On the post-human political potential of puppets: a case study of Storm,an eco-activist

Abstract

With the confluence of interest in socio-natural or human-nonhuman entanglements and concern for the maintenance of a minimal humanism within such post-human ontologies, the puppet arises as a post-human artform that is well placed to address both simultaneously. To argue that the puppet is a post-human artform is not a new proposition, but what is new in this paper is its detailed account of how different features of puppet performance function in post-human fashion, both drawing the human spectator into the performance as part of its singularity and rendering accessible the enviro-political message behind the performance. Focusing on a giant (10 m tall) puppet – Storm – who attended COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 to promote protection of the world’s seas, we first address how the post-human puppet form was brought to performative life through identification of a series of constructional mechanisms, which function as spatial manoeuvres to reposition the spectator with respect to both the puppet character and her political message. Subsequently, we consider how these mechanisms differentially influence legibility, acuity and potency of the political message, explore potential risks to the effectiveness of those constructional mechanisms, and draw out three foundational tensions that must seemingly be navigated for optimal political effectiveness (relating to post-human, political and spatial concerns respectively). Ultimately, we hypothesise a bidirectional spatial and subjective transition on the part of the spectator, progressing from being one who becomes bound into the collective singularity of the puppet assemblage to one who funnels the agency of the collective singularity into their one-ness for optimum political potency. Thus, we present both a detailed empirical and critical reading of one specific puppet performance and provide a more abstracted account of the political potency of (giant) puppets.

Introduction

In the context of well-known associations between puppets and politics (e.g. long-running popularity of the political satire television series Spitting Image and its new interpretations for both screen and stage), giant-sized puppets seem increasingly used to convey political messages and celebrate cultural distinctiveness. While there is a long history of the use of effigies and puppets in political protest, dating back to pre-capitalist times, ¹ which might suggest that we overstate our case about increasing use of giant puppets, effigies and puppets are not the same thing and our observation relates to a specific type and use of puppet. In an examination of the persecution of protest-related effigies/puppets by American police forces, for example, David Graeber compares effigies as having few if any moving parts and that can be passed around but not manipulated with puppets as having moving parts and being manipulated by a single person. ² By contrast, the giant-sized puppets to which we refer are those that are so large that they must be operated by a team of people, often aided by machinery, and that are not only objects to be seen but subjects with whom to interact. While both ‘effigies’ and ‘puppets’ can be powerful representational, affective and political forces in a variety of contexts, it is this type of giant puppet (manipulable as well as representational) that seems to be increasingly prominent as a technology of political protest and cultural expression, as political messages continue to be embedded in mainstreamed cultural events to present an alternative future, ³ wherein the crowd becomes part of the performance. ⁴ For example, a recent paper in this journal looked at the monumental public arts project ‘The Walk’, involving the 3.5 m tall puppet Amal, which was designed to bring to public attention the plight of child refugees, but which did so by integrating the political message with cultural narratives relevant to the place of performance through subjectification of the puppet. ⁵ Thus, while acknowledging the historical roots of such giant figures, and overlaps and intersections between effigies and puppets, not all giant figures are alike. There appears to us to be a shift occurring in how such figures are operationalised for political purposes, moving beyond the construction of insubstantial effigies to be mocked and destroyed by their creators as part of the protest ⁶ and taking shape as the construction of monumental, venerated puppets granted their own identity and the agency to interact with the crowd in telling their own story. It is with this possibility in mind that we engage with Storm, who walked at COP26 to highlight climate change, to explore how such puppets function politically.

Our starting point is acknowledging that puppets are commonly associated with both the political and the post-human. Bruno Latour describes the potential of puppets to act as ‘sensitizing mediums’, challenging the subject-object relation that has characterised anthropocentric ways of seeing. ⁷ Instead, ‘you are moved by the thing you move’, implying a relationship of mutual dependence and entanglement. ⁸ In post-humanism, the ‘human, individualised self’ is rejected in favour of an ‘“assemblage” of human and non-human actors’ which, Braidotti argues, is a more ethical model of how we should conceive of human existence in a post-anthropocentric world. ⁹ It is not new, then, to consider puppetry a post-human artform, in which the human is visibly and materially incorporated into an assemblage with non-human actants, ¹⁰ as evidenced in notions such as Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘bio-object’ (symbiosis between actor and object), Frank Camilleri’s ‘bodyworld’ (mind-body assemblage) and Banfield’s ‘conjoined puppet-puppeteer bodyscape as its own space’. ¹¹ This makes it an ideal artform to use in the context of environmental activism; beyond offering an alternative narrative of how we might interact with non-human ‘others’ in a post-anthropocentric world, it enacts these entangled relations at the material level of the artform. Building on this scholarship, we explore how giant puppets activate a political-ethical sensibility through manipulation of their post-human ambiguities, we consider potential impediments to such efforts and we extrapolate from that to hypothesise how – if successful – such political-ethical sensibility might translate into political action post-performance. Our emphasis is thus on how rather than what. Rather than focusing on political actualities (e.g. subsequent actions from behavioural change to formal protest) or conceptualisations (e.g. resistant/prefigurative, big/little P/p politics) we are concerned with the potentiation of political possibilities within the (giant) puppet performance, and how performative factors might facilitate progression from political sensibility within the performance to political action beyond the performance, irrespective of what form such possibilities might take and how we might theorise them.

We establish our case through close examination of one giant eco-activist puppet: Storm (see Figure 1). Storm is a 10 m tall puppet created by Simon McIntyre and Kim Bergsagel of Vision Mechanics, an Edinburgh based arts organisation specialising in cross-artform collaborations, and site-specific work. The puppet was constructed by weaving willow branches together and was made entirely from recycled and natural materials. Aided by eight puppeteers, Storm began her journey as part of Celtic Connections’ inaugural Coastal Connections Day in January 2020 to mark Scotland’s official Year of Coasts and Waters 2020. The project was supported by funding from the Scottish Government and Nature Scot. Depicting a goddess of the sea, the purpose of Storm was to convey the message: protect our seas, stop destroying our planet. ¹² Storm’s walk was accompanied by a soundscape created by composer and singer Mairi Campbell and Dave Gray. Following a break prompted by the pandemic, Storm visited eleven coastal towns in the autumn of 2021, this time with school and community engagements, including performances by the Soundhouse Choir and artist-led social enterprise Oi Musica. Consistent with Oi Musica’s message that ‘Enough is Enough’, Vision Mechanics created a Storm Grove as part of the rewilding of the Ancient Caledonian, led by Trees for Life, ¹³ to offset Storm’s carbon footprint. Finally, Storm appeared in Govan, Glasgow for COP26 on 10th November 2021.

Figure 1.

Storm.

As we were not physically present in Govan, our examination of Storm’s political effectiveness is grounded in Author One’s visual analysis of over 2.5 hours of recordings of live-streamed footage available online (see https://visionmechanics.org/storm-giant-puppet/) including the accompanying soundtrack and onscreen textual narration. Analysis proceeded in three stages, beginning with a review of the entire event to craft a summary of the performance, become familiar with Storm’s form, functionality and interactivity, and to identify specific instances within or features of the event that drew attention. Subsequently, more detailed examination of those instances and features, for example, notable interactions between Storm and members of the audience, specific gestures or postures that stood out, and evident transitions in Storm’s movement and attention, was conducted, wherein questions were posed, including what is happening, how it unfolds, how context is important and with what apparent implications. The third and final stage of analysis involved reviewing commonalities and idiosyncrasies across and between the instances and features examined to formulate an organised account of the features and functions that we deemed most important to forging and manipulating puppet-spectator relations and to rendering accessible Storm’s political message.

This analysis identified a series of effects seemingly generated by Storm, associated with different parts of Storm’s anatomy, which we characterise as a series of spatial manoeuvres insofar as they facilitate the repositioning of spectators with respect to both Storm as a character (e.g. identification and empathy with the puppet) and the political message that she carries (e.g. its legibility and usability). These spatialising manoeuvres were considered to invite integration of the human spectator into the nonhuman puppet as part of the puppet universe (the performance space and the world that it conjures), thereby making tangible at the level of the human body the political message inscribed in the nonhuman body, with potential to prompt or encourage political action after the performance. We begin by summarising and elaborating these body-related manoeuvres and effects at the heart of Storm’s post-human subjective and political nature, which are visually depicted in a puppet mandala, through which we further elaborate distinctions between effigies and (giant) puppets. Subsequently we consider which constructional mechanisms seemed most important for different aspects of Storm’s political effectiveness (legibility, acuity and potency) and we reflect critically on these perceived constructional mechanisms as also potentially obstructing Storm’s post-human political potential, which leads to the identification of three tensions underpinning her political effectiveness, concerning the post-human, the political and the spatial respectively. Finally, we extend this analysis to hypothesise a bidirectional transition on the part of spectators with respect to their incorporation into and subsequent withdrawal from the puppet universe, through which enhanced political agency might be attained.

The puppet mandala: constructing Storm as a post-human political subject

Use of the term mandala here should not be taken to imply any religious associations but as an aesthetic form, presenting a generalised circular depiction of this specific puppet universe. Our analysis gave rise to 10 corporeal features (mandala points) notable in constituting Storm as a post-human political subject, as illustrated in Figure 2, which are discussed below under two headings – ‘body and body parts’ and ‘more-than-bodily’ – to aid navigation through the text. These features gave rise to 16 constructional mechanisms through which Storm as a post-human subject was constructed, the relationship between Storm and the audience was established and the political message was both constructed and partially obstructed. These features and mechanisms were associated with seven spatial manoeuvres, which are variously conceptual, material, affective and performative in emphasis – that reposition the human spectator with respect to both Storm the subject and her political message, some of which are common to effigies and puppets, but some of which are distinct to (giant) puppets.

Figure 2.

Puppet mandala.

Body and body parts

The mandala point of the body consists of representational, material and performative elements. Storm’s identification as a ‘goddess of the sea’ simultaneously visually represents the ocean (zoe) and humanity (bios), establishing a post-human ‘non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction’. ¹⁴ This constructional mechanism is consolidated in the materiality of the puppet; Storm is made from willow, but fishing netting and seaweed are also incorporated into the puppet, signifying an entanglement of the natural with the manufactured. This embodies her ontological message, drawing attention to the ways in which the effects of human consumerism are becoming a tangible part of ecological systems, and positioning ‘humans in relation to, and in assemblage with various technologies and other beings’. ¹⁵ The puppeteers are physically conjoined to the puppet with ropes, and the movement of the puppeteers is restricted by and controlled by the puppet just as the puppeteers restrict and control the movement of the puppet. There is a gestural reciprocity between human and puppet, which reflects the relationship between humanity and the oceans (or by extension, the more-than-human world). The body of Storm, therefore, embeds the human in the non-human, in terms of representation, materiality and performance, and although effigies can embed the same in similar representational and material fashion, the performance potential of an animated puppet – as detailed below – differs from that of an effigy precisely because of the puppet’s greater manipulability (beyond the whole body movement of an effigy) and its associated interactive capacity.

Unsurprisingly, Storm’s eyes are important to her subjectivity. At the beginning of Storm’s sequence, she is completely still before awakening, opening her eyes and looking at the public. This initial small act of performed agency – choosing to open her eyes – immediately establishes Storm as subject rather than object and distinguishes Storm as a puppet, not an effigy, which lacks this capacity for bodily micro-movements. Rather than succumbing to the subject-object relation that is typical of an anthropocentric ‘scopic regime’, Storm gazes back. ¹⁶ The subject-subject relation is created through the animation of Storm, which crucially prompts spectators to respond to her as if she is a real person. On the livestream of Storm’s journey, Vision Mechanics wrote in the comments: ‘What will she see. . .?’. ¹⁷ Being subjected to the gaze of Storm renders the audience active participants in the narrative. Through mutual gaze and by acknowledging Storm, they are engaging with the effects of climate change personified, making her message accessible and potentially moving audiences one step closer to acting on these effects, which are immediately represented in the suffering anthropomorphic Storm.

Storm’s hands also carry significance, beyond their role in gestural mutuality and interaction with spectators and the opacity of bodily delimitation and locus of control. Robert Maslen comments that puppets are ‘the embodiment of anarchy, as their unfeeling bodies make them impervious to damage, their seeming detachment from their puppeteers absolves them of responsibility, with the result that many puppets are violent things often subjected to violence’. ¹⁸ While effigies can similarly be violently and destructively employed for political protest, Storm’s manual gentility and willow-to-flesh intimacy with spectators challenges the unfeelingness of the puppet, highlighting the role of manipulation and spectator focus in the subjectivisation and politicisation of the puppet by contributing to an empathic and reciprocal relationship between human and puppet. As Stacey Alaimo describes ‘there’s no nature that we just act upon. Instead it’s also acting back upon us, as we are always already the very substance and the stuff of the world that we are changing’. ¹⁹ This ‘unruly’ nature of the puppet highlights the materiality of the human and provides a pre-industrial example of Haraway’s observation that ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’. ²⁰ Moreover, as a goddess of the sea, Storm adopts a powerful role whereby she is imagined controlling the seas and thus is also a puppeteer of sorts. While we might equally consider Storm a goddess divested of her power through the competing geological force of humanity (represented by the puppeteers), we can – on a third reading – consider her own potential motivation of political agency as another manifestation of the puppet-as-puppeteer, subsequently realising through the human performance of politics the politics of the puppet performance.

In walking through the places that she visited, Storm’s feet are important, and while an effigy can have feet, its lack of manipulability means that these lack function, so Storm – as a puppet – has greater bodily synergy with spectators than is attainable by an effigy. As an intra-active artwork, Storm was engaged in an intra-dependent relationship not only with the puppeteers and audience, but also the social space through which she moved. Although the route was planned and roughly timed, and some events were orchestrated, the specificities of encounters and events along the way could not be foreseen so rather than exhibiting linear temporality, Storm’s journey embodied ‘the dynamic and more cyclical time of becoming’. ²¹ This allows for ‘multiple connections and lines of interaction that necessarily connect the [puppet] to its many “outsides”’ that are co-constitutive of meaning. ²² Significantly, Storm walked at a contemplative pace, encouraging engagement with her not just as a spectacular moving giant and feat of creative engineering (setting her apart from both effigies and more rudimentary puppets) but in detail with respect to her form, aesthetic, interactions and message, enhancing the political and affective power of the moment of encounter. Moreover, Storm did not walk alone, but was accompanied by the puppeteers and audience members, and this co-perambulation both extended the political moment and reinforced the unity of the human-nonhuman assemblage. People and puppet move as one body, one agency and one concern, facilitating a sense of solidarity in spatial experience, ethical concern and political motive, albeit that perspective is not totalising by virtue of an individual’s location within the union and the spectators’ capacity to join and leave at will.

While lacking a heart of her own, Storm’s story is heartfelt. As Weik von Mossner argues, ‘narrative events are only truly meaningful to us when they are experienced by someone – ideally someone we know well enough to care about’, ²³ which (for both effigies and puppets) might entail empathy and care or enmity and destruction. Storm can be seen to represent both the oceans and humanity, with each suffering the consequences of climate change due to their entangled relationality, while her constant movement suggests humanity that is displaced, which alludes to the consequences of sea level rise. Storm personifies sea level rise to entice the audience to ‘notice’ and empathise. This supplements the mutuality of gaze and other constructional mechanisms that make Storm humanly relatable despite her nonhumanity and intersects with the netty materiality of her body that evokes affectively powerful imagery of wildlife ensnared in marine pollution. This holds potential to stimulate intense empathy for the puppet and her plight, which can be extended to those similarly impacted the world over, both human and nonhuman. Storm, therefore, renders climate change a matter of concern rather than of fact, sensitising audiences to its effects and potentially motivating action. ²⁴

Finally, alongside matters of the heart come matters of the head (belief in the puppet), which collectively generate investment on the part of the spectator in the puppet as a thinking, feeling subject. As an artform, puppetry relies on both puppeteer and audience instilling life into an inanimate object, and – inevitably – puppeteer and audience also have the power to reverse this process, taking life away. Unlike the actor, Matthew Isaac Cohen argues, who ‘has a social life outside the theatre, the puppet can be considered an “agent of presence”; existing only in the moment of performance’. ²⁵ Akin to Braidotti’s ‘post-human vital materialism’ in which the human organism ‘is an in-between that is plugged into and connected to a variety of possible sources and forces’. ²⁶ , the puppet manifests this post-human vital materialism as Storm’s ‘life’ is tangibly connected to the lives of the puppeteers and audience. Their belief in Storm is what sustains her, and the strength of this belief is evidenced in the public reactions to the puppet: ‘Can you hear me?’, ‘Move your hand if you can hear me’. ²⁷ Despite Storm being manufactured, audiences responded to her as if she was alive, and this ‘belief’ in the puppet contributes to audience receptivity to her message, making puppetry more real and more powerful than any other medium. ²⁸

More-than-bodily

The bodyscape focuses on the indivisibility of control. Storm is supported on either side by human puppeteers, who occupy the periphery of the puppet. The puppeteers are physically conjoined to the puppet with ropes, making it difficult to see clearly where the puppet ends, and the puppeteer begins. Through ‘drawing attention to the conjoined puppet-puppeteer bodyscape as its own space’, the puppeteer is subsumed into the bodyscape, reminiscent of parallels that have been drawn between the post-human and postdramatic theatre in which ‘the body is no longer a site of performative epistemology but merely one component of the theatrical landscape’. ²⁹ Consistent with Braidotti’s post-human vitalist notion of ‘becoming-imperceptible’, the audience perceives not a bounded self in action but the ‘human-nonhuman assemblage as a locus of agency’. ³⁰ Moreover, as the puppeteers are distributed among the spectators, the puppeteers also become imperceptible, such that the spectators can be perceptually and performatively drawn into the bodyscape of the puppet, with this decentralised agency potentially resulting in a feeling of ‘happening together’, as part of a greater whole. While the border between an effigy and the person/people conveying it might also be ambiguous and the conveyors might become lost amidst the spectators, the effigy’s existence as an object to be seen and acted upon rather than a subject to be known and interacted with, invests the puppet with mutually performative qualities that enable this ‘happening together’ to be felt at the embodied level as well as perceived at the conceptual level.

The scale of Storm has two constructional mechanisms attached, positioning the puppet as divine and conveying the ‘geological force’ of human agency, both of which upscale the significance of her message. Storm towers over, and therefore minimises, the puppeteers, which visually creates an inverted Great Chain of Being. Instead of an anthropomorphic ‘God’ at the top of the hierarchy, Storm – non-human, non-living yet contradicting and usurping these categories through her sheer vitality – is the focal point of both the gaze of the puppeteers and of the audience. Thus, the Great Chain of Being gives way for a post-human elevation (or indeed, animation) of matter as agentive, upscaling the significance of the more-than-human. Similarly, ‘[scaling] up our imagination of the human’, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is necessary for experiencing the geophysical force that is the human. ³¹ This is achieved through the figure of the giant puppet, which contrasts with the history of the puppet as miniature. As Stewart argues ‘We find the miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history’. ³² The concept of the puppet as miniature and controllable has, in a sense, outgrown itself, as has the possibility of a ‘private, individual history’ excluding the ‘public and natural history’. Akin to a (giant) effigy, the figure of the giant puppet necessarily spills out into the public sphere, in this case representing the way in which the effects of humanity on the environment have grown out of control. Indeed, ‘while the miniature represents a mental world of proportion, control, and balance, the gigantic presents a physical world of disorder and disproportion’. ³³ The mutual performativity between spectator and puppet again distinguishes the giant puppet from the giant effigy, as it enrols the spectator into the performative and political disorder, simultaneously making them complicit in their existence and potentially agentive in their dissolution, humanising and personalising the political message of the performance within the everyday lived context of the spectator.

The place of Storm’s performance is also significant, in both a structural (COP26) and a geographical (coastal) sense. Appearing in Glasgow during COP26 highlighted the political opportunity and attention to climate change afforded by the session, which interacted with Storm’s scale to emphasise the importance of COP26 generating meaningful actions. Contributing to and perpetuating a time of growing environmental activism in the UK, Storm was embedded in an ecology of many other forms of activism that were happening contemporaneously, yet she was also highly localised in her messaging. As previously noted, ‘spaces are transformed by puppet performances, prompting spectators to question and experience them anew’. ³⁴ The site-specificity of Storm’s performances in coastal regions localised the focus of environmental concerns that were relevant to coastal communities and had the effect of targeting such concerns to a more manageable scale. However, the coincidence of the structural and the geographical enabled Storm to tie that localised focus into the global scale of both the political issue at stake and the political forum set up to address it. Storm thus not only linked the global and the local, but also the personal, and facilitated the connecting of considerations at the level of the individual through the collective to the panhuman. Storm’s name – denoting both ecological threat and potential for change – deftly unites these scalar aspects of place and emphasises the generative, transformative potential of puppetry through human/non-human interactions, which exceed those afforded by effigies.

The complex positioning of the spectating public with respect to society mirrors their complex positioning with respect to the puppet. With the incorporation of netting into a puppet otherwise consisting of natural materials, the artwork makes visible the systems, processes and effects of human consumerism: specifically, the slow violence of environmental destruction enrolling both those who cast the net and those who demand the fish. There is a double irony at play here: the nominal positioning of the spectator as a bystander to the performance is belied by their conscription into the puppet, and the economic complicity of the spectator within the environmental issue that they fight against politically as an outsider is made visible, and the latter is achieved through the former. As articulated elsewhere, spectators have capacity to generate their own and shared meanings, ³⁵ and puppets such as Storm can be especially effective in producing shared meaning by incorporating spectators into the story as coproducers of the narrative, and this performative co-production accentuates the potential of the puppet – relative to the effigy – to reflect the political message of the performance back onto the lived situation of the spectator as that message is performatively embodied in both puppet and human. Thus, while puppetry allows for de-centring the human from the position of protagonist who ‘acts’ (and is judged for it) in the context of the performance, this manoeuvre simultaneously recentres audience focus on their own uncertain role in both the performance and the political issue to which it speaks. In this reconfiguration of the human from singular and unified whole to ‘radical relationality’, ³⁶ the climate emergency is depicted as a ‘quantum soup of possibility’ within which many material agencies are at work and from which multiple realities may emerge. ³⁷ As one of those material agencies, the spectator is prompted to reflect on their own entangled role both between individual and collective contexts and among complex political and economic systems, signposting the political potential of puppetry in inviting the emergence of new realities (intimating multiple political possibilities), and highlighting this radical relationality as foundational to the distinction between puppet and effigy.

The political power of the puppet

The 10 corporeal features identified on the puppet mandala gave rise to 16 constructional mechanisms (such as gestural reciprocity, empathy, belief, mutuality, bidirectionality and scale), through which Storm as a post-human subject was constructed, the relationship between Storm and the audience was established, and the political message was made accessible. Those corporeal features and constructional mechanisms were associated with seven spatial manoeuvres, which were proposed to reposition the human spectator as a subject and political agent. Storm’s body, for example, embedded the human in the nonhuman, hands and eyes established mutuality and interactivity between the human and nonhuman, and bodyscape both decentralised agency and ambiguated societal relations. These spatial manoeuvres were proposed as potentially generating certain effects on the part of the audience, with affective congruence bringing investment in the assemblage and its agency as a singularity, and the ambiguous decentralisation of the bodyscape generating a feeling of ‘happening together’, of being part of a greater whole, in both performative and political terms.

Chains of effectivity can thus be drawn from individual points on the puppet mandala (hands, eyes, heart, head) through constructional mechanisms (bidirectionality, mutuality, empathy, belief) that function spatially (embedding, interacting, coming together) with potential to reposition the viewer with respect to both Storm as a subject (personal engagement, investment and feeling part of a bigger whole) and the political message that she carries (embodying the message, collectivising personal aims) through their conscription into the performing bodyscape. The entanglement of human-nonhuman, politico-economic and individual-collective considerations were thus brought to life across spatial scales, thereby potentiating both self-examination through the performance and political action after the performance. Yet, it is one thing to attune to a political message through a cultural performance; it is quite another thing to act on that political message after the performance, whether that involves discussion with friends, a cross on a ballot paper, behavioural change, formal protest or anything else. Hence, beyond identifying the roles played by constructional mechanisms in directing attention to political messages and possibilities, we now delve more critically into the specific qualities of this giant puppet, to consider their potential to obfuscate as much as elucidate the political message and therefore to debilitate as much as potentiate subsequent political action.

For a cultural performance to give rise to subsequent political action, the political message behind the performance must be accessible, personally relatable and meaningful, while potential targets, mechanisms and opportunities for political action must be identifiable and attainable. Here, we refer to these elements as legibility (ease of comprehension) of political message, acuity of its meaning (precision in grasping its relevance) for the individual spectator and potency (the power to stimulate personal or collective action) in indicating targets, mechanisms and opportunities for subsequent political action. Phrased another way, legibility speaks to the accessibility of the ‘why’ of the performance, acuity is concerned with formulating the ‘what’ that any spectator might be able to do about it, and potency addresses the question of ‘how’ any possible doings might be done. Insofar as the political message must be legible if it is to be grasped in detail and if action is to be taken in response to it, there is a clear trajectory from legibility through acuity to potency, but we can also consider how legibility, acuity and potency relate differently to the mandala points and constructional mechanisms. Legibility relied mostly on representational and material aspects (e.g. the netty body) in conveying Storm’s core political message, supported by spatial manoeuvres of embedding, affective congruence, etc., that facilitated engagement with that message through the puppet as a subject. Acuity – in relating that core message to the specific circumstances of an individual spectator – was closely associated with performative aspects (e.g. hands, eyes, feet, but also body and bodyscape), as the complexity and indeterminacy of the locus of agency within the puppet assemblage, within which the spectator has become implicated, reflected the political message back onto the spectator by highlighting their own complicity in the social, economic and political relations that underpin it. Potency, on the other hand, seemed bound up with situation or context as these encapsulated opportunities for (and constraints on) actions for the individual spectator and involved spatial manoeuvres of scaling (‘speaking to’ a global conference), localising (focusing on coastal issues) and distributing (possibilities for collective action). Hence, the detailed empirical analysis of Storm’s wanderings suggests that diverse mechanisms and manoeuvres can be differentially mobilised to support spectator progression from political sensibility (activated by post-human representational and material constructions of Storm as a subject), through political intention (facilitated by ambiguated agency and complicity in both the puppet performance and the political message that it carries), to – potentially – political action after the performance (scaffolded by indicated emphases, arenas and targets for action).

As our research entailed visual analysis from a distance without any participant testimony or personal involvement, we offer no conclusions with respect to the efficacy of Storm in generating subsequent political action (in any form), but we extrapolate from the visual analysis to generate suggestions with respect to elements of the performance that ring metaphorical alarm bells with respect to the legibility, acuity and potency of Storm’s political message. Our contention is that the very qualities that distinguish puppets from effigies and that render Storm so potentially politically powerful (interactivity, mutuality, ambiguity) are also the very qualities that risk impeding that political potential by obfuscating rather than elucidating the political message and debilitating rather than potentiating subsequent political action. For example, powerful affective congruence (e.g. intense empathy) generated through interactivity and mutuality can engage and motivate spectators but also risks overwhelming the political message (and any intention to act) through emotional paralysis, while the scaling up of the harmful power of humanity to the geological level risks reducing the sense of individual efficacy and subsequent political activity. Similarly, associations with religion or spirituality risk generating a sense that the issue is beyond human control, potentially reducing any sense of personal or collective responsibility or efficacy. When considering belief as a constructional mechanism, then, we must be mindful of what it is that we are encouraging belief in. Constructing belief in the puppet with respect to agency rather than divinity might mitigate against the overriding of personal efficacy by belief in divine supremacy. Moreover, belief in the collective agency of the singularised puppet assemblage can work in tandem with the scalar consideration of human impact at the geological level, by highlighting both the need and capacity for collective political action in the face of both the scale of the issue and the seeming unassailability of structural and hegemonic forces. Conscription into the puppet performance might thus extend the sense of ‘happening together’ into the political realm after the performance: the sense of collective agency of the puppet assemblage might be channelled into subsequent political action in recognition of the potential power of collective action, even if enacted on an individual basis, yet such potential remains vulnerable to being overshadowed by emotional paralysis.

The decentralisation of agency within the puppet assemblage/bodyscape and the associated acknowledgement of the distribution of accountability among ambiguous societal relations might be similarly double-edged, facilitating the collectivisation of personal (political) aims but simultaneously rendering ambiguous the most appropriate target for political action, given the interwoven structural forces that occlude and preclude opportunities for such action. There is, for example, a distinction between the clarity of Storm’s central messages about climate change, overfishing and marine pollution that are embodied in her form and the broader messages about economic complicity, political imperatives and more-than-human morality that are bound up with the nature and location of the event. Despite facilitating the forging of connections between individual circumstances and broader societal, structural and hegemonic forces, thereby highlighting both individual complicity and agency, the complexity and ambiguity that are brought to the surface through performative conscription into the bodyscape risk masking, overshadowing and undermining political intentions and actions. While the quantum soup of possible worlds accommodates multiple and diverse spectator positionalities and provides multiple options for political emphasis, target and action, thereby maximising audience buy-in, this quantum soup of potentiality also places onus on the spectator to carve their own path through the myriad ambiguous possibilities, with potentially paralysing effects. The ambiguity between personal economic complicity and the political potential or otherwise to act individually and/or collectively comes to the fore in the performative assemblage and is important for rendering the political issue of personal relevance, but the ambiguity itself can be detrimental to identifying specific attainable actions, and this is accentuated in the specific context of Storm’s coastal walk and attendance at COP26. This context potentially facilitates acuity and potency by situating the spectator with respect to the coast and COP26 and identifying specific issues (fish consumption) and political arenas/targets (elected representatives), but might also mitigate against subsequent political action through scalar complexity that makes local issues seem unassailable in the face of global forces, leading to a sense of political impotence and undermining political intentions that might otherwise emerge. Hence, while Storm’s bodily form renders her core political messages matters of personal concern, while the mutuality and ambiguity within the performative bodyscape highlight spectator complicity and potentiality within economic, societal and political contexts, and while the spatial and structural context of her performance point to the imperative and potential for collectivist political action, the very qualities that render Storm so potentially powerful are also seemingly the greatest threats to her efficacy.

If a spectator is to harness the sense of collective agency gained during the performance beyond the space-time of the performance itself (whether as individual or collective action), they are required to comprehend simultaneously the complexity of (giant) puppet and human bodies ³⁸ and both the complexity of the political narrative within the performance and its applicability to and malleability within their own life beyond the performance, but the interactivity, mutuality and ambiguity that facilitate personal engagement with the political message bring into play at least three tensions that the spectator must seemingly navigate. A post-human factor highlights the need to maintain sufficient ‘humanity’ to facilitate relatability while establishing sufficient ‘non-exceptionalism’ to optimise ontological links between humans and nonhumans. In other words, balancing belief in the puppet singularity (assemblage) with acknowledging one’s position as a unique element of that singularity. A political aspect foregrounds the complex distributed nature of problematic relations of production and political systems and highlights the need to maintain the sense of wholeness with respect to the magnitude of the issue while also potentiating the individual as agentive within a distributed or collective context. Finally, a spatial perspective denotes the need to emphasise the scale and significance of the challenge while not overwhelming the spectator with a sense of forlorn hopelessness, or to emphasise the local importance of the issue without rendering it insignificant. Moreover, whether political actions are subsequently taken, and what form they take, is contingent upon the intersection between the perceived scale and manageability of the issue and the personal resources and opportunities to undertake individual and collective action, thereby rendering the translation from political sensibility through political intention to political action anything but straightforward.

Nonetheless, if the collective agency experienced within the singularity of the puppet universe can be harnessed and sustained beyond the performance itself and translated from the puppet universe to social and political space, the potential risks of political impotence, personal apathy and emotional paralysis might be avoided. If successful, the spectator would thereby transition from a state of a perceived singular ‘one’ before the performance, becoming bound into the singularised many of the puppet assemblage during the performance, to the singularised many being funnelled into the one after the performance. On this reading, not only is the human both decentred by and contained within the puppet, but the (giant) puppet is both centred by and contained within the human, reflecting Chakrabarty’s encouragement to scale up our imaginaries of the human. ³⁹ Ultimately, through the post-human form of the puppet, a spectator might remain post-human beyond the bounds of the performance by carrying with them that sense of collective yet singularised agency into everyday behaviours and political actions, exemplifying the puppet as a technology that acts as a threshold to the construction of a plurality of possible worlds. ⁴⁰ Despite the risks and caveats identified above, the core political message (legibility, sensibility), scope for personally meaningful action (acuity, intention) and sense of political agency (potency, action) can all be fostered through the constructional mechanisms and spatial manoeuvres outlined earlier, thereby facilitating the translation of site-specific puppet performances into post-performance political action.

Conclusion

Our intention in this paper was to examine how giant puppet performances are rendered politically effective. We advocated the view that – as a post-human artform – puppets have considerable potential to aid practical and critical engagement with issues such as human-nonhuman entanglements and we set out to elucidate aspects of how the giant puppet functions as a potentiator of political action. We took as our case study one specific puppet performance: 10-m-tall Storm’s walk around Govan, Glasgow during COP26, which was analysed visually through livestreamed footage available via the internet. Storm was proposed to forge cognitive, affective and performative links between the spectator, the puppet-human assemblage and the political message (and thereby the environment) that motivated Storm’s manufacture and wanderings. The spectator potentially becomes an integral part of the multiple singularity or assemblage (the puppet and its universe) through a series of constructional mechanisms anchored on different facets of Storm’s anatomy, which were visualised in a puppet mandala. These mechanisms were seen as functioning in spatial fashion, potentially repositioning the spectator with respect to both Storm and her political message, generating specific effects on both a subjective and political level. For example, affective engagement with Storm as a human-like figure allowed investment in the puppet and its agency, potentially enhancing spectator receptivity to Storm’s political message but also risking overpowering that message through emotional paralysis, while the target of belief might be politically beneficial if focused on collective agency but politically detrimental if focused on divine figures.

These constructional mechanisms and their effects were associated with different aspects of the political message behind the performance: legibility, acuity and potency. Legibility of the core message was primarily established through representational and material aspects of the puppet body and the congruence achieved between spectator and puppet via affect and belief, thereby coming to embody within the human spectator the political message constructed through the bodily form of the puppet. Greater acuity of understanding of the political message comes as the imperceptibility of the locus of control or agency for the puppet assemblage comes to encapsulate the complexity of socio-political relations underpinning the political message, potentially prompting spectator awareness of their own ambiguous yet interwoven position with respect to both performative and political agency. Potency was related to broader contextual features of the performance such as its spatial (coastal), structural (COP26) and scalar (local-global relevance) characteristics. Potential risks associated with the constructional mechanisms were also elaborated, drawing out their double-edged nature in – for example – potentially both motivating and paralysing political intentions and both illuminating and ambiguating targets for political action, thereby establishing the interactivity, mutuality and ambiguity characteristic of puppet performance as politically both generative and debilitative.

Post-performance political potency was thus proposed to hinge on successful navigation of three foundational tensions: a post-human tension between feeling part of the singular puppet assemblage and holding a specific position and role within it; a political tension between recognising the complex intersectionality between economic, social and political relations and appreciating one’s own capacity to act nonetheless; and a spatial tension between highlighting the significance of the issue that requires concerted political effort and the local relevance of the issue that makes personal political action seem both manageable and meaningful. Finally, a bidirectional transition was suggested as a spectator engages with, becomes one within and re-emerges from the multiple singularity, potentially allowing the collective agency within the puppet assemblage to be harnessed and channelled into subsequent individual or collective political action, although this remains contingent upon their personal opportunities and constraints for such action.

Thus, through targeted examination of one specific puppet performance, we have extrapolated and developed a more abstract set of ideas that we hope will provide resources for future academic, theatrical and political work with and through (giant) puppets. We have identified the spatial nature of the constructional mechanisms that potentially reorient the spectator to the puppet assemblage and its political message, we have highlighted spatial considerations as one of the three foundational tensions that puppet performances must seemingly navigate to optimise their political power, and we have proposed a bidirectional transition that might be undertaken by spectators at both spatial and subjective levels, first becoming bound into the multiple singularity of the puppet universe and subsequently channelling its collective agency into individual or collective political actions. While this bidirectional transition is hypothetical, it suggests fertile ground for exploration through participant-facing and participatory research methods, to test, clarify, modify or contest this suggestion as to how puppets function as post-human artforms with political potency beyond the performance itself.