Puppets in the Age of the Anthropocene

Rapid changes taking place in the contemporary world in almost every sphere of life prompt reflection on the question of the relationship of human beings to everything that surrounds them, beginning with the natural environment and extending to the cosmos, but also their relationship to every living being that is not human, every form of existence, and everything that human beings have created, produced, invented, or brought into being—whether in an artistic act, in utilitarian production, or, finally, through experiments aimed at animating that which is inanimate. In light of the latest achievements of science, the term “inanimate matter” should no longer be used, since no such thing exists.

The concept of the Anthropocene is defined in various ways, and this is not the place to enter into broader discussions, especially those concerning the identification of the beginning of this era. Generally speaking, the Anthropocene is an epoch of unconditional human domination. It has been stated that “human activity should be recognized as one of the fundamental geological forces, whose traces may serve as chronological and stratigraphic indicators.”[1] The Anthropocene is characterized, among other things, by the disappearance of biodiversity, climate change, environmental pollution, the exploitation of deposits, and changes to the surface of the planet. We may speak of the end of the Anthropocene in the sense that awareness of the destructive effects of the “age of man” is growing, which in turn mobilizes discussion on how to halt these destructive processes. “Above all, the point is finally to notice and appreciate those forces and relationships that have always tended toward symbiosis and coexistence.”[2]

Małgorzata Sugiera, discussing the subject of the end of the Anthropocene, cites other competing terms, such as: Capitalocene, Necrocene, Technocene, Anthrobscene, Chthulucene, and Plantationocene, showing how differently researchers from various academic disciplines describe the subject.[3] This is not the place to present them. More important seems to be the conclusion, which points the way toward the future:

“The point is to bid farewell to the epoch of the Anthropocene as quickly as possible, in order to begin a new chapter in history, and to undertake intensive actions in this direction. That is why there is a growing number of postulates from those who already today see the necessity of thinking intensively about what will come after the Anthropocene; those who see the need to develop strategies aimed at recovering at least part of the destroyed diversity of natureculture. This, in turn, requires a radical redefinition not only of the relations between humans and other biotic and abiotic agencies, but also of such basic concepts of modernity as , , or .”[4]

In the context of a conference on the “new puppet,” an important question arises: how does this new perspective in the humanities influence the understanding of the possibilities and aims of puppet theatre, forms, and animants—and does it influence them at all? What especially valuable and unique things might such a theatre have to say, and to show, to contemporary audiences in the new era? It seems that it has a great deal to offer, and even that the decline of the Anthropocene opens up magnificent possibilities precisely for this genre of artistic creation.

Puppetry art has always, by its very nature, been the art of animating the inanimate, of simulating life, of studying the specificity of the “life” of everything that is not alive, or in any case is not human. The art of animation brings to life everyday objects, figures and mannequins, human-like and animal-like puppets, and even endows immaterial beings, imaginings, and illusions with materiality and visibility. Puppet theatre can animate anything! Admittedly, it has always been dominated by the desire to humanize that which is not human, but there have nevertheless also been attempts to seek in non-humans their own, specific life, a life different from human life. Animants are most often metaphors for human beings, but they do not have to be—and the decline of the Anthropocene makes us realize this perfectly.

The era of human domination over the world is coming to an end, so it is high time to truly notice and understand everything that is not human, to give it a voice, to look at it, to understand it, to activate empathy toward the non-human. Puppet theatre can become a genuine training ground for such exercises, and to some extent it has been doing this for a long time. Let us look at the main categories of non-humans imagined and animated by puppeteers.

Plants, animals, and forces of nature

In puppet theatre, especially for children, there is a great abundance of animated animals—from ants to mammoths, from bees, butterflies, mosquitoes, or flies to giraffes, elephants, lions, and tigers, not to mention countless cats, dogs, foxes, and wolves. It is worth asking: to what extent are these characters subjected to anthropomorphization, and to what extent are they not? The tradition of the animal fable, from Aesop through La Fontaine and Krasicki to contemporary children’s stories, is very familiar with and makes extensive use of the custom of “humanizing” animals. The bravery of the lion, the timidity of the hare, the wisdom of the owl, or the cunning of the fox became lasting allegories. Less important was a careful analysis of the behavior of individual animal species; instead, stable allegorical emblems were reinforced over the centuries.

Over time, however, there arose a need to direct attention to the animal itself—not through its relation to the human, nor as a symbol of certain human traits, but by looking at the animal in itself. Thanks to this, for example, living conditions of animals in zoos were gradually improved—by adapting them to their real needs, increasingly studied and better understood. Children’s literature began to change its way of looking at animals, in order to sensitize audiences to their specificity and their subjectivity. Attention also began to be paid to animals that are disliked, despised, or considered repulsive. In puppet dramaturgy we can find many such examples, for instance in the plays of Malina Prześluga. In her The Smallest Ball in the World, we befriend a romantically in-love Mosquito with an artistic soul, while the play Blee teaches compassion and sympathy for cockroaches, a wasp, or a spider with missing legs.

Years ago, Jan Ośnica wrote the play Who Will Like the Wolf?, encouraging a different perspective on the typical negative hero of fairy tales and fables. In turn, in Marta Guśniowska’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, the young Wolf turns out to be a sympathetic character, even worthy of compassion as a victim of an overprotective mother-wolf. In other dramas, such as A Tale of a Knight Without a Horse, Fox, Black on White, Bon Appétit, Please, Mr. Wolf, Let the Goose Kick It, Marvin, Big Deal, and many others, Guśniowska creates unconventional animal characters, such as a Mouse pretending to be a bat (because she dreams that someone will finally be afraid of her), an old Tortoise wishing to see his great-grandchild before death, a Horse longing for a rider, a Wolf raising a Bunny, a self-conscious Goose and a Fox who does not want to eat her, or a Hedgehog who enjoys extreme sports and runs across a highway—quickly ending up in hedgehog heaven. The list could go on.

Already in 1919, Federico García Lorca, in The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, showed a world of cockroaches into which a beautiful butterfly accidentally enters, awakening love in a cockroach—but the animal disguise served as a metaphor, a critique of human, bourgeois morality. A similar character can be found in Ants by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska or The Insect Play by the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek, about which Małgorzata Sugiera wrote:

“The only reason for which we may turn to ants is their perspective, different from ours. Looking at humans through the eyes of insects changes the angle of vision and provides the necessary distance, revealing what we do not yet know about ourselves or what we would prefer to hide.”[5]

Even today, this is most often the case—animals are used to metaphorize the human world. In Wolf by Anna Andraka, a group of boys is compared to a pack of wolves to show how animals surpass cruel and wicked humans. The Dog in Robert Jarosz’s play Raised in a Barrel is not only wiser than humans but also preserves the memory of the beginnings of the world. This is a version different from the biblical one, emphasizing that Nature (represented by the Dog and the Tree) existed before humans appeared. In Tomasz Kaczorowski’s play [●REK]in Pol, the voice is entirely given to the shark, and the human is viewed through its eyes. A Stork and a Little Eagle are astonished by the human world in Prześluga’s The President’s Suit. Penguins tell the story of the biblical flood in Ulrich Hub’s At the Ark at Eight. There are many such examples.

In the works mentioned above, animals are more than allegorical images of human traits. They gain personality, and it is their fates that the reader or viewer follows in the same way that one usually follows the fate of human characters in literature. Thanks to such literary and theatrical practices, our capacity for empathy toward other living beings increases. It is high time, as more and more species are irreversibly disappearing, and human cruelty toward animals continues on a massive scale.

It is therefore all the more important that puppet theatres animate animal animants rather than replace them with actors in stylized costumes, because in such cases the “humanity” of the character clearly dominates its “animality.” In the era of the decline of the Anthropocene, what is needed is precisely the opposite.

A particularly important group of literary characters are representations of the forces of nature, such as Wind, Dawn, Sun, Moon, Gaia, Mother Earth, River, Mountain—present in fairy tales for centuries. The theatre of animation creates a unique opportunity to give them a voice and attempt to listen to what they have to say to humans. Their real presence on stage affects the viewer much more strongly than films, in which everything is unreal because it is only projected. In theatre, they gain material presence.

Ecological posthumanism is spreading ever more widely. The work of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek constituted an intellectual foundation that led to extending reflection to all excluded, subordinate, and “other” beings—whether due to race, gender, social position, or ontological difference. In defending nature, the anthropocentric point of view was transcended, first advocating for the rights of animals and plants, and eventually also for objects, robots, androids, and all non-humans. Rosi Braidotti wrote: “The ecological alternative is a new, holistic approach that connects cosmology with anthropology and with post-secular, mainly feminist spirituality, proclaiming the need for a loving respect for difference in its human and non-human forms.”[6]

Objects

The decline of the Anthropocene also prompts new reflections on things, including objects produced by humans—whether still in use or already discarded. Puppet theatre long ago discovered the magic of the animated object and created an entire branch of this kind of art. The protagonists of performances have included umbrellas, chairs, cars, kitchen utensils, cutlery, and many other items.[7] The effects achieved were most often either comic or lyrical in nature. Comedy arose from the inventive use of banal objects to tell stories, as in the case of the fairy tale about Goldilocks staged by the Czech Drak Theatre using kitchen utensils (for example, an oven as a horse), or The Miser by the French group Tàbola Rassa, where hydraulic taps and valves were used to create characters. However, in such performances the emphasis lies more on the originality of using everyday objects than on a genuine focus on the objects themselves.

Lyricism usually stems from compassion for the sad fate of unnecessary objects, thrown away, broken, or simply unfashionable. In this tone, Jan Ośnica told the story of an old car that had faithfully served a family for several years and was then discarded without regret and sent to the scrapyard (A Tale of a Car). In The Last Daddy, Michał Walczak gave voice to such figures as a Very Wise Book, a Grey Tram, or a Talking Puddle. It is to them that the main character, Ania, turns for knowledge and guidance. Humans are disappointing—so perhaps objects will tell us something more?

In the theatre of objects such as umbrellas or chairs, we are dealing with the phenomenon of upcycling—that is, the use of old items in a new function: the function of actors. This is another interesting thread, because there is practically no object that cannot be transformed into an animant. In the play Grande Papa, Malina Prześluga gives a voice even to a television antenna named Antek, a plastic bag from Żabka, and even pigeon droppings.

In turn, a world dominated by waste is vividly depicted by Kuba Kapral in the play The Trashers and the Last Human, in which various types of waste acquire personalities. Their characteristic traits and language (highly stylized!) do not imitate humans but, on the contrary, arise from their essence and are defined in opposition to humans. Toxymilian, Góron, Jednoraziec, Automatik, or Mrs. Rag (together with her son, Little Rag) present their own point of view and their own perspective on history. The Trashers did not take over the world of their own will—they remained on the planet after humanity had died out. Only one last human remains, and the dramaturgy of the play is built around his relationship with them.

In the play I Am a Poppy Seed by Magdalena Mrozińska, an adventurous journey is told from the perspective of the titular seed, while a Grain of Sand named Edgar is one of the most important characters in Marta Guśniowska’s Big Deal. The action of The Great Buzz Grow by Kamila Oleksiak-Czerwińska takes place, among other locations, in a trash bin and a drawer, and the acting subjects include drawings, greeting cards, an Apple Core, Chewing Gum, and a Choir of Crayons. These are just a few examples.

Introducing objects onto the stage as characters makes it easier for viewers to accomplish a difficult task: to seek a perspective on the world other than their own. Such training in thinking, imagining, and empathizing may better prepare humanity for the end of the Anthropocene. It is difficult, because it requires rejecting the temptation to reduce everything to human essence. For example, in the play The Story of an Object, Aneta Wróbel-Wojtyszko and Adam Wojtyszko tell the story of a character called Something, who does not know who or what it is or where it comes from. In search of its identity, it ends up in a drawer with cutlery, a toolbox, a woman’s handbag, even a trash bin, and finally a box of toys. The conclusion is the recognition of its own uniqueness and individuality. However, in the stage production (Animation Theatre, Poznań 2011), the role of “Something” was played by an actress made up as a little girl—and all the mystery and originality disappeared. A human child’s discovery of the world is fundamentally different from the search for a place in the world by a “something-unknown.” Instead of leaving the exclusively human world, the production returned to it, even though the text encouraged entirely different explorations.

The human relationship to things fits into the broad current of posthumanist ethics. Bruno Latour, co-author of the well-known actor-network theory, included non-human entities, including objects, within the scope of philosophical inquiry as active participants in shaping our culture. A widely discussed philosophical concept was formulated by Graham Harman in such books as The Quadruple Object and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.[8] Harman challenges Western philosophy, which has presented the world almost exclusively from the perspective of a thinking subject, pushing reflection on objects into the background. He calls for recognition of a world independent of human will, draws attention to “non-living causality,” and treats “causal relations occurring between non-human objects in the same way as human perception of those objects.”[9]

Philosophical background may support artists—especially puppeteers aware of the power of object theatre—in creating works that help viewers experience the agency of things and activate empathy directed not at humans but at objects. To empathize with their fate in order to more easily see the world from a perspective other than human. Without such training of the imagination, humanity will ultimately destroy the Earth and everything that lives on it.

Immaterial beings, imaginings, gods

Objects bring their materiality onto the stage, and the task of the animator is to discover the latent life within them. The opposite situation occurs in the case of figures originating from human imagination and belief. Plays for puppet theatre are full of fairy-tale and supernatural characters—from fairies, spirits, dragons, and elves to angels, devils, and deities (for example, “God” in The Golden Key by Jan Ośnica). Strange lands, both of this world and beyond it, are inhabited by various creatures which, created in the imagination of the authors, must find their material form in performance. The extent to which popularized images are used versus the extent to which the theatre demonstrates creativity is of fundamental importance. One of the greatest mistakes theatres make is reducing an extraordinary and mysterious figure to the obvious presence of a live actor. A good example is Christ the Pensive in Confession in Wood by Jan Wilkowski. God is presented as a materialization of folk imagination—as a sculpture created by a simple woodcarver from the Beskid region. The hidden animation of the figure gives the audience a moving sense of a real conversation between a human being and the God imagined by them. Replacing the animated puppet with a live actor (as has been attempted) destroys the metaphysical, multi-layered meaning of Wilkowski’s play.

According to historians, puppet theatre originates from the sphere of the sacred, and the first animated figures represented gods. Today, this is no longer the case, with the possible exception of mannequins, which have taken on special significance, for example in the literary works of Bruno Schulz and Bruno Jasieński or in the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. “Puppets, originally belonging to the sphere of the sacred,” wrote one researcher, “were reduced to the position of toys and theatrical props, and only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regained their proper place. The elevation of the mannequin to the sphere of the sacred is primarily connected with the perception of the dead body as a mannequin, oscillating between immobility, lack of life, and active memory to which the object refers as a trace.”[10]

Non-human beings still inhabit the pages of plays, although deities appear less frequently, and much more often we encounter imaginings or concepts whose material form is difficult to imagine. If we want, in the era of the post-Anthropocene, to look at the world through non-human eyes, then “the theatre of plastic forms in motion” (to use the apt term of Janina Kilian-Stanisławska) offers us an extraordinary opportunity—although it requires a truly talented scenographer to create on stage such characters as Fever, Autumn, Better (The First Human of the World, or Blood, Sweat, and Tears by Maria Wojtyszko), Rage and Darkness (Mr. Lamp by Malina Prześluga), the almost invisible Smyrek (Pearls and Pike by Magda Mrozińska), the Polish Language and the Ugly Word (Come Have a Word by Malina Prześluga), the Whale or Noniek (plays by Marta Guśniowska), Spark and Flame (Ash Gathers in the Heart of the Sun by Artur Pałyga), and many others.

The key lies in otherness and even indefinability. It is this that we must confront in the face of the decline of the Anthropocene. It is therefore worth abandoning simple allegories, which accustom us to interpreting non-human characters only as metaphors or in comparison with humans. It is time to learn a different kind of thinking, and non-human animants in puppet theatre can greatly assist in this.

Automata, robots, artificial intelligence

Humanoid automata have fascinated audiences for centuries, and some have entered history, such as the eighteenth-century androids: the Musician, the Writer, and the Draughtsman by Pierre Jaquet-Droz. However, their main purpose and attraction was to imitate human beings as closely as possible—their appearance, gestures, and abilities. In the era of the decline of the Anthropocene, the situation is reversed. Mechanisms are exposed, and what becomes most fascinating is not how androids resemble humans, but how they differ from them.

The achievements of artificial intelligence developers evoke both fascination and fear. In order to mitigate this fear, many intelligent machines in film and literature are portrayed in ways that elicit sympathy from audiences (such as the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars). They are often funny, kind-hearted, and entirely devoted to humans. On the other hand, there is no shortage of horror narratives depicting the rebellion of machines against humans and the threat posed by increasingly sophisticated beings created by humans but gaining autonomy, self-sufficiency, self-reproduction, and even a form of free will.

Once again, animation theatre can help to domesticate this phenomenon, especially when it creates sympathetic robot characters. Sometimes it encourages compassion, as in the performance Robot by Unia Theatre of the Impossible, where androids persecuted by humans receive understanding and help only from a disabled woman. A human being aware of their own limitations and defects is better able to understand the otherness of non-human beings. In this performance, tenderness toward these somewhat peculiar creatures, made of wheels, springs, and metal sheets, is conveyed to the audience—and that is precisely the point.

In various theatres around the world, there are more and more experiments involving animatronic actors. One example is La Vallée de l’étrange, directed by Stefan Kaegi (premiere: Münchner Kammerspiele, 2018), described by Izabella Pluta.[11] The main character was a remotely controlled android—a double of the German writer Thomas Melle. The title of the performance, The Uncanny Valley, refers to a term from the 1970s proposed by the robotics engineer Masahiro Mori. The concept denotes “a feeling of unease that may arise in the presence of an android with a high degree of resemblance to a human being. The term echoes Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche), associated with the discomfort experienced when encountering anthropomorphic objects such as dolls, mannequins, or wax figures. […] The titular ‘uncanny valley’ is discussed by Kaegi in the performance in various ways. It seems that the creator approaches it in a rather perverse manner. He aims to provoke doubts in the viewer regarding the current boundaries between humanity and technology. Meanwhile, all questions formulated within the framework of transhumanism remain unanswered in the performance. The Melle-robot is, after all, a double of the writer; it coughs, moves its head and hands. Yet the director demystifies its construction by revealing the back of its mechanical skull, exposing wiring and the mechanism of its functioning.”[12]

I evoke this example to emphasize one of the directions of theatrical use of androids. The fascinating and unsettling resemblance to humans is a direct continuation of the eighteenth-century fascination with automata—only the technology has advanced. Here, however, we are interested in the opposite process: observing what is different from the human, what does not need or want to imitate humans, because it constitutes a distinct kind of being, whether in the sphere of nature or electronics.

Such performances in Polish puppet theatres are, unfortunately, still rare, although other themes related to the end of the Anthropocene—such as environmental protection or sensitivity to the suffering of marginalized people and animals—are increasingly present in theatres, not only for young audiences. Children’s theatres even teach such basic matters as waste sorting, for example in the performance Captain Order by the Puppet and Actor Theatre “Kubuś” in Kielce.

Even small steps in the right direction are important, although puppet theatre as an art of animation could do much more.

Bruno Latour, in the aforementioned actor-network theory, draws attention to “non-human actors,” meaning “things and phenomena, machines and animals, practices and cognitive schemes endowed—with agency that has so far often been overlooked.”[13] It is precisely this agency that is at stake. The younger generation will have to confront a world we are unable to imagine and one that will be shaped not only by human beings. In fact, it has always been so; we simply need to practice thinking in ways that are not anthropocentric.

As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow: “We cannot really predict the future because technology is not deterministic. The same technology can be used to create very different kinds of societies. For example, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution—trains, electricity, radio, telephone—could be used to create communist dictatorships, fascist regimes, or liberal democratic states. […] The flourishing of artificial intelligence and biotechnology will certainly transform the world, but it does not have to lead to a single deterministic outcome.”[14]

The decline of the Anthropocene does not have to end in the destruction of humanity, but it does require a radical change in thinking about humans and non-humans alike. In this, the theatre of animants can be extremely helpful, as can performances that engage audiences in real actions. Generally speaking, the performative turn in the humanities should be considered in connection with the turn toward agency—not only human agency, but also the agency of things. The decline of the Anthropocene compels us to direct our attention toward what is non-human yet living and acting—such as animants and all “lalka novas”.