipulation but your body is a tool that will give the puppet the energy it's so to my opinion it was a long it was a long way as you said to understand very well my physical scheme and my gravity center to be able to to put the gravity center in front of me or next to me or behind me I mean it's all the time how the work with the puppet move your center to a certain extent and in order not to get pain and with this kind of practice I think you have to to train every day and to be very soft in your way of dealing with this not to be like at first when I was performing I was like too much energy and the pain arrived with this and then after a while you really recognize that it's a moving from your center of gravity and that you will assume it with a softness and that you will be able to keep it in the time so for me it made me learn more about my own body to to perform with puppets shall we just go down the row alright yes okay yeah I can well connect or comment on this in this way that I feel that the puppets or the performing objects they own certain shares of my body and certain parts of my body are I would say periodically subject to the performing times but not only on stage it can be many months before and after they belong to the puppets so like my leg for example that has this row of humans on it it becomes a part of the awareness that I know that it's not only mine I'm just carrying it around but they will then use it it will happen there it's like you have it's like you're owning a restaurant but it's not like you know there will be people there there will be I don't know weddings or whatever happening so in this case I lose some of my independence but it's not a negative thing it's kind of nice to know that I yeah yes it continues yes in this sense on the level of awareness it continues and it is in a way it is animistic in this way you don't put the border and also like you're speaking about the image and this so there is one body image of how people see me but it's only one then there are also other because there are also others other things that are using my body my body yeah okay I can try to answer from outside just for being there during creating process I would say that's for me it's really interesting to see how the puppeteer when they're training trying to control the puppet to find the best way to make it alive and so there is so many training say very very mind powerfull training how it does it work that doesn't work and then during the show there is something magic that sometimes the puppets it seems to be autonomous and it's beyond the puppeteer and it's magic for the spectator from outside but then when you discuss with the artist itself the puppeteer he says at this moment I don't know what's happening what happens but it was beyond me and it was beyond my control beyond my body beyond my training so that's it it's very true and sometimes even you feel that during the rehearsal the puppeteer is very heavy and suddenly you don't feel anything anymore it's like it's not even material it's very light and it it moves all alone it's true it's a kind of magic also it comes to my mind an example that there is there is another show but there is a well it's a big lion character that I manipulate and the lion has this voice is I cannot do it now I cannot do it and I never got a real voice practicing this but when this hand goes inside and on it just I can talk for one hour from this or the lion can talk and I don't feel it at all but if I try outside of the performance I my voice is dead after a few seconds and yeah very good do we have another question from the floor please yes come forward so in the kind of inverse of that question kind of I'm wondering on the effects of performance and the puppeteer on the puppet or object the like callous for that thought was the there was a photo from the practice with the ice puppet of someone wearing gloves so the heat of their hands wouldn't but then in performance how the heat leaves a memory and I think Ishmael you mentioned the body having a certain narrative a certain memory and how that memory of the body and performance is translated to the object the puppet in addition to the natural wear down of using materials if that is somewhat clear the yeah the effects of performing the puppet on the puppet both in the enemies and the like wear you mean the effect of what is the effect of performing the puppet on the puppet itself yeah yeah in the in the way that you all feel the effects of performing on yourself the reverse question maybe I okay I've been experiencing that some of my puppets have been performing like 500 times and some of them are made out of paper so at first the first thought was it will not last more than five performance and then it lasts so there is something like a mystery inside this and I notice as well that if you make an exchange of role the puppet will be in danger because the fragility of the material it's all worked in one side with one puppet in one side in one side for 100 times and then suddenly you change the the puppeteer you change the role it becomes very fragile it cracks so in my opinion there is a link very strong in between the puppeteer and the way he manipulated the puppeteer and it gives him softness and strengthiness in like a big sportive like athletic sportive that makes work the muscle always in the same side and it's the same with the puppet and to me there is as well like physical thing to think about and magical both because we were a little bit in between the two but puppeteers usually take more energy and more density in performing more but there is a fragility that can happen as I described that's my yeah there are some thinking about the body of the puppeteer that is experiencing things and they leave their remarks on it it's very hard to separate or maybe impossible to separate what is my image of the experience puppet body and what is happening because puppet it can be some styrofoam and wood or something like this and then I say it's just styrofoam and wood and some glue here and this so it's not like it's not a body in this but then puppet can look at me and say it's 60% water with this yeah there are some pipes going like this it's not a body it's just a collection of some materials and when I perform and also after I really I really feel it's a real body in this sense and if something happens it gets hit or something like this it hurts in this way that I think that it kind of remembers that it was hurt yeah it's animistic I think there's nothing there's nothing supernatural in this it's natural only but it's yeah it works as in any way it's a nice puppet it's very particular because it exists only during I would say 20 hours of burning of birth and then 4 hours, 3 hours of real existence so this is really something particular of course each night it's a different puppet because of this material so unstable like water and ice so it's never the same and there's the puppeteer each day the puppeteer make the puppets the ice puppet and then perform with it it's connected with very long strings so the persons who animate the puppet is him in the backstage but the one who's the more reacting acting on the puppeteer is the performer dancer was in the puppeteer so that's very interesting that finally the one who's is in contact with the puppeteer the more closely is the one who is the most exterior of it and is the one who will be able to make it change the most and I could say there's a difference between the US and French version that's quite interesting that Elise Vigneron so she's the the one who's performing with the puppeteer the body in the French version she doesn't hesitate to be really hard and rude with the puppet to accelerate it's melting it's melting to to put the FMR in the center to say it's cracking to be very hard with it and the dancer here Ashwati was performing the US version she doesn't really knows how to do with it because of course it's her first experience with puppets so she's very respectful because of this it's so many times of processing and everything so she's very respectful and we say to her you have to be rude you have to crush and she's it's very hard for her to to be and that's very that's very moving for all the team because at the end the puppet is quite melting but it's still human body and we put it in a bucket and we wash we open the water hot water and we're looking at it's very very hardly is very quickly is melting in the bucket so this is very particular experience with puppets and I guess the puppets have to be more detached than for your other shows where there is this very strong relationship between puppets and here you have to be detached I guess thank you we have time for more questions someone else would like thank you I figured Anthony would have something to say so let's hear it so you all kind of talked about your process a little bit and about how you all tended to start with the compositions and the physical forms sort of like the images and movements of what was going on and then you sort of came to the themes or found a text to relate it to or created your own text so I guess starting with those movements and really sort of getting to the meat first and getting to those feelings you have and expressing them in the physical world and then trying to bridge that important feeling you have with a text or a theme and making that connection how do you follow through with that process how do you get over the struggle of making sacrifices to those feelings you started with in order to connect it to those text themes and finding more feelings there is not really contradiction for us when we work between these two it's more that it's nice to find out that we all share this that we start with some materials and puppets and then we find for us it's the interest always come first with a concept of working with certain material on stage and the body and then we trust that it has enough its own narrative it has things to tell and we try to not impose a story on it for as long as possible a theme would come eventually because the world is kind of full of theme all the time and I think it's also good stories that they are like garbage it's not the maybe the artist to choose and to know when the right one comes to you then you okay you grab it but you don't go and open encyclopedia and start to look for a good story because it's endless and then first making the process as much as possible with the materials or the objects that we work with then we allow them to kind of dictate what kind of language we use and then only in the very end we take some some kind of theme from the outside world and then it's still there it's relevant but it's being told in a different way because because the objects pretty much telling it really really well well said I guess it's very close that it is process so I don't have much things to add it's really close at the beginning of the process there is it's very texty I don't know how to say that there is lots of text and during the process the text is disappearing just to keep the essence of the novel or of the original texts so it's always like that in every show but for the rest the other party it's the same I guess maybe it's still the shocker when you read Arto for the first time the story of putting things on stage and that something will happen a truth by putting the things on the material and the body and all the element on stage with along together with the text there is a truth that you have to reveal during the rehearsal but it is already there at the beginning of the work something like this and then you have or maybe another image would be you have a block of marble and you start at the beginning of the rehearsal but the shape is already inside the block and the difficult thing is not to go too fast to put up the nose of your sculpture so you have to be very delicate during the rehearsal because you have to find the shape without a little bit in the darkness like a sculpture in the darkness with a frontal and you have to be delicate not to hurt the shame inside and then after each time I feel that the process of creation is like I don't know the word in English a day a morning because you have to leave some part of your idea you have to leave them apart in order to really approach the real shape of your show but you had many other ideas you wanted to have and you have to leave them and I think it is that's the thing I'm doing another show it's with all the ideas I couldn't put in this one and I want to have another show to deal with them so we're at five minutes I think that gives us time for one more question is there anyone else who would like to come to the mic yes come on up okay thank you thank you so I guess that brings us to the end I want to put in a little plug for the festival's workshops because I'm planning to teach one in the spring on this kind of discussion you know the whole post human object oriented ontology make it digestible the way that it was this morning thanks to the panelists and to you all for coming and to the tech crew for bearing with our disorganization in the beginning and thank you yes thank you Paula and just to add to that very quickly this panel discussion and the other ones have been live streamed through howl round which is a platform and it will be saved there too if you're like oh I want to hear them and hear them and since Paula mentioned it we do offer classes and workshops through the festival here in Chicago so in our studio on the fourth floor which currently is a cafe it's not usually a cafe it's usually a puppet studio and so they're in person classes but the class that she was referring to is an online class we have several online classes where you make stuff you build puppets you build shadow you make shadow puppet shows and so if you do not live in Chicago you can still get trained on how to make a toy theater show or a shadow puppet show you can check that on our website so without further ado thank you so much we'll have another one we'll convene again at one o'clock thank you