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Rouge 28 and the Relationship between Human and Puppet
Since co-founding Rouge28 in 2005, Paul Piris has explored the relationship between puppetry and other performance forms. Whether combining puppetry and existing texts – such as 2005’s adaptation of Boris Vian’s The Heartsnatcher – or fusing Japanese horror and life-size puppets (2019’s Kwaidan), Piris’ direction challenges simplistic notions about the potential of the medium and strives towards an inclusive and provocative dramaturgy. Unsurprisingly, Piris’ approach combines both the intellectual rigour found in his academic writings and an intuitive imagination that speaks both to the immediacy of the marionette tradition and the experimental possibilities suggested by the presence of the human and the inanimate in the same theatrical space. And the distinctive series of productions that have given Rouge28 a unique identity are rooted in Piris’ own experiences of creating and watching puppetry.
‘I came to puppetry through theatre,’ Piris explains. ‘I saw, by chance, in the late 90s at a street festival in north of France a performance by acclaimed German puppeteer Ilka Schönbein without knowing that I was watching puppetry. This performance where the performer was interacting with her puppets stayed in my mind.’ This moment then manifested in the adaptation of The Heartsnatcher: ‘I took a strong interest in the relationship on stage between humans and puppets as I found their interactions and their co-presence unique and bizarre.’
Upon joining the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama to study directing, Piris met Aya Nakamura, ‘who was studying puppetry in the same MA course. Since then, we have been collaborating through Rouge28 Theatre to create puppet shows for adult audiences.’ The company’s aesthetic has consistently explored what Piris calls ‘a special type of performance in which the puppeteer is also a character which interacts with the puppet that she manipulates.’
Piris continues: ‘It puts the relationship between puppets and humans at the centre of our work. We also always use realistic life-size puppets in our work in order to blur the differences between humans and puppets.’ And while their work has been critically acclaimed and popular, this juxtaposition has allowed the company to range across diverse style or performance and subjects.
While Piris acknowledges that their work exists outside of traditional genealogies of puppetry – ‘none of us had any traditional training,’ he admits – he does recognise a trend within puppetry, from the 1980s that shares a strategy ‘in which puppeteers have started to interact with their puppets as characters. Not only do they become visible on stage but they became part of the fictional reality of the puppet as characters. This movement has been initiated by artists such as Neville Tranter, Ilka Schönbein, Philippe Genty and Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté for instance.’
The company has existed through a period of immense technological innovation and change, and this interaction allows their performances to comment on contemporary aesthetic and existential questions. As Piris points out, ‘I think that it is even more relevant nowadays with the development of AI that are programmed to behave like humans, and the fact that with the current pandemic people have started to interact less and less directly but through images of themselves via computer screens. The puppet remains a big inspiration for us because it allows us to explore new forms of alterity between human and machines and to try to understand what it means to be human.’
This vision has, almost inevitably, reflected on the most pressing of modern concerns: the pandemic. The use of the puppet as performer has an ancient pedigree (2006’s Furies draws on the Eumenides of Aeschylus, while Urashima Taro was inspired by Japanese mythology) and this appears to have encouraged in Rouge28 a willingness to address ideas that speak to the human condition in a fundamental, existential manner, without losing a sense of the immediate situation. ‘The puppet reveals the loneliness of human beings communicating via screens but being isolated from one another,’ Piris concludes, ‘because the puppet is ultimately an absent Other: it is not a human being that is in front of the audience but just a construction of papier-maché and fabrics that is the image of a human being.’
