The Theatre Of Animated Forms

At the time of its conception and editing, we (initially) immodestly referred to this journal as a “compendium” of papers”; this is probably the closest we can come to the result you are seeing today. This special joint issue of Masks and Puppets is to a large extent the result of the educational programme Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts, which took place for the twelfth time in the 2014/2015 academic year: it was conceived and implemented in collaboration between the Maska Institute and the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre, and was dedicated to the art of animated forms in the context of contemporary art.

The seminar, aimed at writers, creators, producers, curators and the general thinking audience of the performing arts, offered a model of (self-)education in which artistic practice was intertwined with theory. We encouraged discourses, questions, insights and reflections of artists in dialogue with theorists and audiences of contemporary art practices. We tried to think animated forms at the intersections of cultural, social and aesthetic currents, with the aim of improving our analytical and critical thinking skills in order to understand the origins and references of the procedures, strategies and tactics that artists use in their works today, deliberately or quite spontaneously, to achieve effects or to problematise their chosen themes; in a creative atmosphere, we practiced old and invented new possible forms of reflection on the performing arts.

Aware that puppet theatre in general is one of the most interesting starting points for thinking about the relationships between the human and the object, the animate and the inanimate, we have focused on four themes that the performing arts have encountered in one way or another throughout history: the body, the object, public space and technology. We reflected on them through lectures, discussions, visits to reference performances or recordings of them, in-depth readings of important theoretical, historical and critical texts, and visits to artistic events that touched on the themes. Our work was inter- and trans-disciplinary and guided by selected national and international theorists, curators and artists.

At the same time, we have obtained permission to publish four selected papers (Martine Ruhsam, Aline Wiama, Daniel Blange-Gubbay and Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher) originally written for the international conference Does It Matter? Composite Bodies and Posthuman Prototypes, held at Ghent University in March 2015, for which we would like to express our special thanks.

Christel Stalpaert, Kristof van Baarl, Laura Karreman and Pieter Vermeulen from the Research Centre for Performing Arts Studies at Ghent University (research centre of Studies in Performing Arts & Media – S:PAM).

Amelia Kraigher, Editor-in-Chief of Maska, and Ajda Rooss, Editor-in-Chief of Lutka