The Power of Double Vision: Tradition and Social Intervention in African Puppet Performance

Abstract

The appeal of the puppet lies partly in its dual nature: it is at once a representative object without life while at the same time it enacts the imagined life with which it is endowed by the puppeteer. Marie Kruger argues that this duality makes puppetry a uniquely effective way of questioning the very traditional values it appears to embody, and so of stimulating a sense of the need for social change. She relates her argument to the long tradition of puppetry among the Bamana people of Mali, and specifically to the performance of the Bin Sogo bo, an animal masquerade in which the ‘characters’ adumbrate human qualities with effective ambiguity. Marie Kruger is Chair of the Department of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where puppetry is offered as a performance option. She is the author of Puppetry: a Guide for Beginners and has also published in the South Africa Theatre Journal. Over the past twenty years she has directed numerous puppet productions for all ages, and is currently leading a research project to document the nature and application of African puppet traditions.