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“Emotion through motion: looking at Bunraku, giant marionettes, and The…

- - - - (Barthes,1971) writes of bunraku retaining a phantasmic origin while not aiming to animate the inanimate, but bring a piece of the body to life.
    - - Edward Gordon Craig
        
        'Puppets and Poets'
        
        I couldn't find any versions of this on the internet, through the online library and google scholar.
        
        'The Marionnette'
        
        :speech_balloon: "For example, in the German essay Marionetten, Craig praises the excellent mobility of “today’s Japanese marionettes”, and compares them with the large-size marionettes of classical Greece, including King Antiochus of Cyzicus and Pothinus of Athens."(Yamaguchi, 2013)
        
        :speech_balloon: “These Greek marionettes had extremely flexible joints. All parts of the body, including the eyes, could be moved. This goes to show the degree of perfection that today’s Japanese puppetry has accomplished and the position it occupies”
        
        'Über-marionette', coined Edward Gordon Craig. It is refered to in other texts however its still unclear if what he was refering was a puppet or an actor (le Boeuf, 2010).
        
        From reading Yamaguchi's account of Craig, it is possible to question Craigs reliability on these subjects. It seems apparent that he was not so much of an informative voice on the subject, and more aexploring a personal interest. Impressed by the puppets and copying sketches repeatedly of the mechanisms. Craig said “The Mask and Marionettes have only been nobly used by the Japanese”.
    - - This concluded that the difference between the same actions carried out with different emotions was mostly the change in paces or "lengthening or shortening the local times".
    - - :speech_balloon: "Concerned with a basic antimony, that of animate/inanimate, bunraku jeopardizes it, eliminates it without advantage for either of its terms ... Bunraku does not aim at 'animating' an inanimate object so as to make a piece of the body, a scrap of a man, 'alive', while retaining its vocation as a 'part'; it is not the simulation of the body that it seeks but, so to speak, its sensuous abstraction. (Barthes 1982: 48)"
  - - - (Read, 2006) wrote in the contempary theatre review journal about "The Sultan's Elephant", the display put on by Royal de Luxe in london in 2006. this proved to have some useful quotes and gave an informed, academic opinion on the giant marrionettes.
        
        :speech_balloon: "a relief because whenever elephants enter the frame there is something top-heavy about the expectations and semiotic overload that ensues."
        
        "almost everyone who saw it spoke about it in terms of scale and little else. Of course big things are wonderful; they stop us in our scaled down tracks and evoke wonder, as do tiny things (when we don’t tread on them)."
      - Joslin Mckenney chose to analyse the giant marionettes of Royal de Luxes liverpool display, when discussing scenography and spectacle in their play.
        
        :speech_balloon: "Christopher Baugh addresses the complex relationship between scenography, technology and spectacle through focusing on the use of stage technology, machinery and effects. He notes that ‘the use of sophisticated technology has been most frequently associated with spectacle, and spectacle has been consistently associated with extravagance, waste and courtly indulgence’ (2005: 7)." (Mckenney, 2013)
  - - - :speech_balloon: While the characters are animals, The Lion King is a human fable, and Taymor was determined that audiences see the fictional animals and real, live humans at the same time– what she termed the “double event.”
    - - Taken from Puppet Master (Lampert-Greaux, 1999) these quotes are in context of different puppets that Curry designed for Disney, after Lion King, a comparison can be drawn between them and this quote speaks of Curry's style as a puppet master.
        
        :speech_balloon:"It is very exciting to watch the energy flow from the dancers to the puppets." The puppets are attached to the operators using adapted backpack frames worn like harnesses, which can be adjusted to fit operators of all sizes. Some of the puppets are also connected at the ankles, so that walking helps provide extra control.
        
        :speech_balloon:'There is a real connection at eye level with the puppeteer and a second boost from the impact of the puppet.' As Curry sees it, there are two performers: the puppet and the puppeteer.
    - - This point could be argued for a whole essay alone, with strong evidence either way; quotes of the director calling them constumes, yet created by a puppet master who makes puppets. For the sake of this essay I shall consider them as puppets, but without further research, it would be acceptable to view them as both, perhaps a costume puppet?
    - - :speech_balloon:The visual combination of animal and human forms seen in "The Lion King" costumes were influenced by the Japanese Bunraku puppets, and the traditional Balinese moonlight ceremonies of Indonesia. The Bunraku puppets are about 3- to 4-feet tall, and are operated by three different puppeteers who are visible to the audience
    - - :speech_balloon: "In the experimental theater that informs Taymor's stage work, the concept of the performing object establishes a connection between European and non-European ritual drama. The performing object was aprimary concern of what became known as "machine aesthetics" (Bell 1999,16), a hybridization of human and machine that challenges the tendency to perceive the human body as sacred and natural." quote taken from 'Titus, Broadway, and Disney's magic capitalism; or, the wonderful world of Julie Taymor' (Anderson, 2013) Commenting on taymor's style of production
- - - - kinesiology -
        study of human and animal anatomical motion.. more related to sports physiology etc
      - Nonverbal Communication
        
        The Role of Human Body Movements in Mate Selection (Hugill et al, 2010)
        
        :speech_balloon: "From the biological perspective it is of paramount importance for the survival of an organism to decode information based upon the perception of other organisms' movements (Johansson, von Hofsten and Jansson, 1980; Pavlova, Krägeloh-Mann, Birbaumer, and Sokolov, 2002; Pollick, Paterson, Bruderlin, and Sanford, 2001; Troje, 2003)."
        
        :speech_balloon: "However, there is still a dearth of research that highlights the relevance of body movement in human social perception compared to the large number of studies on static cues (i.e., studies on face and body morphology) that have been put forward primarily through the expanding field of evolutionary psychology." (nadine) this is key as it appears that through this authors reasearch they came to the conclusion that more was understood by the impact of human appearance, rather than human motion.
        
        When researching body motion I came across a whole area called evolutionary psychology.
        
        (Matsumaru, 2009) aims to understand the negative impact of some 'artificial mechatronic systems' when trying to communicate emotionally with humans. he concludes;
        "Furthermore it is possible that not only the static form and appearance but also the dynamic movement and behavior are used to express the emotion (feeling, affect, etc.) of artificial object"
        
        This confirms to me that I have found a subject worthy of discussion that has been considered within another discipline
    - - (Sofer, 2016) raised the point that puppets are what some would consider 'low-tech' but says this is part of what theatre is and doesnt need to be digital or mechanical. This seems more of a defensive opinion than a considered conclusion; a bad arguement.
      - (Kaplin, 1999) talks of how Jim Henson, and Peter Schumann have diametrically opposite aesthetic's, yet are both revolutionists of their field, clearly meaning their work is successful. this suggested another concept to consider, that the aesthetics must be seen as subjective and there isnt a right and wrong answer to them.
  - - - Freud's notion of 'Das Unheimliche' is of relevance here as he speaks of the psychological effect from unfamiliarity. describing a feeling of something being somewhere inbetween where we cannot differentiate as to what we believe it to be, eliciting a negative response.
      - These two theories are often seen as the same thing but they differ. Their comparison was the subject of my level 5 essay andi feel i have a good understanding of them and their surrounding theories from the previous research.
    - - Written by Mori, a robotics professor, this is an arcticle on his research to understand why humanoid robitics were improving in complexity and design with technology, yet resulting in negative responses emotionally. He described a 'valley' when drawn as a graph, meaning as a humanoid becomes more realistic, it results in a negative reaction.
        
        He uses Bunraku as the only example that has escaped this valley, which is very significant.