HANDSPRING PUPPET COMPANY, the South African theatre makers (now most

celebrated for War Horse, but also celebrated for such shows as Woyzeck on the

Highveld, Faustus in Africa and Ubu and the Truth Commission) has for the past four

decades engaged in an aesthetic exploration of relationship: the relations between

subjects, as well as the relations between Subjects and Objects. And in fact, they

persisted in thinking about the enigmatic mutuality of these entanglements. This

sustained and serious enquiry was ongoing during the years of Apartheid and then

through that regime’s demise. All this while, they were involved in an embodied and a

material arts practice that provoked their own thinking about definitions with relation

to questions of agency and autonomy. Who is for whom? What is for whom? Who is

for What? The enquiries provoked ideas of Self and Other, and raised volatile

questions about race, about gender, about animals, about persons, about things.

photo:Robyn Swart

The puppet is a companion of extraordinary gifts. It will be as volatile, as docile, as

effusive, or as silent as we need it to be. It can provide a metaphoric self that will

supplement our own deficiencies; it can enable us to live inside able bodies if we are

broken; it can allow us to perform experiments in order to explore gendered or raced

identities. Handspring Puppet Company, through its decades of working meticulously

and thoughtfully alongside puppets, has established an Arts Trust with a double set of

imperatives.

Handspring Trust seeks to be an advocate for puppetry arts;

AND

Handspring Trust seeks to engage in meaningful arts development for youth

in the region of Southern Africa. In particular Handspring Trust seeks to take

advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that have come to Handspring Puppet

Company in the past decade through its international work in the arts of puppet

performance. Most substantially the massively popular success of the production of

War Horse, with the National Theatre in the UK, has enabled Handspring to engage in

increasingly meaningful creative development work in Southern Africa.

photos: Robyn Swart

!!

THE CONTEXTS:

1. BARRYDALE: Some three hours North-East of Cape Town, South Africa, is the

small rural community of Barrydale, in a semi-desert scrubland known locally as the

Little Karoo. In the 1960s, at the height of Apartheid engineering in South Africa, all

members of the Barrydale Community who were not classified as European by South

Africa’s race laws, were compelled to leave their homes in the village, and were

relocated to a crowded settlement a mile or two away, in the foothills of the great

mountain shelf overlooking Barrydale. Many of those displaced were descendants of

“First Peoples” in the region, the Khoisan or Bushmen, hunter-gatherers historically

from the region. Barrydale became a white village. The ‘new-made’ township that

became the settlement of the indigenous or so-called ‘coloured’ (or mixed-race)

community was officially named “Smitsville”, but the people who were displaced

there named it, with considerable bitterness, “Steek-my-Weg” [“Hide-Me-Away”].

For the past two decades, since the first non-racial election in South Africa, some

citizens of each of the two divided communities, “Smitsville” and “Barrydale” have

seriously engaged in the processes of reconciliation and communication. There have

been some significant achievements, though there is much to be done. Unemployment

is at a devastating rate in the region, and there is widespread and debilitating

alcoholism, foetal alcohol syndrome is rife, and child abuse a serious problem.

THE PROJECT:

Since 2010 Handspring Trust has been engaged in developing a puppetry- based

Festival that takes place in Barrydale on December 16th, the national “Day of

Reconciliation” in South Africa. In the weeks preceding the holiday, Handspring Trust

supports members of Handspring Puppet Company and allied artists to engage with

the school children in the area, in order to expose them to performance, play and

puppetry arts. The Festival has grown in complexity and demand from year to year.

Increasingly the project deploys a range of partners, including professionals as well as

fellowship scholars. In the area the key partnerships are with “Net-Vir-Pret” [“Just-

for-Fun”], an arts education program run by Peter Tokela, that makes arts available for

children on farm schools, and in local villages. Because so many children suffer from

the profound effects of foetal alcohol syndrome, there are severe learning disabilities;

and Tokela has developed a very successful strategy using traditional drumming to

coach young scholars in counting and mathematics skills.

Handspring Trust works with “Net-Vir-Pret,” as well as members of “Magpie”

– an arts collective who are activists for HIV positive youth – in order to train the

local children in performance, and to help develop youngsters through an exploration

photos:Robyn Swart !

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of self and other using puppetry arts. During the Apartheid era, school children from

indigenous communities would have had no access to arts education and so the

historical deficit in arts training is substantial. More recently, because Barrydale is

increasingly a community for ‘outsider artists’ there is a newly-diverse spectrum of

community members engaging in the educational program and the Festival. Derek

Joubert has facilitated many of the sustainable educational projects in the area.

Puppets are marvelously volatile and lively participants in the processes of

testing and developing young selves. The puppets serve as doubles that can create

exploratory identities. As a result, young people who have uncertain or negative self-

representations can engage in transformative play with projective identities through

enabling puppets. As the Festival has evolved, the participants have begun to make

ever-stronger demands. In the past two years, the Festival has been ‘themed’ in order

to raise questions about identity. In 2012 the puppets were a giant peacock and an

ostrich who develop an amorous relation, and who produce a vast egg that gives birth

to a hybrid bird. In 2013, the story revolved around a narrative of a mermaid and an

elephant. There is a fabled quality to these works, which draw on traditional story-

telling strategies indigenous to the area. Research for the stories has begun to engage

photos: Robyn Swart

with archeological exploration of rock art in the area, as well as local mythologies.

In developing the theatre works, children have had the opportunity to travel to

regional arts festivals, to visit theatre in Cape Town, and have also been supported in

their ambition to study and develop themselves, The Trust works with local educators

to prepare students for the possibility of admission to university. The University of the

Western Cape is a partner in this set of objectives. Almost without exception, these

students would be the first generation to complete high school. Handspring Trust

derives much of its funding from Handspring Puppet Company; though we also have

has substantial support from the Blumberg Foundation, a family trust based in

Canada. There has also been support from the author of War Horse, Michael

Morpurgo; and artist/director William Kentridge is the patron of the Handspring

Barrydale Festival. The Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the

Western Cape has raised funding for administrators and artists involved in the

program.

The Festival planning for 2014 is well advanced.

2. MASIPHUMELELE: Handspring Trust also works with a group of talented young

adults in Masiphumelele, an urban ‘informal settlement’ or shanty town on the

outskirts of Cape Town, on the Southern Peninsula. Masiphumelele is an over-

crowded and volatile context where generous and open-hearted beings are compelled

through economic necessity to live in unsafe and precarious circumstances alongside

shiftless and dangerous individuals, many of whom are themselves also destitute and

homeless. (Originally known as Site 5, Masiphumelele got its name from the local

residents. The word means ‘we will succeed.’) Many members of the township are

migrants who have come into Cape Town in search of employment from remote

regions in South Africa or from across its borders. As a result, there are periodic

outbreaks of xenophobic violence in the area, and many inhabitants from

neighbouring states who have settled in Masi (as it is known) live with a perpetual

anxiety about being persecuted or killed as foreigners.

THE PROJECT:

Handspring Trust has been supporting the work of Masiphumelele Youth

Development Group, which was founded by two employees of Handspring Puppet

Company, Ncedile Daki and Luyanda Nogodwana. At present the group are using the

Handspring Puppet Company facilities in Capricorn Park on the Cape Flats. The

intention of the Trust is to establish a permanent performance space in the township

with refunctioned shipping containers. The group are working with local youngsters

to develop innovative and original works of puppet theatre. The recent piece, about a

tortoise that wants to fly, has just won double gold at the Qhawe Festival in the

Western Cape. In the process of developing their work, young people are given the

opportunity to visit theatres (often for the first time), to work with theatre

professionals, to travel to regional theatre festivals. Members of Handspring assist in

the making and design of puppets, and the construction of playtexts.

!In 2015 HANDSPRING TRUST will, with the University of the Western Cape and

the University of Leeds, be running a puppetry conference in Cape Town, “The

Emotional Prosthesis.” A call for papers will be circulated shortly. The conference

fulfills that obligation of the Trust’s work to enhance and enrich research into

puppetry arts, and to explore the aesthetic and philosophical meanings inherent in

non-human performance. Handspring Trust is committed to an exploration, through

performance, of the continuities and discontinuities between the object/the animal/ the

human. The psychological and metaphysical exploration of ‘attachment’ (from

prosthetic limbs, to transplants, to mobile phones, fetishes, dolls, puppets, hearing

aids, memories, illness, lovers, parents and pets) will be at the centre of our

conversations, and we are keen to draw a wide spectrum of ideas into the

conversation.

!We will be posting details and the call in the coming month.

!Handspring Trust encourages engagements and partnerships. The work of the Trust is

posted on the Handspring Trust website.