HEALING MACHINES
Healing Machines is currently in development at the St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab, patiently awaiting our return to shared spaces. Click here to participate in the video installation portion of the piece!
A puppeteered installation consisting of a collection of mini performances, each for an audience of one participant, Healing Machines is meant to be presented in a lobby or gallery space, middle school gym, senior center, or Walmart parking lot. It is meant to be silly! and weighty! and communal! and transformative!
Each mini performance - a human-powered “machine” - is a ritual that moves the participant through a very specific psychological wound, using narrative and symbolic imagery to heal it.
The visual language of the piece is based around healing hands, birds and eggs (rebirth!), and entrance into/emergence from cocoon-like spaces.
I hope that creating connections with these benevolent healing machines will spark conversation about the ways our culture pathologizes suffering and offers no collective process for coping with hardships like coming-of-age, illness, or grief.
In the current incarnation of the project, I’m creating healing machines for:
The crippling fear of losing a child
The regret of feeling too awkward to enjoy Homecoming
The shame of not making enough money and mismanaging the little you have
The shame of all the single-use plastic you’ve ever used (before and after you knew better)
The shame of being unable to be happy for people who are happy
The pain of your relationship with food
The fear of missing your opportunity to have children
The crippling fear of losing a parent
In the image below, I've included a sketch of the "Healing Dream" spaces, created by draping fabric between a triangle of puppeteers. They begin in a seated position, the fabric crumpled to the floor, when the participant enters the triangle. The puppeteers stand, and in the tent they've created around the participant, they enact a very short play using shadow puppetry, object theater, and masked marionettes (see the photos titled "Transformation Mask" at the bottom of the image).
The "Social Anxiety Healing Machine" in the center of the page is a collection of foam cube headpieces displayed throughout the space, which can be worn by audience members. When another audience member presses their hands into the handprint indentations on either side, they make an image of a sun pop up at the top of the head. There's also the Dog (bottom left), which is walked through the space by a puppeteer, and The Oracle (bottom right), a marionette puppeteered by the foam hand that contains it, which plays a three-note copper xylophone that is the invocation for the space.
There are several objects in the piece that do not require puppeteers: the foam headstone on the top right of the page, the banners with text that will hang in the space, and two "Listening Eggs," which are hollow foam eggs in which a voice recording will play, walking the participant through an audio-only machine.
For more, check out the experiments below.