Bird Wings and Puppet Strings: Puppetry, Ecopsychology and Story

Abstract

This article examines Bird Wings and Puppet Strings, a practice-led research project that offers a creative response to the constantly evolving environmental movement, by exploring principles of ecopsychology through developing puppet characters and performance script. Aimed at exploring ecological identity from the perspective of a non-Indigenous Australian, this work has evolved from a personal relationship with the South West, Western Australian landscape, and the imaginative dialogue that developed. The project includes the creation of six Bunrak-inspired puppets based on archetypal characters, and symbolic hybrid forms including local flora, fauna, and human elements. The main Bird Woman character emerged as a symbolic response to perceiving the land as an interrelated aspect of self, and led to understanding how living reciprocity between humans and nature can take an imaginative form and be communicated through artistic methods. Bird Wings and Puppet Strings provides a new creative approach to implementing puppetry as a method of communicating ecological perspectives. Puppetry offers the capacity to serve as a distancing technique, which allows alternative views to be presented in a non-threatening way. The imaginative use of puppetry and narrative enables an alternative exploration of the human experience, can question limiting Western perspectives, and encourage a sense of belonging to the more-than-human world.