The Unclean, ‘touching and training’ in puppetry from Japanese otome bunraku

Abstract

‘Training in touching’ aims to refine the knowledge and experience of ‘touching’ in its specific application to puppet-things in motion by those who move them. It opens up unusual concepts such as virtual touch in the spectator, therefore contributing to a practical and theoretical understanding of the lived experience of the ‘puppetry ensemble’, puppeteer-puppet-spectator. An acutely perceptive haptic sensibility distinguishes puppetry from all other forms of performance. Contrary to the idea that puppeteers only use their hands to animate, ‘touch’ is a whole-body sense exemplified in the strange, paradoxical, dance-like phenomenon of the beautiful and rare Japanese otome bunraku or ‘maiden’s puppet-theatre’. Any marginalisation of female artist antecedents of otome bunraku tainted by their three centuries in the pleasure districts of Edo, was superseded in 1925 by technical and theoretical inventiveness enabling one young girl to perform one heavy, fully articulated puppet: head, legs, arms, neck and back. It was similar in appearance to the famous and more familiar Japanese bunraku operated by not one but three men in, possibly, unhealthily close proximity to each other. Currently, dangers in health implicit in the touch and breath of COVID 19 might be averted by adopting a one puppet to one puppeteer style of performance.