 puppetry. We've also had the pleasure of having Paulette be one of the teachers with classes that are we offer online here through the festival and she's taught a couple online history classes, one of which was contributing to her research for an upcoming publication by Rutledge called object performance in the black Atlantic colon the United States. So without further ado I passed the time to Paulette. Thank you Claire. Thank you for this morning and came out for the symposium panels. There's been so many excellent shows and this is down towards the end of the festival so we're in our last energy reserve but we're going to make it worth your while for coming out today. So the format will be, I will briefly describe the theme of the panel then I will introduce our first presenter which will be Janine M and we'll come down the road this way with each presenter having about 15 minutes and then we will have a discussion between the panel members linking their remarks and shows which some of you have seen to the theme of the panel and then we will open the floor for questions from the audience. I hope you will participate with us because this is really an inquiry, it's not a lecture and there are microphones on either aisle there so when we do open the floor for questions please come forward and be able to pose your question here. Okay let me switch out and pull up my notes because I wrote this a couple months ago. So Maya, the uses of illusion. Hindu cosmology regards the material world as my illusion. It does strange things to my computer and I cannot see so I'm going to amp up the, okay now I can see, okay yes. The soul's journey to enlightenment is a process of awakening from the illusion that our impermanent material existence is separate from the divine consciousness. Maya therefore also encompasses the wondrous creativity of the gods who brought forth and maintain the material world. Western theories such as Graham Harmon's object oriented ontology that's the name of the author and quote so you can go check that out if you would like to later. They similarly conclude that while humans are not the only agents in the universe we can only enter into the reality of the material world outside our own consciousness through metaphor so we are always telling ourselves stories about our encounters with the material world and what is this thing and what is its purpose or function in the world that's a story that we're making up for ourselves illusion. So Harmon turns to aesthetics rather than science for new tools of knowledge creation and that's where we artists come in and that's why object oriented ontology is gaining such traction in the art world. Puppets, masks and performing objects can be powerful implements in this endeavor because they function as three-dimensional metaphors that explode artesian dualism so they count as the um divides the world into self and other body all of these higher archives dichotomies so looking at things from the perspective that we're addressing today enables us to apprehend that's another word that the phenomenologists the students of consciousness like to use so how we apprehend material objects as subjects in their own right and any of us who have ever wrestled with a puppet that wants to turn left when we need it to turn right then we understand that negotiation with material so without further ado I will introduce Janie Young and then we'll launch her presentation so we're very fortunate to have Janie Young here today from South Africa she is a director and producer of multimedia theatrical and visual performance works with an emphasis on public tree arts Janie's work has been performed widely internationally in north and south america africa europe india and the east a director of the handspring puppet company for four years she currently runs janie young productions and she also directs unama south africa unama is the union international that is the international public tree organization dedicated to creating friendship through public tree around the world so janie is the leader of unama in south africa and she also focuses on social development through visual performance medians in 2018 janie was a granada artist in residence at the university of california davis where she co-directed an interpretation of tony horrison's the bluest eye with margaret l kemp young and reprise this production at last year's chicago international public theater festival and some of you may have seen that show it was excellent janie is a graduate of the french national school of public theater she has a bachelor of arts in fine art and a master of arts in theater so i'm just going to pull up her presentation materials and we can take it away and we see that you can't see that so that's fine i'm going to read it to you anyway i'm just going to read this one part because i want to try and say it correctly so um the puppet puppet is a representation creating the illusion of the animate in the inanimate it's a thing that's water we all know um the representation is an automatically metaphorical act because we're saying one thing is another we're creating a parallel being um it's a transparent metaphor we see both the illusion and its source allowing a direct engagement with the act of creating identity every human mind is engaged in a great act of creation we're continually we continue in the we continually invest belief in a fixed reality including the idea of the self so you know the philosophy that we talk about um the hippie philosophy um talks about this uh this ultimate reality where in fact we are one with the with each other with the being of the the divine but really in our everyday world what we relate to is i me me me my things and stuff who i am this is my world it's all about that and even those of us that are really interested in these philosophical ideas um just me myself uh it's not something that we can continually process because right here in our business mark stand in front of me and i'm sitting here talking to you so that is the constant space that we're in creating and fixing an idea of i in a real world which in fact is an illusion um as all of these philosophies tell us most of us don't perceive this act of creation it's a continuous act of creation that we're engaged in so um this this is kind of the ultimate suspension of this for those of you who really in the public field you know relate to what the suspension of disbelief people know that the public is not real but they suspend that they put aside that disbelief and invest their emotions in the reality that's being created on stage and uh for the period that they are engaged in it believe in it but we are the masters of the suspension of disbelief in our own lives we do all day every day but the suspension is so complete that we're really very often completely unaware of the creative act in more than that um so this this ultimate suspension of disbelief leads to certainty which i believe certainly is one of this is our greatest threat in negotiating the fragile space of our humanity so for me um and i think i'm not alone i think that when we believe with certainty i am this is they are this is the boundary this is the border this is who we are this is ours this is yours those kind of um concepts of certainty are the source of many of the conflicts and um uh the situations that leave to lead to this harmony amongst ourselves and between us and our beautiful world so that's why i talk about certainty being a threat the human investment and the illusion of a fixed living identity is directly and visibly mirrored in the path of mathematical the half of my work has always been to scratch at the edges of the illusion of a stable and unified reality to provoke a glimpse of the fluidity between ourselves our identities and our world and our world i see the purpose of my work being to open the dynamic space of uncertainty that i experience to be the vibrant heart of being human so that's the level that i wanted to meet you now and i was just going to talk about a few of my shows to give you a sense of how i do that in practical reality this is an easy part so we're going to go on to the just so the very first work that i created after graduating from the french national school of puppetry was my master's thesis what was the first one but it was the first significant work for me uh it was my master's thesis production and it was the thesis was on the way puppetry is a miracle the illusion of self so very much on the topic that we're talking about today and the production was called dollars it was about a relationship between the young man and the young woman who were engaged in uh relationship and were in the fragile space of questioning where it was time to make a more permanent commitment to each other based on where i was at my life at the time of my husband um and the way that the show started you can see the new slide right i'm trying um i don't know how to scroll down in the document i might have to get out of that that takes me to the other document and from the other well never mind i'm just going to tell you a little bit about it so this particular show dollars um started off with the two characters and each character the man and woman is manipulated by three puppeteers and all the puppeteers were all puppeteers were completely covered in black and the color so you couldn't see black lives the whole thing so they were invisible and in the beginning we see this relationship between this man and woman developing and you know things are going well but as things start to some conflicts comes into the relationship we start to see the manipulators removing their cuggles and entering into conflict with each other about how they want the body of the person to act with the other person and eventually all of them are totally like undressed and they've got bras on and they're shining they're wrestling they fight they pull the puppets into pieces and then finally uh and towards the end of the production they they they're completely all puppets are in pieces all over the floor and all the puppeteers are all sort of exposed and they somehow see the best that they've created of themselves and each other and they start to put the puppets back together and find a way towards re-entering relationship and finally they actually get married and when they when they turn their wedding garments are all the all the all the things that baggage that you know we've sort of encountered in the course of the play is trailed behind anyway so the that particular production was what we saw was the manipulators exposed more and more in the course of the production as forces acting on the puppets and then next so that's Dolfs then Barabara's um it was a production that uh the the puppets were exposed all the way through and they were in a kind of a neutral brownish color and they uh were like the forces behind characters but they didn't play a direct role like a character role as they did in in dollars in Barabara's what we saw was in the beginning of the show you have the impression that you're seeing a lot a lot of different stories about different people but in fact what it was was one one story with five different versions of the same people so you have man and woman and you've got uh uh uh an adult person a child a baby an old person and a dating person and so somehow in the beginning you see these these characters are interacting it looks like they're following different people you think there's a child and there's father but then as the relationship between man and woman to them you realize that the the thing that's blocking them from being in relationship is that the child doesn't trust the the woman and it's hidden the man's heart so it it was it and there's a whole lot of complexities involved in the whole relationship and somehow the two children have to find a way the child from within the woman and the child from within the man have to find a way to reach a resolution over this heart and and you know whether he the little boy has to decide whether he can trust the girl with a heart patient and then when that is resolved the woman is able to die so it ties together life and death and the process of of interaction and in that reaction what I was really looking at is how ourselves at this time and space how we act on ourselves how we've gone through something when we were young and in that thing is a thing that we're carrying with us that way of being with that anxiety with that uh that care even for ourselves and concern for ourselves sometimes invisible to us but it's within us causing us to act and react in ways that are or sometimes quite mystifying to ourselves and that was an idea going on behind the show and then the the story was once again it was a relationship story um in that oh look there's rogers on the screen so if you want to go back a couple of pictures I'll just say I only have two pictures of dollars that's dollars the two in the beginning and you can probably maybe not see at all but the manipulators are all there totally in black and then in the next image that's the wedding scene and you see the the manipulators and how they're exposed and they're different ways of being traced so you know the guy had for example he had what would be called gq man and he had dough boy and then there was uh there was a there was an active guy so they have different kinds of personalities these three different manipulators within each one of the characters um all right now we can go on to a robberist and that's just a shot to show you like the whole family portrait um so you see the two in fact it's not the whole family because you don't see the day to people there but there we've got the the children the baby the woman the man and it's all them in a place the costumes you may recognize they're a repurpose for Hammett because we've the world we have to sometimes so okay we can go to the next one um so that's a little boy in his room and uh one of the dynamics in his life is we hear his his parents arguing in shadow then of their presence but they're arguing and he's playing war games in his bedroom and inside that's he dances in setting up his war games and eventually he can't bear the sound of his parents fighting and he takes off his ears and if you uh if you go to the next image uh that's him uh continuing to play and so on go on and later on as an adult man he also takes out his organs he's a writer and he needs to look at things so he takes out his heart he looks at things like his lungs and his stomach and so on and um that's in fact how his heart uh manages to get taken away by somebody so um go on this is the old man also writes we have the right to come back to help the audience to understand this in fact the same as we have the color coding of the costumes uh some things to be afterwards i really love the show but i don't understand why you end up with like a pink and blue and i was really actually that she was rigged but when i dyed the clothes they came on pink so you know talking about the hazards of materials and their influence on what happens you go to the next one so there's the man he actually he as he's examining himself and looking inside himself he pulls himself apart completely and takes off his skin and his face there he's he's having a look at himself but in fact what he needs to be acknowledging and looking at is this little boy who's running around in his face trying to get his attention trying to get into trying to be seen like this interior part that needs to be seen and acknowledged so he's looking at the wrong places but getting down to his skeleton all right and there the there's another image of the heart so that's uh that's rovers and i think we're going on to the next show now yes the firebird so the firebird uh based on strivinsky's firebird considering what the firebird is about for me i looked at the original ballet and there's this uh there's this this force kashai who is um uh who kind of uh is it is a dark and controlling energy that wants to first think that has these demons and then there's also the firebird which is a it was a very creative energetic inspiring passionate energy in the production and the way that i interpreted the firebird game was almost the opposite now of these previous two shows the central figure was the human being so the the seeker the central figure with prince ivan in the traditional uh firebird became my seeker who's a woman the young woman who is trying to find her voice and it starts off with she has this relationship with flat and with paper and you see little bits of paper that emerge from her and begin to form flat like images and eventually they come towards birds but then also at the same time is the garden of kasha is the sense of of threat and destruction and criticism that comes in and all of those images were created with sticks snakes and beasts so the forces of creativity were related to birds and paper and then the the the forces of um questioning and anxiety were uh were created in sticks and what happened during the course of the production was that these these forces come into conflict within her and they eventually start to blend with each other as i investigated more and more what it meant to be creative because in the beginning it was quite a clear cut for me it was like wow the great the wonderful beautiful spaces of creativity that we feel the inspiration and then how that gets dragged down by the the the anxiety and the self criticism and the you know the the the darker forces that exist within us so it was quite a clearly a dichotomized view but as we me and the whole cast delved into the meaning of these two different forces we found that it's actually not the one or the other right they're both essentially part of a dynamic that without that questioning without that re reconsidering and pulling apart can we really own who we truly are so the the there is the conflict and then in the end you have the beasts and the and the sticks and so on blending with the forces of creativity and emerging as the dragon which is a mixture of the bird and the and the beast and on the back of the dragon is flying the child which is also another element in the production that's the fiber in the natural now i've run out of time okay so the blue star shall have to wait yeah i'm going to ask you a question about it i'll ask you a question about it okay cool okay thank you so much and sorry i was behind hand on the tech put the slides down there so we can come back to them later i can't see my cursor here it is okay now we need to open up the folder for our next presenter jonathan meyer okay first i have to introduce you so somatically driven jonathan meyer works to develop an idiosyncratic movement palette blurring grace and awkwardness building strange lands that can delight baffle and open new possibilities a gymnast in high school jonathan meyer discovered dance at oberland college where he studied release technique and critical theory with nusha martinook and ankooper albright after a capoeira immersion in brazil with mestre medicina he returned to college to receive an undergraduate degree in dance from unc greensboro meyer has danced for the high-risk group pierce paul savoy asimina cremos and the seldom's in addition to dance meyer has worked with at-risk youth in wilderness therapy program in utah teaching primitive skills and is a certified practitioner of mind body centering oh yes we're we are centered in the uses of illusion here okay yes in 2002 meyer founded catchery in taos new mexico in 2006 meyer moved catchery to chicago and shortly thereafter he began his intensive collaboration and partnership with julia ray antoniq with whom he runs the company through catchery meyer and antoniq create and present their own work in addition to choreographing collaboratively collaboratively meyer has been a cdf lab artist and rdd i participant and an artist in residence at gerrassi bagdale hambridge abigale the cola art center lynx hall the chicago cultural center and the chicago park district it's a great pleasure to have um the words of wisdom from jonathan meyer today thanks so much thanks everybody for being here today uh i'm actually going to start with um if we can cue the video cue uh this is um from as though your body were right the work that's being presented here at the festival and uh just to say this is actually our first um you heard word a dance company catchery uh this is our first foray into the world of puppetry i'm just gonna let this roll it's less than four minutes other places that the ego the singular sense of self is in some ways at least illusory a functional convenience necessary perhaps but also hiding a a legion of selves aspects of the cell splinters of the id the ongoing infant the underlying the animal that underlies the socially vested self a lot of things maybe tucked away as emergence theory found its way into popular thought i got particularly fascinated with this idea that the that the person uh that we as as individuals that we're an emergent phenomenon of the blinkered lives of trillions of largely independent cells as if we were better thought of as a like an ant colony than a single organism how can we witness the lives of cells and how can we choreograph that life as i started thinking about this piece uh i first just wanted the audience that close that we could see that kind of infinitesimal the the cellular and originally i brought in puppets as a framing device if the actor is is this big than the body of the dancer becomes something like terrain or environment and because i knew nothing about the puppetry world i was familiar with blairs work and reached out to him and he connected me with tom lee who designed all the puppets and was a really integral part of helping develop the the material of the piece and training the puppeteers um who actually in this case were from the dance world as well and this was their first time in in puppetry for me uh one of the many delights of being an artist is that kind of repertoire between uh one's vision i the word vision i guess i want to use art artist vision to to include questions doubts passions conflicts i feel like that the word vision is a bit it's easy but a bit problematic in a way um but but whatever it is that's that's driving the artist uh in the in the creation um but the the repertoire between that and the the increasing life of the work the the momentum that the work itself gains and um starts to self-direct and and and talk back um and all that so at some point uh for me it became perhaps less about bodily vulnerability and bodily power um though i feel that that's still there but but maybe at some point it started to gain more of a life that was about relationship and symbiosis um specifically and from originally just a framing device i think that the the the puppets and the puppeteer moved to be much more central players and i think originally i had considered it um solo work but it became very clearly a a duet or even at a certain point a trio between puppet puppeteer and dancer so it's still relevant for me to talk about my interest in choreographing or viewing cellular life but as the work developed and i think particularly in the context of this symposium it became just as interesting for me to to start to ask so why like why view cellular life why you care why is it interesting um my studies in body mind centering offered tools to build the capacity to experience cellular consciousness the fruits of this are better expressed i feel through performed work than any language i can offer here which is i guess another way of saying come see the work um but the the ills of society are the things that we bemoan i do i do feel sometimes we maybe speak about them in a particularly individual um moral kind of way like why would somebody do that why why do people behave this way when arguably perhaps it's the result of a of a higher emergent level the behavior of the superorganism we're not bad people we feel however blind we may be to choices that we make that cause the unnecessary suffering or even death of individual cells in our body even whole communities of tissues or organs if we can experience the cellular in an immediate visceral kind of way can we experience the superorganism can our individual egos step aside for a moment and hear the cellular speak to the superorganism this is a question that i feel like has been driving the work that i don't begin to have an answer to um but it still feels very potent as a question and another one that's that's become really central for me what is it to see the body we grow so familiar with the thing sometimes that we no longer see it it's part of the magic of perception that we come no longer to feel the cane but to feel the ground through the cane the fork becomes merely an extension of the fingers or even an extension of the grasp of the mouth and the utility of all this is is fabulous it's um it is magical and it's necessary for how we function in the day-to-day and i think morally i would say that morality requires us to see a person when we see a human body but what is it to live in a world where we never see a chair or a house or a plant but only use them or to live in a world where we don't hear the life of language but only communicate ideas data meaning or treat each other and ourselves solely as socially successful monolithic beings um jenny also said something that that stuck with me that that's to this point about the threat of certainty or to turn on its head the value of doubt or the value of possibility possibilities so exiting the quotidian of just for a moment to be briefly child again wellmed by the maelstrom of shape color sound the looming they're treating also since uh kind of being invited to this panel and reading some of paulette's words that that she shared earlier i've been chewing a bit on illusion um i was particularly struck by the the language about the life and the agency of objects on a literal level i think that you know it presents itself to our current sensibilities for the most part as impossible um yet the impossible is very fecund we know as performers that there's a magic in escaping ourselves to be someone or something else and even if that stays with us as the impossible there's something very uh potent in that experience ways of finding other aspects of ourselves or um selves uh something like an authentic multiplicity the animal the child the cellular the thousand other people that we could have been or perhaps are and then there's also just um the really incredibly simple things the the spending hours and rehearsal on technical aspects of timing of exactly how the performer raises a body part and timing with how a puppeteer manipulates a metal rod to create for the viewer the solution that the body's being magically or magnetically lifted by those rods and on on one level it's very simple even childish kind of delight when that childlike like playing pretend we see through at the same time as we fully feel it's a profound doorway into aspects of being that resonate with our lived experience of being moved of the numinousness that somehow still persists in our world this is one of the magical capacities of art that the simplistic the obvious the childish can be so profound there's uh symbiotic relationships that we that we have biologically right the things that live in and on us that genetically perhaps are not us but arguably are in fact us i think about the the sort of symbiosis between the puppeteer and the puppet or the puppet and the dancer in the context of a work like this or the puppeteer and the dancer but i like thinking about symbiosis too in relationship to the audience's relationship to the work um and i'm gonna end with a a paraphrase here from merle aponte phenomenologist as a way of framing that audience art relationship hardness and softness moonlight and sunlight present themselves not preeminently as sensory contents but as a certain kind of symbiosis certain ways that the outside has of invading us and certain ways that we have of meeting this invasion thanks okay you did your homework great so um oh and this went offline because it was silent for a minute our final presenter is edwardo felix the director of the fabulous macunaima show which if you have not seen you must see some of us saw it yesterday evening and we're still passing it okay edwardo felix who's coming to us from brazil has a degree in sculpture and has been working as a puppeteer and sonographer since 2001 he is the founder and artistic director of the pigmalio escult pigmalion escultura que mexe in which he develops his research on puppets dramaturgy sound performance and teaching of their practices he has given workshops in belgium spain france italy wales and in several brazilian cities he wrote and directed shows such as a filosofia na alcova o quadro de todos juntos algem macunaima gourmet and brazil drawing and watercolor form the basis of his creations so let me just access his images and we'll be ready to go oh hi uh thank you i'm glad to be here with you i will try to speak a little bit about our process and how what we try to do but it will be hard for me because my english is terrible so i i i hope you understand uh well the company the name of the company pigmalion escultura que mexe it's like pigmalion moving sculpture i came from sculpture uh and uh it was when i started the company i didn't know if it would be a company of sculpture or theater and i i worked already with some other companies with a big company very now in brazil the name is jiramundo ah yeah yes there is yes it's a company with 50 years of physics existence and uh but i was a student of art fine arts and for me i would like to make contemporary art and puppet for me is one thing contemporary art was other thing and it was what i learned in the school like the the puppets are smaller than the other arts even in the theater i think there is a lot of people that thinks really that puppet is smaller than the human theater and uh and uh and i during a long time for me it was really separated i had my career in sculpting selling things in galleries and uh but the theater was not was something that i like i enjoyed a lot to do but for me it was something uh different and the the company starts when i realized that i could make contemporary arts with puppets it was not so easy to discover that because i have not references and when i started to have to to see that oh i can really uh make what what i understand as contemporary art i think it is when you touch when you when i when i can speak to my time when i can interact with my time with the things and make people think about some themes and uh to help the society to think about the the time we are we live and uh so i i when i left the school and i opened my workshop it was a sculptor workshop in the beginning and uh i was trying to say how can i do something different and oh we start from something that i have not seen yet puppets with natural size natural proportions natural like puppets with a big head or but natural proportions and after that i've seen that it was really hard to manipulate these puppets because when you have a puppet with a proportion more caricatural you can make move you can make movements with the puppets less natural and when you have a real proportion puppet all the movements has to be really real and it's hard to do that and we work more than other techniques with string puppets it's even more hard to to do but it was the the beginning and we started the first work of the company uh was a erotic puppet show it was in 2007 and the initial proposition was to think about philosophy with puppets it's still in the objectives of the the company the main of the company to to work on philosophy and puppets and uh uh the first big show we did was the philosophy and alcove she told it's the philosophy in the bedroom the text of marquis he said oh and uh this it was really important for us because we are we were talking about uh philosophy but also we discovered how to provoke sensations in the public like the public sensations like uh to be horn to be can't breathe when the public to make the public feel angry sometimes the public really are angry with us even here i can see because at the end of the show mcunaim i can see a lot of people happy and a lot of people and i like it because because if i if i'm trying to touch the contemporary contemporary uh contemporaneity uh uh it will not be a easy talk i i will not talk about just about uh uh good things uh uh and if you but everybody's happy in the end it it didn't work so i don't like sorry but i don't like the public happy in the end normally the public leaves the theater like uh and it's what we try to do it's sorry uh and uh and uh in this work we it's a work in a process this work trying to make realistic movements with puppets we discovered a real real there is really a illusion this illusion is something really powerful because uh uh when you give the impression that everything that the puppet is alive it it's like an hypnotic uh uh sensation it's the public is open when even if it the public doesn't like what i'm saying but the public listen it's something powerful when really it's like even if sometimes it's like five seconds of this sensation but this is powerful so we try to to make this sensation during more the more time possible and uh and using these to to make uh to provoke this exist provoke the public uh to think about things they don't want to think about and so the philosophy in the bedroom was the first big show of the company we were talking about uh sexuality and society and the the rulers of the society and after we did another show i think maybe there are some pictures of the pigs it's a family of pigs and it's a terrible show like it's a terrible because but it's the show we turn more uh it's because uh it's like a uh respectable family but you can see inside the head of each character and it's not easy because the public will always we will identify with one or other story and maybe and sometimes it hurts and i like it sorry my first show was sad marquise sad so a little bit of sadism natural so we we work trying to make this illusion stronger and uh how can we convince the public that this the the puppet is alive and we started to create like you discover like a vocabulary of movements because everybody can you can recognize we are more prepared than we think to like a like it was it's like really like a language that we all know very well the language of jester we can we have you you know if you like or not one person just by the movements they do and so we started to discover how what means a jester like this it means one thing it means other thing it means one thing it means all so like how to make sentences like we say that are we use word jester even and how to make sentences just with movements and we started like philosophical themes but after brazil started to be a a disaster in the political themes and as a contemporary artist also i started to think how i could not to let it pass without talk about that we have a space of speaking i can i have like here i'm speaking you are listening this is also a relation power a power relation sorry and what how could we use it well i was not i i think it was not sorry i lost that it's very hard to speak to do that in english but we have to talk about that we could not we had to use this space to talk about what was happening in brazil and to think about that because it's not when we have a show we don't want just to talk about that to speak about that one to understand before and always that we start a process we it's about oh what i'm i want to think about in this moment because i will be the next two or three years thinking about this so it's a curiosity thing that makes make it happens so after that we started to be more political than philosophy it's philosophy also but but all the shows after 2000 this mess in brazil started in 2013 the the show we did in 2015 and the others we did after are more political than before and we and this illusion this power of the puppet this power of this illusion is is what it's our guns to fight is what we can do i'm not a person that goes to internet to say things i'm not it's it's my i the space i have to talk to make to talk about political and this is the stage so we try to do that in this stage and this show was not because i we travel a lot we don't talk just for the brazilian public so we are in the same mess at the end and uh to to think about that i think it's important i don't know maybe it's illusion for me also to think that we have to think that we what we are doing are important in some way to convince myself we we try to do this and the the next like we are in the process of a new show and just by the name you can see what is happening it's anthropophagic fables for fascist days that we work with uh uh the fables of isop and contemporary in the brazilian contemporary philosopher who thinks about fascism fascism fascism and uh uh and we are going to do it more and and well yeah well is that that i think i think i i don't know if i use it all my time or more than my time so i think all the panelists for um really making a deep dive into the ideas that i had sketched out i'm gonna come through and give a question for each one of you and since you all were able to reference each other's work so well you know just right here in the moment if you have any questions you'd like to pose to each other that would be wonderful too so starting with yanni yeah i get to do a little knitting here so i'm really intrigued with um the double voiced performance of your hamlet show we often have three or you know two or three person operator puppets but generally we give the task of voicing the puppet to one performer but with the hamlet you have split that and some of the characters the dialogue is voiced alternately by two is it just two or sometimes even more than that two um two performers so i wondered if that is new to this show i also wondered um if that's an evolution from the bluest eye production where there were three performers per puppet um but they both voiced the puppet and would sometimes stand outside of the puppet and speak separately so i'll start there and then i'll knit some more things in yeah i think um um new maybe not because uh if you look back to what i spoke about first with dalas that was my first work to uh begin to explore the multiple voices in conflict inside of uh individual human um i think what may be interesting in the evolution of hamlet was um that uh the original concept that i had was to work with uh hamlet as a single person represented by multiple different forces within that person so that like the the the the father because who's this father this ghost that comes and says to him now you know i mean imagine the ghost came and said hamlet listen i was murdered by my brother but you should let it go maria felia have a great life and just ignore the bastard you know no he didn't do that he came out and said you know avenge revenge my foul and most unnatural murder so then hamlet is in the but hamlet is not a natural murderer he's torn between this voice of his father and his own very sensitive perception of what does it mean to be alive what does it mean to set things right he said a cursed spite that ever i was born to set this right he doesn't know what it means to set something right he he has these questions that echo across time and space about what it means to re-establish a balance in his world so coming back to the original concept was that the that that father voice for me it's irrelevant whether this ghost is a real spook that appears or whether it is a manifestation of hamlet's father as he lives in hamlet's mind that and that claudius being this um power hungry is another element of the human being because he represents the kind the you know he he represents that fat figure that's you know he's this you know the one that wants to pull everything to himself and so we have these different things within us so the original concept was we had the the those you know these these um driving father figures and then you know who's the calling to him and what is the what is the Gertrude element and the friends the the the laities and the ratio and how they call on his on his sense of humanity and balance in different ways at different points in the show that was original concept we went into a creative workshop process one of the ways in which it was provoked was because i thought to myself as a puppet person i feel like a bit of a fraud to doing shakespeare because i'm not like a real proper theater person so i don't know about shakespeare and me you know and then i had a thought like okay i feel like that and i've got a master's degree and a first language english and blah blah blah how about all my fellow theater makers in south africa who uh you know don't have any degree at all because we have a big community of people who make and create theater who have cannot afford to go to tertiary education and haven't been through any kind of training but make extraordinary very uh visual very gutsy theater all the time how do they feel about shakespeare so i was like okay let's actually just open this up and have a workshop where we explore owning hamlet what does it mean let's ask the question and i got together my sort of the way that i work often as i surround myself by with people who know a lot more than i do so i say rosh come we're going to make this um tim come uh andrew bucklin come let's let's make a workshop and explore what does it mean to own hamlet what does our hamlet mean and in that process with 15 young theater makers who didn't have a background in a university background in theater and myself in the middle of it going i don't even know what i am but pentameter is never mind how do you you know work with it in the theater so then we were all learning from each other so i ran the puppetry element what does it mean to explore the images in hamlet using objects and so on and timothy ran the how do you access the text how do you how do you understand how to deliver this these words and uh roshina was working with the dramaturgy and the story elements of the thing and andrew bucklin was working with a physical performance and and so we learned from each other but and that was that was the plan but what was unexpected was how much energy and vitality came from the participants and from that moment on it became obvious to me that hamlet could not be about this sort of this voice this idea that i had in my mind which was that there would be only these four actors who would speak all the parts and that we would see them unified into one uh thing but then from after that workshop it became obvious to me that the bigger group of people needed to be involved needed to be speaking and siam tanda scott who is the second voice of hamlet is one of those young people and he learned he knows the whole of hamlet he knows all the words of hamlet and you know he was delivering hamlet at the end of that workshop with such power and such beauty that i had to make him hamlet as well so the the the double voice of hamlet came because two hamlets were in the room and mongi are other hamlets not here because of a visa issue so mongi and siam tanda are the voices of hamlet and tim became the voice of hamlet is now claudius and hamlet are the same well that wasn't part of the original concept but you know maybe there's something to be said about that but so the the evolution of the of the splits rather within the beings inside the inside the the family dynamic really evolved out of the theater making process which i love i love opening the process of creation to the the people and the things that are in the room because the things bring their own dynamics as well so yes it was also present in the blue side but i feel like that's a very long answer to my question so maybe i shouldn't go on about the blue side blue side keeps getting shelves over there i'll be happy to talk about it again later if we can run to more questions yes okay so that's really great there was some other theory i was going to knit in there but that's okay um because what you've brought to the table just now is um kind of our ongoing poking a decal for insisting that the self is a monad in opposition to whatever else is out there and you are bringing in multiple voices in a consciousness that can be multiple whether that is within the person or as a group of people coalesce to create something yes yes yes okay good i'm i'm i mean i'm delighted with the fact that we can leave doors open that we can say well does it all speak as one person speaking how is is hamlet one voice is this one human being we're seeing or is it you know i i like that they're little little openings where people can read their interpretation that that that provokes them uh i really do enjoy great leaving some questions out there yes so jonathan um i wanted to ask you more about the mind body centering but i just have a personal question first which is have you read blood child by octavia butler no i haven't i have read some octavia butler uh recently but not that one okay blood child is octavia butler's pregnant man novel she is a or was a science fiction writer um and it is exactly this kind of symbiosis between a i guess a race of beings that um humans see as large insects i you know i don't know how they see themselves but they have evolved this symbiosis with humans because they cannot propagate themselves and so they inject their eggs into a male human being but the process of giving birth to those eggs when they are ready to emerge uh destroys the male human body and yet being elected to serve that function is a great honor in the society that has developed and because you get to have a special close relationship with these beings who are running everything and so the story is told from the point of view of one of these men who is looking forward to bearing the child or the you know the offspring of this other being so that was what i was reading in kitschery while the um the show as if the body were real while i was watching so um leaving that aside i i think maybe since you're a dancer the best way to go is through process and um as a fellow dancer i've said this in the last session in the west i think we're often chasing transcendence and this sense of connection with whatever the cosmic entity is out there through um standing outside of oneself ecstasis which is the root for ecstasy but as a dancer i find that the deeper i can go into my cellular awareness of my body the more expansive that becomes so if you can talk about your work in mind body centering a little more that would i think be illuminating for all of us uh yeah sure where to begin um i mean i do i do particularly like the idea of exploring eminence i guess um and i think there's there's ways in which uh my my studies and body mind centering are are a bit about that i think it's you know it's it's if anybody's familiar with that particular somatic approach it's it's very experiential and exploratory there's there's a lot about just um getting down into specific experiences about what does it mean to uh to be in one's liver or to move from the arterial blood versus the different quality of moving from the venous blood or um what is it well what does it mean to to try and experience cellular consciousness to get out of the um cerebral cortex i guess the central nervous system in particular uh bonnie brainbridge cohen who developed this work has a has a thing that that she's been kind of more recently um getting into that feels like a really um to me a really fabulous mystery i don't quite know what she's talking about but i but i keep coming back to it she talks about how typically and largely in my experience with with work like that like body mind centering we bring in the central nervous system as a witness to cellular experience for example um and and that's a great thing but that's different yet than actually being in the experience of the cells themselves so what do we do with that for me i would say that my studies in bmc have been probably the one of the most influential things for me as an artist for for developing dance material not in a real i guess just from from opening up my my sense of self and sense of experience and um you know we've been talking about like a sense of possibility the multiplicity of of self or cells uh i think you know everything from just being a dancer and and having a whole cache of of things that that can be like not about the form of technique you know this is this is ballet movement this is cunningham movement this is capoeira whatever um all of which are lovely um things also but to to get into the the mind of the fascia for example and bmc talks a lot about the mind of of this or the mind of that um and and how does it influence me as a mover as an improviser or kind of underlying technical movement to be in the mind of fascia or the mind of silver spine is fluid something like this so it so it opens up a lot of possibilities as a as a mover um and then as well choreographing you know there's a lot of of things i guess that that um that i've undertaken as as creating projects and that julia and i have have done as well in uh collaborating that are about presenting certain kind of challenges to ourselves like what does it what happens if you have a dancer on a stage that size where you can't even stand up so immediately 99% of the vocabulary or the training that that you have this um or that i have in my particular realm of of dance training gets thrown out the window and you've got to figure out what works now what's interesting and and that was a place where i started leaning really heavily into um being in the cellular mind and trying to move from um from fascia from fluid from cells rather than articulating joints or or being in kind of the the skeletal muscular system or that sort of thing okay i could keep going that's probably yeah i'm i'm gonna see if we can link this more concretely to an experience that even the non dancers will have can you connect it to the breath because what i thought was so beautiful in the show the first 15 minutes you only see the dancers back yes and the movement is mostly the breath so how did you choreograph the breath and what prompts are you giving the dancer so that we see the breath traveling through the body in a way that is riveting for 15 minutes and then i think since we all breathe then we can connect with the experience of being in the body through the breath yeah sure so um a really primary exercise from BMC that i can just introduce for you all right now so we're we're used to you know inhaling through the mouth of the nose goes into the lungs and the lungs expansion pushes the tissue so you can feel the you know you can feel the breath in down into the belly maybe down into the the bowl of the pelvis um perhaps even farther out but if you'll imagine with me for a moment that your inhale is coming in through the navel and from there expanding out through all six limbs including the head and the tail maybe just try it if you want you can not also but if you like just try a few inhales inhaling in through the through the navel feeling that reach of the tissue is going all the way out to the to the periphery and on the exhale from the periphery everything's just going back out through the navel so to really plumb this i think it's it's spending hours with this rather than you know minutes but um but also i think one of the points of this from the BMC perspective is that this is actually a pattern that all of us experienced for a significant chunk of our life this is literally how we breathed in utero for a big period of time right our oxygen as well as food and other things came in through the umbilical cord and uh that's how we were oxygenated and and exhaled as well before we had operating lungs um then to kind of transition that so so working with those kinds of things can open up like the the various ways of working the experiential things that can that can directly feed practices uh in this case what you are seeing i was working with another image that i can offer um i think we can just maybe take a minute for this if you were to imagine every cell of your body not grouped into the tissues that we know like this is bone this is ligament this is organ etc but imagine each cell of your body as an individual separate discrete thing like a bird i think probably this is another thing that's like coming in popular thought now the idea of murmuration we watch like i'm go to youtube and watch the murmuration of starlings for example there's incredible like patterns that happen and there's a whole science behind like how that works but if you just take a moment to imagine all of your cells murmurating so they're shifting kind of like in response to each other in these to us at least from the outside eye unpredictable kinds of ways and responding not through the the trajectories that we're used to of like you know movement travels through a joint in a particular kind of way or whatever keeping it really tiny you know on the cellular movement so this was an exercise that we used that's really foundational to um what you saw in the first minute or so of the video loop that's these tiny micro movements uh and going a little bit back to what we're talking about earlier about like that the impossible and how like okay we can't really move this way anymore we do have bones and joints and ligaments that did largely direct how we move but going into a an experience like that can offer a new quality of movement despite the fact that we're not actually you know just a cluster of non-differentiated cells. Is that good? Okay all right I get to pick on Feliz Eduardo now so um I think it would be helpful for the audience many of whom do not know anything about Brazilian history if you could tell us about the novel that the show is based on? Is it? Yes and and maybe how that connects to um the how the contemporary situation evolved. Well Makonahima is a very important book in the Brazilian literature uh in in there is 100 years 100 years ago there was a art movement in Sao Paulo with some artists between them Mari Djandrade who wrote Makonahima but they there is a manifest you can find that in in google the anthropophagic manifest when they talk about anthropophagy the cannibalism but in a way like a cultural cannibalism like to a cultural anthropophagic like how to eat uh uh how to eat the culture of others so it's like it's Makonahima is a foot foot futurist futurist novel but using everything the Brazilian themes it's like a collection of Brazilian themes but at the same time it makes a caricature of the the Brazilians that we when we started to this process the the first days we have seen that we had to destroy this this this character more than to destroy because it's really important it's like a there is many there is a lot of true in this character but uh it's part of a process of construction of identity of the Brazilians that are not true in fact like the so but it's a big movement we don't use in the the show we use some informations of the book of the character but we really don't don't use the complete history it's a very interesting i recommend it for you i i know that there is a translation i know that you have read it Blair sent me a picture there is a translation of this book in English but it's a very important at the same time it makes something it's not there is a movie very important movie made in the 60 also uh and there it's a collection of a lot of characters like the giant who wants to eat Macunaima uh he's a uh oh it's i i don't have words to that uh like a business man uh a corporate fat cat yeah and there are some informations like it was there there was a giant very rich who enjoyed to eat meat of humans and there was he used it to buy that in the frigorifical continental so when we started this point i think it's just in the beginning of the book when he talked about the frigorifical this this enterprise that sells human flesh so it started to flow so we didn't want to make it completely but there is a lot of we who have read the book can recognize it in the show but we don't use just that there is in the sentences there is the two characters moon and sun the with the carnival things uh like the first the first word told in the show is nonada it's in the nothing all together uh it's from another book very important in the brazilian and after there is a sequence of very and who knows the brazilian literature can recognize because it's like the the references are from 20 books just like just one sentence here one sentence and it's a collection but this this image because we are talking about the gourmet this illusion also illusion like you feel special when we eat something that is gourmet it's prime it's uh you are feeling special but it's illusion it's it's bullshit so this this lot of references but the reality comes hard and the i recommend it's a book it's a very interesting i i i cannot imagine how how's to be read this in english because even for the brazilians there is a lot of words it's not known by everybody because i have words from amazonia and for different regions but it's a very important book for for us even if we want to destroy it great thank you thank you so um of course now we're a little bit behind hand but it will open the floor for questions from the audience if you would like to come up to the microphones we'd be very happy to hear from you we're everybody's always afraid to be the first here comes the brave gentleman yes steve hello thank you all um i'm fascinated by puppetry's unique relationship with the other performing arts which are particularly film music mine and dance my mentor often preferred to hire dancers over puppeteers to perform in his puppet company as dancers can you comment on this relationship that would be you you know interesting i guess i just i'm so unfamiliar with the puppetry world that i don't have any sense of comparison really i mean it's been it's been fabulous and to be to be doing this process we're working with tom for for a little over three years now and to be part of this festival has been been wonderful i think that one of the things that that i i think is maybe somewhat true is that our process um typically in dance is a lot longer um then then certainly what i am mostly familiar with i mean i'm speaking of very general terms i think that you know people are different there's there's theater processes that are quite long dance processes maybe that are that are shorter uh but you know we i've been developing this work for for three or four years um and we were in rehearsal for for maybe six months or so uh and i think that that something happens there with um i mean both of the puppeteers in in our piece are dancers and i think there's a certain kind of like understanding of of kineticism and being in one's body um that you know i'm sure puppeteers are all different uh but that that that they both had uh and then i think that there's a lot of just time spent in um you know i was talking a little bit about this this this idea of uh perception of like how that um how the fork can become an extension of the body um that's leaning again into merle aponte uh phenomenology perception but i think that that's also probably what happens with potentially at least with puppetry that that you get to the point where it's not like i'm you know manipulating this object and and it's challenging but suddenly i'm no longer in in the controls but i'm in the puppet um and i think probably you know maybe that's just like your years partly years of being a puppeteer maybe but but i think also it's it's just hours and hours spent um being in rehearsal and and working on the same kind of motion over and over again until it becomes myelinated um which is honestly and and a bit oddly also what we do as dancers right you're you're being in your own body in a way that further that takes the that the body lessed as this separate thing and more as the thing that you're in i don't know if that made any sense yeah yeah okay great so um i'm while the gentleman is coming forward i'm going to take a moment now i can knit in the thing that jenny made me think of so can we tackle this question in light of a side conversation that you and jenny were having beforehand about the audience's expectations for different performing arts um and i'm going to connect that to steve tillis's work on um the double vision of the puppet that um the puppet stands in between the performer and the audience and they are experiencing the object together so um can you all pick up the thread of what you were talking about earlier about audiences giving you space for um understanding or not understanding the work sure i mean i can uh recap a little bit what would you say so um we were just talking about working with puppetry and dance because i've also worked a lot with dancers um in the firebird and origins and a couple of other creations which are really word-free dance with puppets and what i was saying was that it's quite interesting that puppetry and dance almost have um diametrically opposed places where they live in some senses and i think there are a lot of exceptions but that uh because the puppet project is to create life in an inanimate object what how we recognize life is through the cotidian through the everyday through those little symbols of stuff like a look a breath uh and and one of the big projects of dance is to take us out of the everyday out of the natural body into a translated body so when you put those two things together it can be really challenging to find a space where both can exist beautifully because the puppet wants something to relate to it wants something a thread to look at or be in relation with or uh feel or so there's this automatic narrative that comes with the puppet narrativeness that comes with the puppet and the and the and then dance is not necessarily comfortable automatically in that space i may totally be talking out of turn here but there's something there that has been very challenging that i've found in working with the two mediums together and i've also found that it goes over to the the performers and i'd like to say from my perspective as a director who works with dancers and puppeteers that dancers are extraordinary at what they do with their bodies but puppeteers are extraordinary at what they do with objects and the creative imagination of somebody like mongum tombene who i'm really sad that you couldn't see as hamlet his his what he brings as a creative into the space and he's a very physical very body-based performer how he takes a piece of of cloth and starts to translate that as an energy as a movement as a feeling it's i i have rarely met a dancer who has that exact capacity to imagine in that very specific way that i don't think it has to do with training but it has to do with the passion the the passion puppeteer the person who's got that crazy mind of living in things it's a very unique space of of being and that was the one and then the other thing is the fact that one of the things that i also train in fine art originally and then i came over into theater that's how i also feel like a theater fraud because i actually stopped i just did a masters in theater but i've lacked all the undergraduate training where they teach you all the real stuff you know so so um in fine art audiences come to fine art wanting to be provoked and not wanting to understand literally fine if people come into a fine art experience and they understand they're they're repulsed they what is this why you're telling me stuff you know a theater audiences in my experience come into production and they want to understand if they don't understand they're like why why was that so confusing what does it mean why why didn't you explain to me what was going on and the dance audiences come into a thing and they're like just give it to me yes okay and they're really different so if you start doing like puppetry with dance audiences the dance audiences are like whoa there's a narrative there ah we don't do that and then and then your fine art audiences are like and then and then you do something like experimental provocative with different energies and it's a theater and people are like whoa what does that mean so i i think that you know that the audiences come in with very different expectations and the unwillingness of theater audiences to trust themselves is is is really it's a big sadness for me in our contemporary world we need to just keep pushing it out there they don't trust their imaginations they don't trust their ability to make up their own meanings and feel the feelings and allow that to be enough um and i think that also conversely sometimes the the drive to remove all narrative from storytelling in in dance and art can be quite sad because there's so much about our human soul that gets revealed through the relationships that build on each other so that's just me oh that's a little two cents about the whole world of it did you want to add on or are we ready for the next question um yeah i i guess maybe i would just say briefly i this question like the question of audience agency comes up a lot for me in this kind of question and and just feels like a really juicy one and how for me i tend to work in maybe a place of sort of tension between the narrative and the abstract and and i i i probably lean pretty heavily into a lot of dramatic elements but without having sort of like a clear like this is the narrative kind of thing it feels interesting when audience can come in with a lot of things that stimulate or provoke reaction feeling but but are left to you know a dozen different audience members come out with a different dozen different interpretations or stories or non stories or experiences or whatever um but then also that question of like how do we frame the work in such a way as to invite that you know like can we set up the the whole experience not just the material that that happens on stage but the whole experience in such a way as to try and invite people into like oh this is this is a non narrative situation or this is a narrative situation or like what are the what are the things that that engage the audience in a way that's sort of appropriate to the work which might be wildly different from one work to the next thank you all right thank you for waiting no problem um the only problem is i think i have two questions but i don't want to hawk the microphone so um maybe i'll take this off because so this is i think Eduardo yeah um i just wanted to say in watching the production that the sensations in me were active pretty quickly because you were talking about the sensations in creating a puppet and um so there's a question there but i just wanted to say at first that particularly food creates a sensation right away i think you know in one in our senses it's comes from so deep in us and so i was feeling that quite early on when i was watching so your thought that in creating a large puppet that even five seconds of sensation in the puppet would create a as you put it a hypnotizing kind of experience i guess i'm wondering as as the performers being aware of what the audience was experiencing as much as you could do you would you tracking the sensations were you would you were you thinking about other sensations as well as what you were creating with the puppet as you were creating the piece and i say that because i think that it was so powerful and there were ways in which the the mind part of it the hypnotic part of it just grew and grew and grew so i'm just curious how how else you were thinking about sensations throughout the creation of the piece well i try to give different sensations uh during the show but uh yes i think each scene uh i don't know if i understood very well the question sorry because it's a little bit hard but uh but uh different sensations i i try to organize these sensations uh should have a big uh range wide range of of wide range of sensations and because i i think even this show has not this in other show there is like a scene that the public can't breathe the public i a lot of people tell me in the end of the show and there is a strategy to make this and there is a moment that really even because i i do the soundtracks normally i do the soundtracks of the shows and even when i was doing the soundtrack it gives a it's a and i i think it's so i think it's so powerful because if you i think you the public doesn't expect this from the puppets and i love this that the public think the puppets are beautiful are sweet and it's very good to have this expectation and i like to use that because they are not expecting to feel what they feel and uh i i like like i know exactly i try to do in the when i'm writing of these i know i where i have to put the i have to make the public hate me no but it's it's it's uh because they are judging this they are i i'm maybe they think oh why are he doing that we don't like but yes it's not to like it's not uh like when we do the the philosophy in the bedroom the other show the marquis is sad uh a lot of people leave the theater and i always ask when in the show i i have someone from from the production waiting counting how many people then when and when they they they left the theater because uh uh it's not this the public are expecting good sensations good message message but a good message it's not uh uh uh uh uh sweet always and uh i believe really that we this we can use the the puppet to to make people think to make about some things and for me it's what what's important like an artist i will i will feel that i'm doing my job not if i live the public uh if the public agree all the time because there are there are a lot of things that is not good too and we are not we we do everything for don't you think about this and uh i think during this show like it's terrible but it's terrible i know it's terrible it's very like when he cracks the the the neck of the puppet i can see i was i was using a mask that i can see just one small point in the public and when you did that there was a guy like and he was like that for one minute i know he was not he was not happy but at the same time he was he was thinking oh that's true life is like that i was talking to you before here like the idea in this show was to to make the public think about who i explore to to make to be comfortable to use fancy products and and who like who are you eating when you use a special soap that comes from us i don't know and who are you eating but who eats you also where in this chain are you uh so it was the main objective main thing in this show yes i hope that was satisfactory okay so i think this is going to be our last question this is for all three of you but especially for yanni and edwardo i haven't seen your show yet sir okay but you may be able to answer it too uh i believe it was yanni who said living in the object is what great puppeteers are able to do okay you may not have phrased it that way at what point does the metaphysical or spiritual or spirit of the puppet take over no matter what you may want it to do and how does that influence your show or your project yeah um i think it's uh it's it's in the space of play where you create if you're the builder of the puppet something that is going to be it's going to be moved and it's going to somehow come into being you don't know how yet and then you've got these people that you've brought into the room to play with this thing and then there's this meeting this encounter and there are expectations and things that you know like the bluest eye i made i built the puppet so that she could come to pieces because it's you know it's about the fact that she's her psyche is disintegrating so we see the puppet coming apart and the and the puppets you know puppeteers forcing her back together or pulling her apart that is a plan but when you bring the thing into the space and the the the puppeteers have to grab uh the in order to get the eyes out of the puppet they have to grab it across the mouth so that they can hold it properly and get the eyes out suddenly there's this kind of masking and this um silencing that's happening by the puppeteers of the puppet that is unplanned and that can only emerge as you start to explore how these two things meet the play of the performer and the and the object i don't know if that answers you the question sorry can you help me okay um so we've been dancing around the metaphysical um because even though graham harman and the object oriented ontology thinkers invite us to um apprehend as it were the agency of the material they all stop short at what we would consider to be animism and the idea that there is a spirit in the object jackie is raising that question of animism and do we encounter that in the puppet have you encountered that in your work yeah yeah it's and this is the illusion that i think it's almost for me even it's long it's more more than illusion more than it's like a magic really some characters are really they have they own like yesterday i i did uh uh in the cabaret i presented a show it's a show i've do there is 15 years that they present this the show and it's really a character that he's he knows what he wants more than me it's like it's a show with it's uh i never know what is going to happen i never never know yesterday before to enter in the the stage i could not i it's that it's that's the play uh and each character but it it's also because it's not the character that of course it's a object but uh each person and i i i i say to the the actors in the company that they have to oh put your actor side in your arm that i think there is something here when i take uh the head of a puppet a transfer of energy that may be metaphysics may i i don't know what happens but if i have i i can't have the same i can't the character cannot be here in my head it has to be here and i have just to transfer that and i feel really that i'm doing that like the energy is passing it's a little bit strange but it's strange to be puppeteer also yes okay yeah bruce i see you we are at two o'clock i believe that the live stream shuts down at this point if anyone needs to leave you are welcome to do so um i am gonna honor our um living treasure here and entertain his question if the panelists will bear with me and um let's have it bruce well there's a scientific neurological component to to this which i like that that is being proven uh illusion uh comes about through the wish through the uh what's happened now is they have proven neurologically that there is a communication between the audience and uh the performance all performance arts which uh involves comes with a ritual wishful dispensing of belief and uh that process creates an illusion that is shared and unites all performances in that respect um this was i got from peter brook the director and one of the uh in his uh in one of his youtube thing but what what's happening is they know scientifically that we are we unite neurologically with each other okay and uh these are studies that are going on now which uh i think really addresses uh what you were all talking about that there is a scientific solution or a possible solution to uh what is experienced being experienced by anybody involved in a performance that takes them up into another sphere of a reality okay thank you so much thank the panelists thank all of you for being present and that is the end of this session