APD Week 6: PLAY AND SOUND

Week 6: 

THEME:  Sound 

Full Video of my playtesting with the puppet is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQvkzM9UxSY

CONTEXT: 

During this week’s lecture, examples of puppetry came up with regards to sound, in discussion of the muppets and in the work of independent artists, and something about it stuck with me. I’m a big fan of puppets, and this week I considered just how many of my film-making and animation inspirations are puppeteers like: Frank Oz, Henry Selik, Jim Henson, Jiri Trnka, Ray Harryhausen, Nick Park and Jan Švankmajer, but I’ve never actually considered puppet building or stop motion myself as a serious avenue for my practice. So this week I built a marionette and in a future APD I would like to do stop motion. 

An artist whose work encouraged me to think about sound differently was Tarek Atoui, an experimental instrument builder and interactive object sculptor, who describes sound as a multisensory experience, interwoven with the viewer’s other languages of touch and gesture and sight. His works encourage people to experiment with the emotional/experiential pleasures of making sound and witnessing sound’s impact on other objects, for example his exhibit Water’s Witness, which features the vibrations of street sounds impacting large pieces of stone for the guests to place their bodies on, as well as a “Table of Contents” full of unique song making objects for guests to combine and enjoy.

An example of an artist who uses this definition of sound as something interconnected with vibration, with the body and with sight is puppeteer and musician Olivier Mobeli, who builds and uses his entire body to play large string instruments that are inter-strung with marionette puppets, creating a combination of music and dance. Considering his work made me think of how similar using puppets is to playing musical instruments in method, material and result, and much like Mobeli I decided to combine the two. 

METHOD: This week I build a puppet out of bells and windchimes that makes improvised sounds/music then it is played with. 

RESPONSE:

In the beginning I had a rough idea of a prototype puppet with wind chimes for its arms, legs and body that would make discordant frenetic sounds in a variety of pitches (as ideally the chimes I would find would be of a variety of lengths) as the player used it and experimented with its movements. As I shopped for cheap goods I could afford to assemble a puppet out of, I found that bells, necklaces, funnels and chopsticks made for a better sound texture and incorporated them into the making process. I think being a sort of dollar store junk shop puppet adds a specific feel to the object that I wasn’t expecting and affects the guest puppeteers connection to the object. 

The first prototype was a single hand puppet without leg wires for control, that was better at emoting and being cute than it was at intentionally making noise. Keeping the legs flailing on their own seemed like a good way to keep the noise making random, but honestly the lack of control just became a lack of opportunity for noise experimentation and puppet manipulation. 

In the third puppet I made, I added more varied noise making objects like the necklaces and added in strings for the knees so the legs could be controlled. I think having a two handed puppet is much more challenging and requires more mental and physical engagement, but it reaped very interesting results. I found, getting my housemates to test the puppet, that many of them either didn’t have the energy to play with it for long (possibly because of this noisy two handed demand for active mental engagement) or were totally enraptured by it and played with it for ages making noise from the puppet’s contact with itself, the ground, a car, a chair, a table, and a bin. 

REFLECTION:

Of the housemates that agreed to play with the puppet and stuck with it for a long time, three of them tried to make it walk, sit and dance, and hit itself in the face. They intentionally tangled the wires to see how it moved and flipped its leg wires around so it could walk like a crab. They sang a long to it’s chimes at some points, or some actually seemed to go to lengths to make as little noise as possible so that they could focus on the puppetry aspect. They emoted with the puppet and had it bump against various objects to make new noises. 

The (as unguided as I could manage) responses I got to my puppets were surprising. One housemate talked about going into an unthinking rhythmic state while making the puppet dance, enjoying the bounce and weight of it and tapping it against objects to make new noises. Also making its arms and legs swing in perfect circles over and over trying to match the rhythm he had created. It is a person-shaped instrument and the impulse to make a rhythm out of what you hear comes with that in a way. I think a result of the puppet making so many overlapping noises is the need to organise and control them into something less chaotic. 

Both of the housemates who played with it for a while described focusing on how their bodies and muscles were moving and balancing the heavy puppet and how their focus shifted totally off of the puppet and onto the body over time. My other housemate even stood as still as possible, making as little noise as possible, held the puppet still and then flexed just his stomach muscles to see what it would make the puppet do. What I’ve taken from this is the impact of weight and sound vibration on the body of the puppeteer, causing them to shift focus onto themself, their stance, their muscles and skeleton. The feeling of vibrating metal objects suspended in their hands frequently made the puppeteers take a wide stance or sit down, which I found interesting. In a future project, I wonder how I would affect people’s posture and actions and emotions with vibration and also how I could configure peoples bodies using strategically placed weight. 

Another interesting product of this experiment is that puppetry generally seemed secondary to the players, including me. Maybe it’s because we’re not trained puppeteers and attempting to recreate human movement failed pretty quickly, but the work turned from a music making puppet into a human shaped instrument pretty quickly. This could also be a reflection of this particular puppet’s difficulty of use. 

If there’s anything I’ve taken from this week, it’s that I can appreciate sound as an object, as something with physical presence in a physical world. I’m no musician, but as an appreciator of music on that base level that everyone is, I’ve always regarded it as something separate from the rest of the world of art. This week I got to witness and appreciate the interplay of object and sound in a way that may seem obvious but I’ve never really considered before. I especially want to take the theories of Tarek Atoui and apply them to future works. 

Fridericianum. (2020, Oct 23). Tarek Atoui – Waters´ Witness [Video]. Youtube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EffXKpFk0C4 

Mobeli, O. (2020, Day Unknown). OLIVIER MOBELI. Nyegenyege 2020. https://www.nyegenyege.com/artists/olivier-mobeli/