Beauty Beyond Breath

 

On Matt Smith’s APPLIED PUPPETRY (Methuen, 2024)

Beauty beyond breath could be a definition for puppets;
Those lifeless structures brought to life by a touch,
Gifs from the hand’s majesty ruling possible worlds,
Folding futures, as if from plastic bags, paper, fabric
Magic itself had made much. And so it is with this book,

Which applies magic as such to each finger, won from
The digits of its versatile author, Matt Smith: Academic,
Actor, Writer, Director, and Expert, Puppeteer, Teacher,
Who illuminates, explains and prosletyses, extolling
His subject and pleading for everything else but the fifth.

This is an invaluable scroll, as book becomes bible
For those interested in puppets and in the act
Of transformation itself, with each facet explored
And each Alice brushed door newly opened
As a return to the primal through a sophisticate’s grip

Brings death stealth. For Puppets are the hand’s Lazarus,
Rising from stillness. Here Smith taints and teaches
What the slightest twist can convey. He re-introduces the world
By first considering past resources, to explore afresh
Time and texture and how these bright objects made

From stick or string, honour play. From the start of his search
In the early 1990s to a research trip in Cape Town in 2017
Smith has breathed and begat entire planets of people
Made from papier mache and magic, from rod and rule
And from dream.  These magicks unfurl through object testimony:

A plastic bag talks to children to knot its tapered form
And to speak, while a broken accordion breathes
To become  a wolf’s belly; these thoughts are a ventriloquist’s
Verses, as a single stone becomes witness and performance
Itself scales new peaks. What Smith now expounds is how

Everything is  a puppet; certainly actors are for directors
And writers too come to that, and so even a stick formed sigil
Takes on an eerie permanence for us, containing our echo
As we amplify or distort it through inelegant limb and flesh fat.
Applied Theatre’s the term, Applied Puppetry, Applied Drama;

For these adaptations and this applications too, reveal more
Than even tech can explore, as if the secret sat in us
From the start off; as if while first forming and helpless
Ourselves we sought strings, as newborns always do,
Guided and directed by parents, physically throughout childhood

And then in influence or reaction as older and out,
They break wings. From Deleurzian theory and on, ‘of the body
Without organs’, we can see puppets and puppetry as God-craft.
A religion in terms of approach, theory, concept but where
The worship and wisdom are more equally shared in  a shaft

Of plastic, or wood, or any substance which can be made
Malleable. Matthew knows this and makes a lifetime’s
Expertise from this study. Like us all, he’s had losses, 
Which he has bravely and beautifully made tenable.
Regained and reformed through new faith bestowed

In these foundlings from which he now captures chaos
But which also contain not only poise and perfection
But the means to make silence attain its own voice
Through the hand. This then is a textbook and tome
For practitioners and for people who seek to move others

With hand-sprung special care. In Objects speak for
Themselves Matt explores South African Puppeteers in exelcis,
From Aja Marneweck, William Kentridge, Persephone
Sextou, Emma Fisher, he sees how for the body in practice
Puppetry is new air. Applying the spectacular theories

In spades, he digs fresh earth, finding furrows along which
New beings are led and lead each new walk. As we follow
We find and found agencies to encounter communities’
Evolution as the silent puppet in practice teaches different
Languages how to talk. This is there in Karim Dakroub’s
Trauma workshops,  In Husam Abed’s and Rafa Deak’s
Dafa Puppetry work with refugees, and Riku Laakkonen
In Finland using them for palliative care; Angels made
With from both the simplest of means and the most rendered
Examples. Smith’s Humphrey the Puppet represents

Light granting life through hand shade. And so it is
With the book, which expounds across Application,
Showing how we all live in shadow because it is safer
For us than dared life. But as soon as we see and more
Importantly listen to the objects around us, then Eden

Can be ours to raise to cleave strife. Smith thinks
With an ecological slant as a way to understand
All our movement; where we are with the planet,
Defines who the puppeteer truly is and who claws
At the strings or bites the hand that begets it;

Once more he considers the practice of colleagues
And those who court magic’s kiss. Nature’s hold
Has great sway as Smith found in the 90s, when
Testicular cancer saw him live and love with just one.
He made a LIPA show out of it, and details here

The becomings of not just his family and his future,
But also the modes and the motions from which
Survival itself is begun. This is at times a technical book,
But unlike most it is human. Smith’s winning spirit,
Seen in his smile bubbles through, and as the cathexis

Is caught, so of course is the humour, as you grow
To embrace an Academic who makes puppets
From within  a piano, and who in his playing is living
New life now for you. Smith examines it all: from whether
A puppet’s consent can be won to be run through

Performance to Sarah Woodward’s Material Methods
And on,  to Kantor and Baird, the puppet becomes social
Totem. It is a camera. It is a foam and rod microscope.
An amp made from rags. A paper torch. A wood laser.
A badge for becoming.  An Eve and an Adam. A serpent.
An ark full of souls.  A held hope. Smith’s book brings
It all. It is a serious study. It is dream trip truly taken,
Hand in hand with a glove. Read it and watch as all former
Theory starts warping. You will never look at sticks,
Foam or paper in the same way again. Now you’ll love

The sense in the still and of how stillness serves us.
Man dreamt of flight always just as he and we dream
Of God. But Puppets fly instantly. The hand forms flight
Through the making. The thumbs entwined make
The shadow of a bird on the wall;  the slipshod

Society we have made can be made again
With a puppet. For as we fall and stumble these theories
These practices are a dance from which dares are made
At any point on the mountain. The bearded beaming
Smith becomes Sage-like in sourcing the secret for us.

Stay entranced.  

 

 

 

                                                                     David Erdos 30/10/2024

 

Photographs by Jonathon Purcell

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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