Prelude to a puppet: the catalog (Hello Dave)

Puppeteers are often asked, 'Oh, don't you love Being John Malkovich?' In that film, John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a puppeteer frustrated by his unachievable desire to control people the way he controls marionettes. This has nothing to do with real puppetry and is instead a misdirected metaphor about puppets: the idea that the goal of puppet performance is complete control of the object.

This tyranny of the copy brings to mind the final images of Federico Fellini's film City of Women, in which (Marcello Mastroianni) finds himself in the gondola of a hot-air balloon. Looking up, he realizes that the balloon is a copy of the beautiful young woman he has been pursuing throughout the film. She looms over him like a vast marionette, yet it is he who is caught in the strings.

The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a coach and transverse his own town to turn the street into a puppet-show. (Emerson)

Brecht's epic theater is an argument against 'culinary" performance wherein the audience gives itself up via empathy to the unreality of the stage. Once the empathic lock has been achieved, the spectator consumes the words and experiences of the protagonist as if there were her own. And in light of such consumption, nothing changes.

Ann Chu, for instance, has taken her puppets off the strings. All of a sudden, the charming old man with a wide-brimmed sloppy hat and the maiden with her stiff bonnet hang off ropes, transformed by the artist into strangled corpses.

Nayland Blake's puppets are delicate, temporary, rococo concoctions - frail and doomed.

A puppet is never abstract, lest it become a pattern (or a dance).