The Sentient Spoon as broken puppet: Celebrating otherness with performing objects

Exploring speculations about new materialism and performance, this article discusses how we (re)consider the ‘puppet other’ as a subject in community performance, focusing particularly on work with youth who have severe and complex learning difficulties. The discussion of this project explores the ethics and politics of practice in applied puppetry (Smith 2014) through reflections about the use of performing objects in relation to specific communities and identities. The method employed in this article is to explore the world of objects in practice, using the ideas of object-oriented ontology. This viewpoint explores poetic processes and speculations about the inner reality of objects, in relation to human participants. This exploration of the materiality of objects is framed in reaction to the way power operates, specifically through the Foucauldian lens of biopower.

The art of expressive objects supporting agency in palliative care

I have been developing a model for how to use animated objects when meeting a palliative care patient and I have noticed that during these animated moments in the hospice, performing objects have represented different sites of humanity. At their best, these moments have created a performance from the patient’s story that has become shared. Moments of animation in the hospice are meetings between me and a person who is in palliative care. I have facilitated our meeting and brought a suitcase full of everyday objects with me. A patient is given a story and then cast in their own story with objects they have chosen. Meetings with patients in palliative care made me think about patients moral agency. A moral agent is a being who consciously puts moral activities into practice. Expressive objects telling stories for a patient is one place where moral agency survives in the hospice setting and where a palliative care patient can act for a while as a member of a moral community. In this article, I share my model of expressive objects related to my practice.

Pompeii Live: Performing Objects

On 18 June 2013, Pompeii Live brought the Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition from the British Museum into over 300 cinemas around the UK and Ireland. This paper draws on empirical research of Pompeii Live and audience experiences of the event, in order to consider: How were the objects featured in Pompeii Live encountered by the audience? What were the factors that shaped meaning and value attributed to them? What role was played by the ‘live’ in Pompeii Live? As access to museum collections is of growing concern, along with accountability to audiences, museums are likely to continue to trial innovative ways of distributing collections. These new ways of sharing collections and knowledge, through ever changing digital media, further speak to wider questions of what a museum is and what a museum does, challenging traditional notions of access, curation, and interpretation.

Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and the Winter’s Tale

This chapter looks at The Winter’s Tale and Titus Andronicus to show how Shakespeare’s aesthetics integrates performing objects and performing bodies in its depiction of powerful women. In staging the process of survival for Lavinia and Hermione, Shakespeare travesties the concept of the king’s two bodies central to early modern sovereignty, redistributing agency between subjects to objects. Central to the argument about the female body in these two plays is Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of corporeal femininity, which emphasizes the tactility of the performing body, its agitating power that poses problems for the way these plays and their critics attempt to make sense of the women’s physical condition as an embodiment of fractured or incomplete subjectivity. Julie Taymor’s film Titus (2000), with its cinematic expression of the power of the prosthetic, becomes a touchstone for a reading of the play’s exploration of the politics of vibrant matter. Both Lavinia and Hermione offer a form of corporeal feminism, exemplified in Taymor’s film. In their parody of sovereignty’s charismatic survival beyond death, these two plays to different degrees transform political theology into a feminist politics in which performing objects—Lavinia’s body and Hermione’s statue—evoke the phenomenon of non-sovereign agency that limits sovereign absolutism and enables fugitive politics in Shakespeare.