ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

“blackface” as counterfeit performances of blackness. Blackface distinguishes organic
black actor Charles Gilpin as Brutus from Federal Theatre Project puppeteer Ralph
Chesse’s carving of an exaggerated figure of Charles Gilpin as Brutus. Like the similarly
vague relationship between the few African Americans that inspired white burnt-cork
performance and the white counterfeiters who donned burnt cork, blackface puppetry was
always a fiction, to greater or lesser degrees divided from empirical reality.
In addition to providing a clear grasp of the historical contingencies of a puppet’s,
or puppetry’s, essence, the bracketed nature of the phenomenological reduction, more
than any other theoretical model, articulates the atomized essence of puppetry. 14
Puppetry shows its audience characters in pieces. The figure, its kinesthetic energy, and
its voice exist in the same environment, but they originate from different sources.
Puppets’ voices never project from the objects. Most often, the manipulators speak their
lines from offstage or somewhere near the objects onstage. Occassionally, a separate
voice-actor will speak the role. In many cases, the individuals who create the puppets’
physical forms are distinct from those that shape their physical motions. The essences of
puppets depend on this practice of atomization. Phenomenology, by providing a
bracketed reduction to each element, takes the analysis step-by- step through each, and
explains how the vocal frontality of the puppet (its words and sounds) may have an
essence subtly, or even markedly, different from its sculptural form and kinesthetic
14 The atomized nature of the puppet is posited by Henryk Jurkowski in, Aspects of the Puppet
Theatre, edited by Penny Francis (London: Puppet Centre Trust, 1988).
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