Puppetry as Radical Empathy:  Transmuting Personal and Communal Trauma Through Animism-based Performance Practices.

In this presentation I explore the links between puppetry practice and what Joan Koss-Chioino calls ‘radical empathy’, a theory based on neurophysiological, anthropological and nonsecular approaches to understanding spiritually transformative empathy in ritual healing and women’s therapeutic relationships  (2006).  I explore specifically the emergence of  ‘radical empathy’ in the puppetry work I have developed in post-conflict communities in Northern Ireland as well as in South Africa. As a puppetry artist specializing in animist-based creative processes, I explore transformative social and cultural practices through a trans-disciplinary, intuitive and embodied approach working closely with puppetry as both a puppet maker, healer, social interventionist, director, ceremonialist and performer.

In 2012 and 2013, I lead the puppetry creation and training for Theatre of Witness, based at at the Playhouse in Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland.  The Playhouse has been a leader in community peace building creative arts initiatives for the past 25 years and is a self-help, grass roots, bottom-up community development project.  The performance approach of Theatre of Witness, combines art and social justice through testimonial performance, and was founded by dancer, artist and activist Teya Sepunick in 1986.  Teya’s methodology and approach to performance was developed over more than thirty years of creating and producing theatre with non-performers who have been specifically marginalized by society, ‘people whose stories have previously gone untold’.  Collaborating on the 2012 production entitled Release, was an all male cast of ex-combatants, survivors and perpetrators of political violence, prison wardens and soldiers. I was invited to bring paper puppetry,  to the collaborative process, as a potential tool for visual sentience, but also as a metaphoric pathway into the vast and vulnerable experience of violence, hatred, physical torture and healing forgiveness that the performer felt unable and unwilling to convey through spoken narrative. In the next production, Sanctuary, in 2013, we collaborated again to introduce puppetry as a tool for a radical creative expression of lived experience and memory, this time with political refugees and survivors of institutional violence and abuse.

In South Africa, since 2012, I have collaborated as creative director and puppetry facilitator on a vast community puppetry event with the Handspring Puppet Trust (of the Handspring Puppet Company) in Barrydale, a rural farming community in the Klein Karoo of South Africa.  The event engages more than 200 local community members, youths and children.  The community co-creates the parade and performance, using puppetry as a metaphoric and mythic tool to explore their own complex legacies of identity, cultural heritage, colonial devastation and Apartheid.  The process offers the community an artistic engagement not only with making and creating original puppets, but with magical realist thinking and experiences.  It also facilitates a creative exploration of the possibility for self and communal renewal in this complex landscape.

It is the inter-relational potential of a creative practice such as puppetry, that facilitates movement between ritual and re-membrance, sentience and construct, spoken and unspoken, self and other, the threshold and the centre.  It is the radically embodied process of meaning making, paradox and mystery in puppetry that makes these practices so conducive to complex physical, psychological, spiritual and energetic awareness, understanding and expression. Through an ‘embodied transference’ in the mundus imaginalis of puppetry, the intermediate dimensions of its sentient construction offer keys to a potentially radical empathy that may transmute the reception and experience of trauma.

Keywords: Radical Empathy, Puppetry, Animism, Trauma and Healing, Creative Feminine Practices

 

Biography

Dr Aja Marneweck is puppetry practitioner, specializing in the intersections of animism and ritual in transformative social and cultural practices that attend to creative expansion and expressive freedom.   She established the international women’s puppetry company, The Paper Body Collective in 2004 in Cape Town. After obtaining an honours degree in video dance and theatre directing in Johannesburg in the ‘90s, Marneweck began her puppetry career with political puppeteer and puppetry for social activism artist Gary Friedman in Cape Town in 2001, collaborating on the site- specific puppetry production, Looking For a Monster.   Aja was a founding co-director of the ground breaking Out the Box International Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance from 2005-2009.    She has created several multimedia puppetry productions, performing on prestigious festivals such as the Festival Mondial des Theatres de la Marionettes in  Charleville (2009) and the Puppet Theatre Festival at the Stadt Museum in Munich (2013).  Marneweck has also created the original puppetry for award winning international Theatre Companies including Theatre of  Witness at the Playhouse in Derry, Northern Ireland (productions ‘Release’ in 2012, and ‘Sanctuary’ in 2013) and  Opera Company Isango Portobello (‘The Mysteries’ which played  at the Garrick Theatre on on the West End in London 2009).  In 2012, 2014 and 2015 she directed the Handspring Puppet Trust Parade giant puppetry event in Barrydale  in the Klein Karoo.  In 2012 she was awarded the first PhD in practice as research in puppetry in South Africa for her  provocative production Plot 99 about the life of the Xhosa Prophetess Nonthetha Nkwnkwe.  Aja’s international performance research, has been described as a ‘powerful utility of a Feminist Semiotic for an innovative women’s theatrical aesthetics in practices that could become a cross-cultural and international phenomenon’.  She is currently a Mellon award postdoctoral scholar in the Humanities Department at the University of Cape Town.