Advance through balance

Significant changes within the artistic genre that concerns us all—changes whose beginnings should be dated to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were influenced by several important factors, although they unfolded over time. First and foremost, there was the turn toward the puppet by modernist creators, and later by artists associated with the avant-garde. Their search for new forms of expression meant that, as never before, the theatrical puppet gained the status of an important vehicle of meaning, a symbol capable of assuming physical form on stage, or a metaphor that dynamized the means of theatrical expression. From the Polish point of view, the process of nationalizing puppet ensembles, which lasted for several seasons at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, was also of no small importance. Having gained stable funding, puppet theatres, now functioning as institutions, could on the one hand devote more attention to the proper organization of their work, and on the other—and this is more important—broaden the field of artistic exploration, not only by inviting outstanding artists from the visual arts to collaborate, but also by undertaking experimental activities that broke established theatrical models and patterns of performance, although of course this remained a marginal part of their main activity. Numerous efforts to ensure professional training for future actors and directors of puppet theatre were also important; after various, more and less successful attempts, these efforts gained university status—first in Wrocław in 1972, and three years later in Białystok. Finally, the possibility of moving away from the model of institutional theatre that had existed since the 1950s became significant—a model that required directors to fulfil numerous obligations toward the organizing body—in favour of creating private, off, or independent groups operating according to original artistic concepts, whose beginnings can be found in the activity of such ensembles as the Theatre of Fire and Paper and Teatr Wierzbak, founded at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s.[1]

All these activities—although this is a highly simplified description, omitting many smaller phenomena, yet the only reasonable one given the length limitations of this publication—meant that in the twentieth century the art of puppet theatre, both in Poland and in many other countries, underwent a transformation, changing from popular entertainment most often addressed to an uneducated audience into a high art: one with solid foundations, educated artists, social interest, and a new quality brought about by numerous original ideas. Above all, however, it became an art in constant search.

Along with these searches, however, came a certain loosening, a departure from the classical model established in previous centuries in favour of introducing many new and unobvious phenomena which, on the one hand, intrigued the artists themselves and later delighted—or failed to delight—the recipients of their work, and on the other hand caused the genre to split into many varieties, mutations, and variations that were difficult for outsiders to distinguish, and sometimes impossible even for researchers of this field of art to define, due to their fleetingness, one-off character, or simply because of a lack of appropriate tools and the narrowness of specialist terminology. As a result, many contemporary phenomena from the so-called borderland—among which one may certainly include all those activities that, because of the profile of the institution, the education of the creators, the introduction of elements belonging or related to the genre, and sometimes even elements whose only possible kinship with the artistic field that interests us is very distant—began to be included within puppetry art, while their difference, and sometimes even their complete incompatibility, was explained by the continuous development of the genre. Let me only recall that Henryk Jurkowski, already in the mid-1960s, used the term “third genre” to describe all those phenomena that constituted a synthesis of puppetry art and dramatic art—although this distinction ultimately changed nothing.[2]

Thus our explanation, concerning diversity, is in a sense justified, since no art likes to stand still. Had perspective not been introduced into painting at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we would still be looking at two-dimensional pictures. And had the avant-garde not rejected painting that imitated reality, replacing it with an authorial statement, we would still be stuck in realism or naturalism. Nor would our emotional relationship to a visual work of art, our way of perceiving it, or our new kind of relation with it have changed. I consciously use here a comparison with the fine arts, because puppetry—as Janina Kilian-Stanisławska said—is “the theatre of visual art in motion.”[3]

However, the departure from the original model of puppet theatre, which was realized through the arrangement of three subjects: actor–puppet–viewer, or more broadly animator–animated object–recipient of the animation process, in favour of a model in which the second component—that is, the animated object—loses its subjectivity and becomes merely an ornamental addition, a decorative supplement, a redundant substitute, or, worse still, is absent altogether, has meant that today we are no longer dealing with contemporary puppet theatre, but with a newer genre which, although rooted in puppetry art, nevertheless renounces its primary assumptions. We therefore return to the term I invoked above, the “third genre,” although it is now something entirely different from what Jurkowski assumed.

Is this a worse genre? No, it certainly is not—as I have already written, art does not like to remain in one arrangement. But while the act of applying paint to canvas with a brush will still be called painting, regardless of whether the result is a realistic depiction of a landscape or a view transformed in the spirit of constructivism or surrealism, puppet theatre in which the process of animation disappears and in which the animated object loses its role as subject is no longer puppet theatre. Therefore, if we want, with all the freedom of authorial expression supported not only by the experiences of past epochs but also by all the latest technological solutions, to create contemporary puppet theatre—one of whose protagonists will be the lalka nova that patronizes this publication—we must above all remember to preserve the balance of the aforementioned tripartite division.

This is, of course, a difficult task, especially at a time when social pressure releases egoism and the need for a quick career in many of us; and today such a career is much easier to achieve through work in film, television, or social media, promoting above all oneself rather than the complex and exceptionally demanding art of puppetry. Yet there is no shortage of examples showing that some artists choose this more difficult, more uneven path, one that certainly requires greater sacrifice.

Over the past fifteen years—which, on the one hand, have been characterized by the very dynamic development of independent theatres and groups operating in the space of puppetry art, and on the other by an equally dynamic technical and technological development that has strongly transformed the ontology of the puppet itself—the greatest successes have belonged precisely to those performances and those creators who preserved the basic tripartite division, although of course this was never an equal division assigning each element the same space of existence.

From Baldanders by Teatr Malabar Hotel in 2006 to Natalia Sakowicz’s latest premiere, Romance, from 2021 in independent theatre, and at the same time in many other productions by institutional theatres, there unfolds the history of contemporary—or rather today’s—puppet theatre: a new and different theatre, one that consciously uses its proper means of expression and builds statements on authorial ideas, free from any models and often unique examples on a national scale. The names of creators and titles of productions could be multiplied; nevertheless, in this text I will refer only to the area that interests me: puppet theatre for adult audiences, although in practice this means theatre addressed both to adult and teenage viewers.

In the aforementioned Baldanders by Marcin Bikowski and Marcin Bartnikowski, thanks to a variety of puppet means of expression—from an artificial Siamese-twin-like head, through various masks and mannequins—the creators showed the uncanny journey of the title character through successive incarnations and their shells, which took place, as it were, at the demand of the audience gathered at a circus and amusement-park freak-show. Interest in the outsider in the performance grew with each of his transformations, which from scene to scene assumed increasingly sophisticated forms. These puppet forms, distant from one another—fantastic, innovative, and terrifying at the same time—coexisted on stage together with their creators, forming a coherent whole in which each element had a clearly defined purpose for its presence.

In his excellent Hamlet from 2010, Adam Walny presented the world of compromised courtiers as a world of figures cut off from reality, marionettes enclosed in water-filled aquariums that gave them a false sense of security. In contrast to them, he introduced only two characters: the title prince—a table-top puppet[4] moving freely across the stage, whose freedom further emphasized Hamlet’s loneliness and difference; and himself in the role of the Father’s Ghost—constantly controlling his son and urging him toward crime. In this way, Walny became a true demiurge and creator of stage actions, one who at any moment could give precedence to his puppets and just as freely take that precedence away from them.

In The Lives of the Housing Estate Saints, Agata Kucińska’s authorial performance also from 2010, the multiplicity of puppet forms presented the diversity of personalities described by Lidia Amejko in her novel. These “concrete saints”—as they may be called because of their belonging to a community living in large-panel housing estates somewhere on the outskirts of the city—were representatives of all kinds of addictions, distortions, and non-norms, most of them closed within the four walls of their flats, hiding in basements or sneaking quietly through stairwell corridors under cover of night. The very even distribution of emphasis between what was actorly and what was puppet-based—despite the various techniques used, including entirely authorial ones—created a coherent, modern, and thrilling performance, which over the following years returned from numerous festivals covered with awards.[5]

A similar division could be found in Agnieszka Baranowska’s monodrama The Independence of Triangles, or a Comic Bluff with a Dramatic Tinge from 2012—a literary collage that took as its material three works by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: the novel The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, or The Demonic Woman and the dramas The Independence of Triangles and Miss Tutli-Putli. In the live-action plane, Baranowska embodied the character of Serafombyx, who, enclosed in memories, settled accounts with her own past. In her hallucinations and visions, the ghosts of past years materialized through mannequins, animated pictures hanging on the wall, and even small plastic soldiers. All these stage beings and puppet creations existed in symbiosis, without unnecessary pushing, domination, or the desire to attract the viewer’s attention more strongly.

In her first monodrama, Wake-Up Call, from 2017, Natalia Sakowicz confronted a contemporary girl with stereotypes of female characters embedded in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Asking in turn who Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, or Baba Yaga are today, she presented the summoned heroines through different puppet forms—both those more recognizable, already fixed in the memory of some viewers, such as the table-top puppet, mannequin, talking head, or mask, and newer hybrid forms combining the body of the actress with the body of the puppet, moreover in complex interpersonal arrangements based on the battle of the sexes or male violence against women. In this way, Sakowicz managed to capture and show the necessity of changing attitudes toward archetypal thinking and the copying of widespread yet long outdated clichés, and her voice resonated evenly through all the layers of this puppet statement rich in means of expression.

In turn, Karolina Martin—still a student at the Faculty of Puppetry Art—in her authorial project from 2018 entitled Three Quarters to Death, showed the possibility of an extraordinary symbiosis between the puppet body and the actor’s body, characteristic of the puppets created by Natacha Belova, an artist originally from Russia who has lived in Belgium for many years. The drama of an old woman who has spent her entire life mourning her prematurely deceased lover is the drama of an individual dreaming of death, although death still does not come. When it finally appears, it turns out to be inseparably connected with the living woman—present from the beginning, though unnoticed. In Martin’s performance, Death, played in a mask plane, carried its charge in its arms throughout, and thus the actress lent her body in order to complete the figure of the old woman. A hybrid being emerged on stage—half human, half puppet—which was constantly transformed by shifting the emphasis once toward the animated form and once toward the actress-animator.

Henryk Hryniewicki departed furthest from the examples mentioned above in his latest performance, The Giaour, based on George Byron’s work, from 2021. Hryniewicki staged the confession of the title character over a dissecting table on which lay the body of his beloved. But this body was not an ordinary puppet form—a prop or a wooden or plastic mannequin—but a sculpture made of sand, and precisely for this reason it was subject to a specific kind of animation, one that was at the same time transformation, deformation, and even the deconstruction of its original form. Leila’s body therefore changed not only its arrangement, but also its category of presence—in the first part of the performance slowly turning from a compact sculpture into a shapeless mass of sand, then transforming into the site on which a battle takes place, and finally assuming the shape of her tormentor, Hassan. These transformations were accompanied by multimedia projections, elements of object theatre, and even a camera that changed the perspective of seeing and activated additional channels of visual communication. Of course, for many people such an exploration of sand may have nothing to do with puppet theatre. And yet the metamorphosis taking place on stage attracted attention so strongly that this material acquired its own subjectivity even at those moments when it lost the concrete, real shape of a character and became a space for additional action.

Finally, there is the already mentioned Romance by Natalia Sakowicz. The story of the relationship between two young women, who are connected by as much as divides them, was presented simultaneously in the live-action plane and in the puppet plane. For almost the entire performance, the animator therefore did not part from her partner—a puppet equal to her in height, close to a movable figure or mannequin. Their unusual relationship contained something more than ordinary friendship: it was a kind of dependence, slightly tinged with homosexual love. The stage coexistence of two different beings—actorly and puppet-like—manifested itself in numerous emotional intensifications and releases. The culminating point was the moment when the enraged protagonist performed an act of deconstruction on her puppet partner, thereby depriving her of life—an effect unattainable in dramatic theatre.

The performances mentioned above are, of course, only a handful among many productions created in recent years within the structures of independent theatre. Yet among the premieres of institutional theatres as well, one can find many examples that maintain a balance between actorly and puppet means of expression while at the same time fitting into the model of contemporary puppet theatre, which draws both on the experiences of the past and on the solutions and ideas of the present day.

The History of a Sinful Imagination, based on the prose of Bruno Schulz, directed in 2010 by Konrad Dworakowski at the Pinokio Theatre in Łódź, was presented through mixed means of expression—from fragmented casts of the human body, through masks, to video projections, among which the live actor was omnipresent. The multiplicity of these forms built a fantastic world whose visual layer underwent constant metamorphoses, thereby reflecting the extraordinary nature of the ideas of the writer from Drohobych.

Likewise, Paweł Passini, staging Artur Pałyga’s drama Morrison/Deathson in 2013 at the Opole Puppet and Actor Theatre, decided to introduce mixed forms onto the stage. Marionettes, masks, distinctive costumes, and visualizations, together with live actors, created an unforgettable set of figures accompanying the leader of The Doors on his final earthly journey, filled with narcotic vapours.

Agata Kucińska followed a similar path in 2015 when she staged another text by Pałyga, entitled Ash Gathers in the Heart of the Sun, at the Wrocław Puppet Theatre. The performance included table-top puppets, masks, various children’s toys, and ready-made objects. Four actors alternated between the live-action, puppet, and mixed planes, enriching this diversity of forms not only with their own presence, but also with fantastic costumes that even transformed them into puppet-like figures. All these means were intended to convey the complexity of the dramatic text—rich in symbols and metaphors essentially impossible to show in a theatre of homogeneous means of expression.

Jakub Roszkowski, too, in his authorial adaptation and staging of Sienkiewicz’s The Teutonic Knights, performed at the Miniatura City Theatre in Gdańsk in 2016, chose a multiplicity of puppet means. To reconstruct the history of the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he used flat à la planchette puppets, grotesque hand puppets, and clay figurines, which he additionally passed through the eye of the camera. Both the animators and the camera operators were actors dressed as archaeologists conducting research in the former territories of the Teutonic Order.

These are examples of performances with a strongly developed visual layer, but the diversity of puppet forms is not the only way to maintain a scenic balance of means. It can be preserved just as well when creators decide to use two techniques, or even one.

In the performance Don Juan, or… from 2011, directed by Alexei Lelyavsky at the Pleciuga Puppet Theatre in Szczecin, the actors appeared alongside small patchwork puppets; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 2013, directed by Marian Pecko at the Banialuka Puppet Theatre, they performed alongside enormous mannequins; while for the creators of The Danton Case. A Self-Interview from 2012, directed by Magdalena Miklasz at Teatr Malabar Hotel,[6] masks alone were sufficient. I am listing only a few of the most interesting productions from a much longer list, which includes performances that draw both on classical techniques and on entirely innovative forms, sometimes difficult to define.

What is most important, however, is the fact that all the productions discussed above maintained the tripartite model of subjects participating in the performances. They cared both for the puppet layer and for the actorly layer of the performance. In the stage actions, there was no rivalry between the actor and the puppet or object for the viewer’s favour; instead, there was a symbiosis of the means used and the elements introduced onto the stage. The creators’ inner humility toward dead matter thus influenced the stage synergy, which in the final analysis produced extraordinarily interesting artistic effects, repeatedly awarded at various theatre showcases and festivals in Poland and abroad. And it is precisely thanks to this synergy that the lalka nova has the greatest chance of development, regardless of what its ontological status will be—whether it will be a puppet technique known for centuries, though transformed in contemporary terms, or perhaps an entirely new creation already emerging today in the space of experiences of the digital and virtual world, and tomorrow or next year in regions still undiscovered by humankind.