WITH LOVE TO OBJECTS - by Kirsti Ladegård We are nowadays oppressed by objects, and they dehumanize us. Puppeteers however, use objects to communicate with people, in other words, they put life back into the things that are draining us of life Henryk Jurkowski Living beings belong to a world in never ending change and constantly changing meaning. Objects belong to another sphere. Who hasn't felt the unease of a souless object, a seemingly lifeless thing, setting your imagination in motion? Even the simplest object, which lay thrown away or forgotten, represents a foriegn and mystic knowledge. Each object owns its own particular knowledge, and talks to the soul with a unique language. Material mass is the most vunerable thing in the cosmos. Who would believe that we could shape it just for fun. That what started as a joke, might not shape the fate of it? Anyone who'se vissited a wax cabinet, knows that those wax dolls are parodies of living beings, but what a tragic seriousness they exude! One can just imagine what kind of pain lies constipated within these dolls who have no idea what they are or why they must remain locked into this form which is forced on them. «I exist through others eyes» says the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. How do we react to the stare of a puppet then: the real other; the artificial creature, a stranger, and yet not, as its created, in our own image. Through the puppet, I duplicate myself, to confirm my existence. The puppet extends my existence, therefore I desire it: its look and face, its secret proximity which is simultaniously distant...I want to shake out its secrets, to squeeze into its mysterium. I identify with its tradjedy: the contrast between its ambitions and its possabilities 'it wants to be alive, but it can never be. There are many stories which want to be told. PERSONA tells just one of many possibilities. We search for the old question: who am I? What is my story? When the puppet reads the texts, they work on many levels. I am not one, I am many, becuase I am innextricably tied to The Other, to you. The Other is always there. Sometimes just as an absence. In sexuality, we meet. But that there is ever any melting of the the two, is simply an old romantic idea. In the erotic, The Other is a deeply secretive being. Levinas calls the erotic a meeting with duplicity, the secretive, that which we can never fathom, becuase its very being exists within the hidden. And what is a sign of affection? It is the searching for a sign of affection. It's not to know, a game with something which always hides, something which we can never own, the unreachable, that which is just around the corner, in the future. Tonight the puppets will step out of their silent existence and meet the public in the theatre. They stand upright, in apparent majestic calm behind the stage. They seem to rest in their apprehension. Even in their souless condition, they have an aura of self-respect, a picture of the world, as nobodies seen it. They don't seperate between the real and their vision of reality. Those that believe fully in their dream, are in a possition to realise it.