The Phenomenology of Puppet Ontology in the Holocaust Performative
Ariel Roitman
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ARIEL ROITMAN (she/her) is a recent graduate of King’s College London MA program in Theater & Performance Studies. Originally from Toronto, Canada, she also holds a BA (Honours) in Drama from Queen’s University. In Canada she has worked as a Director, Production Manager, Designer, and Stage Manager in a variety of student productions. Ariel’s research interests in Jewish and Yiddish theatre, theatre history and theory, and Holocaust studies, focusing on concepts such as trauma, memory, witnessing, and representation. She’s written about the ways certain dramatic techniques - such as meta-theatricality - and performative encounters - such as in the Musuem - might serve a newer, more ontological, function of transgenerational Holocaust transmission. Through performance, she hopes to find creative ways to apply her research into practice.
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Abstract
The aesthetic deployment of puppetry Holocaust theatre serves multiple diverging inquiries about the Holocaust itself - that of spectatorship and agency, remembrance, transmission of testimony, and of therapeutic capabilities. This essay, however, calls particular attention to the phenomenon of puppet ontology within the ‘Holocaust Performative.’ Using puppets in the Holocaust Performative illuminates the phenomenon of what Vivian Patraka ascribes as “goneness,” an interplay between that which is absent and that which is present. If we consider puppets as both corporeal and psychic actants that exist on an ontological spectrum, in what Mel Y. Chen suggests is a terrain of ‘animacy,’ puppets become theatrical surrogates of torture and mediators between the living and the dead. This essay looks at two works to frame the prevailing argument - Dutch company Hotel Modern’s production of KAMP and Gilles Segal’s play-text The Puppeteer of Lodz – as both utilize the puppet’s ontological disparity to accentuate their own thematic “goneness.” Ultimately, we come to see how the puppet may then labour as a proxy of remembrance within the Holocaust Performative, proving itself to be a dynamic and valuable theatrical tool in which to navigate our relationship with the preservation of Holocaust memory.
The aesthetic deployment of puppetry Holocaust theatre serves multiple diverging inquiries about the Holocaust itself - that of spectatorship and agency, remembrance, transmission of testimony, and of therapeutic capabilities. This essay, however, calls particular attention to the phenomenon of puppet ontology within the ‘Holocaust Performative.’ Using puppets in the Holocaust Performative illuminates the phenomenon of what Vivian Patraka ascribes as “goneness,” an interplay between that which is absent and that which is present. If we consider puppets as both corporeal and psychic actants that exist on an ontological spectrum, in what Mel Y. Chen suggests is a terrain of ‘animacy,’ puppets become theatrical surrogates of torture and mediators between the living and the dead. This essay looks at two works to frame the prevailing argument - Dutch company Hotel Modern’s production of KAMP and Gilles Segal’s play-text The Puppeteer of Lodz – as both utilize the puppet’s ontological disparity to accentuate their own thematic “goneness.” Ultimately, we come to see how the puppet may then labour as a proxy of remembrance within the Holocaust Performative, proving itself to be a dynamic and valuable theatrical tool in which to navigate our relationship with the preservation of Holocaust memory.
| etudesdec2022roitman.pdf |
