In This Causes Consciousness to Fracture, the choreographer imbues her lifelike creations with an unsettling awareness of the limits of their own reality
Puppets are made to be manipulated: they only come to life when animated by a puppeteer who, much like an authoritarian or abuser, dictates their every movement, word and emotion. It’s not surprising, then, that puppets are a key feature of French-Austrian artist choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne’s 25-year practice: their innately submissive personalities are the perfect metaphor through which to explore themes of personal relationships, violence and trauma – particularly as experienced by children and adolescents.
Vienne predominantly works onstage, where her lifesize puppets perform alongside human actors and dancers. But in this show (part of a wider Berlin-based showcase of her art and staged work), the anthropomorphic creations are motionless. Staged in an eerie tableau, captured in a photographic series and displayed like specimens in a line of glass vitrines, the puppets’ arrangements are intended – as the show’s title suggests – to evoke the experience of faltering awareness, and what may cause it to occur.
Much of Vienne’s work here references her theatrical repertoire: the key scene in the tableau, for example, draws from and is titled after her 2021 production L’Etang (The Pond), an interpretation of eponymous short story (c. 1902) by Robert Walser, in which a boy stages his suicide to test his mother’s love. It resembles a teen house party. Dressed in sleeveless denim jackets, purple galaxy T-shirts and sneakers, surrounded by beer cans, jelly sweets and a CD player, a pair of puppets recline rigidly on a bed, the boy’s arm reaching suggestively over the girl’s stomach as her head turns uncomfortably away from him. Close by, another couple sits curled on the floor, staring blankly at the empty white room in front of them – the audience views the whole scene from a distance and is prohibited from entering either space – in which an identical replica of one half of the duo lies dejectedly on the floor. While this could represent a staged suicide, the scene is more effective as a depiction of dissociation: while physically present at the party, the puppet’s emotional self is elsewhere, floating in an abyss disconnected from their uncomfortable reality. Like Geppetto, who brought his puppet Pinocchio to life, Vienne seems to be playing with levels of reality, splitting one of her characters in two and causing psychological turmoil in the process.
The success of this vignette lies in the puppets’ stiff body language and vacant gazes, highlighting how, even when working with inanimate objects, Vienne takes a choreographic approach to demonstrate the expressive potential of movement and bodily gesture. This is also evident in 63 colour photographs of her puppets taken between 2003 and 2024 (63 Portraits 2003–2024). By placing their heads at subtly different angles, Vienne imbues these lifeless figures with emotions of shame, fear and anxiety. The way that their faces are painted enhances this effect, flushed tones and glossy finishes creating the illusion of streaming tears.
It feels as if Vienne is training us to listen to the stillness and silence of her puppets, to become more attuned to signs of suffering in everyday life. If there’s any doubt about what has caused her puppets’ distress, look closer at the dolls encased in glass boxes on the ground floor. While they project confidence in sportswear and spiked punk armbands, closer inspection reveals blood-flecked hands, bandaged wrists and bruised legs hidden under sheer white tights. (The show’s final room is strewn with bloodstained shipping boxes, suggesting injuries sustained during the violent journey to their current location.) Here Vienne implicitly urges us to take time to notice these unsettling details and reflect on how paying more attention could improve our understanding of the unspoken struggles of those around us.
This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, through 12 January
From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
