For there to be voice first there has to be a notion of voicelessness.  Voicelessness thus has an associative function, the gel from which the mold is formed.  The ambiguity (often, the temptation) is the relationship between what is inchoate and what is subliminal and how this is represented.  This can be thought of as a spectrum with different degrees of what constitutes voicelessness and, by implication, what constitutes voice.  The echo is a compelling example... a kind of shadow of the voice but, equally, a shadow of voicelessness... in short, voicelessness as an ideology of itself!

How then to construct this ideology? 

  Elusiveness in presence; the trickster qualities of the puppet that draw out attitudes, beliefs, expectation and desire for enchantment from the one who looks (the audience) and in that way allows the observer to project whatever their interpretations through a set of illusions of control (and division of responsibilities between the puppet-object and the person-viewer).  The puppet allows for this process in its audience, more so than the actor for instance, because being insentient it has no ego and no theory of mind.

 Catalogue - Sub-division A:  form-function architecture.  Container, usually for liquid substances or carrier of seeds; resonator; key sensory locator; electro-chemical fuse-box; indo- & exo-skeletal protector; maskstand; aeolian pre-disposition; calcareous porosity; source and delta...  Pre-verbal and pre-emotive mass; stretch-pivot range of articulation, for instance reach of jaw or vertical-horizontal arching and lateral tilting; protrusive-retractive/expansive-contractive; stasis-kinesthesis...

  I’ve noticed that when given the choice in creative workshops and therapy sessions participants often gravitate towards the villain of the story.  Is this because the hero or heroine doesn’t address or satisfy the risk dynamic?  Or is it because by inhabiting the villain the hero/ heroine’s positive attributes are reinforced through a default of consciousness or imagination?

The natural disjointedness of puppet animation, articulation and voice always leads me, at some point, to reflect on the arc from stillness to movement and back again and, equally, from silence to voice and back.  At what point does stillness become movement and silence sound?  At what point, if at all, does muscle become tendon and tendon bone?  What point from silence to sound to voice to word to poem to song along the parabola of breath, reaching zenith where exhaling and inhaling switch and play themselves out symmetrically until the next cycle?  I sometimes imagine that we sang before we talked.  At other moments, I believe that all sound merely punctuates silence.  I occasionally think of dance and movement in similar ways… dancing, running, walking, crawling… stillness.

 [Postscript:  Imagination as the glue and fibre...a thin diaphanous webbing?]

  ... these as part of the puppetry healing vision:  puppetry as social comment; as political satire; as symbolic object; as therapeutic transitionary object; as effigy; as carnival and parade emblem; as anti-war voice [see all the anti-Vietnam war stuff the Bread & Puppet Theater did]; as shamanic intercessory mechanism; as Inuit bone carving; as religious/mythic iconoclast; as the coalescing voice of spiritualism and ancestry in, for example, Mexican day-of-the-dead rituals and pageants; as icon of hope for so many dispossessed populations; as the elusive, quintessence of subversion and therefore true spirit of enquiry; as anarchistic and arc-angelic... etc...

For some time now I’ve been interested in the interrelationship between aesthetics and the therapeutic dimensions of puppetry and puppetcraft.  I am currently inclined to think away from puppetry as a genre for children and of aesthetics in terms of fixed notions of beauty (whatever those might be).  Therapeutically, puppetry has been used primarily as a projective, dissociative tool with children.  I’ve come across very little attention of it as a way of approaching transference (or counter-transference)  with adult clients and am curious about the potential for this.  I wonder if a heightened awareness, or at least a greater conscious focus on the aesthetic properties of puppetry when used during clinical practice might not take away some of the unconscious stresses associated with transference, and affect more enduring positive outcomes?