NO MEANS NO

Puppets appear more or less immediately as Others depending on their design and the quality of their manipulation but also in relation to the affective response of the audience. The visual similarities between puppets and the real subjects they are intended to depict can be slight. For instance, in object theatre the audience first has to recognize the few signs of subjectness before they may imagine a character. Conversely, realistic puppets, such as those used in Twin Houses, provoke a more immediate affective response because of their strong resemblance to human beings. The puppet maintains a distancing effect because imagination never fully takes over perception. Perception confirms the puppet as a real object, while imagination displays the puppet as an apparent subject. This dual mode of existence of the puppet establishes a synthetic reality because the puppet belongs to two different levels of actuality: its objectness is real but its subjectness is not. The contradiction of a relation of self to Other between a human being and a puppet finds its resolution in the fact that spectators do not experience the puppet as an object, although they know that it actually is one, but as an imagined subject. .................................................. THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PUPPETRY AND MATERIAL PERFORMANCE Edited by Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell