Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Forkbeard Fantasy (Theatre company)"

Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.

In 1980 the city of Edmonton organized Summerfest to help alleviate the cultural aridity of the summer months. While Summerfest’s two musical festivals, Jazz City and International Folk, caught fire immediately, its theatre festival was slower to ignite. A plan to run a summer-long repertory season of primarily Shakespearean plays out of a large tent in a city park worked well in 1981. The programme fell through in 1982 when the city offered Northern Lights Theatre, the sponsoring company, only half its previous budget. Enter Brian Paisley, founder and artistic director of Chinook Theatre, a touring group that had moved from Fort Saint John to Edmonton in 1980 and now was doing two shows a year in the historic Princess Theatre. Paisley, attracted to the “Old World” atmosphere of Edmonton’s Old Strathcona district, found himself imagining a multitude of small theatres in the area’s older buildings. When the $50,000 originally slated for Northern Lights came free, Paisley jumped at the chance to turn his fantasy into a reality.

AbstractPat Hanna's Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht's cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War's profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna's company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.

In 1991, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged David Edgar’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 novella, directed by Peter Wood, to a generally negative critical and commercial response. Five years later, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre produced Edgar’s revised version of the play, using the shorter title Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to much more positive reviews, often from the same people. The striking thing about this radically different response is that, apart from a single element, the two scripts are very similar. They can therefore serve almost as a real-life scientific experiment, demonstrating the difference that a single change will make. This article will consider the various choices that an adaptor may make with this story and look at what the different responses to the two versions can tell us about the nature of this story, and possibly about horror and fantasy in general.

Taishū engeki—Entertainment for the Masses? What do a highway robber, a samurai, and a geisha have in common? They are all played by the same actor, often at the same time, in an incredible flurry of costume change, in a contemporary form of Japanese theatre called taishū engeki. Taishū engeki, translated as vaudeville, literally, “theatre for the masses”, would be better described as a parallel world of fantasy, glitter, and manga-esque beautiful men wearing elaborate wigs and even more elaborate kimonos, who dance and gracefully sway their hips to portray women, and simultaneously do their best to seduce the overwhelmingly female audience. Taishū engeki represents an escape into a world of romances enacted through dance, of tragic love stories that somehow end well when the main character reappears in the second act as a brilliant dragon-slaying god, and of literal dances with dragons. One performance by dance troupe Gekidan Kokoro included onna-gata buyō (traditional Japanese dance performed by a man playing the part of a woman), a play about brotherly love and devotion where the glamorous actor from the first part was a not too bright young boy (depicted with snot running down his nose), more crossdressing and dancing, a few shamisen songs, a totally unexpected breakdancing piece, and a collaboration with Iwami Kagura—a famous group from Shimane who performs sacred dances in association with various Shinto rituals. Despite being able to combine theatrical skills with dance and acrobatic feats, taishū engeki is seen as a minor theatrical genre, often included in the category of folk arts (Kurata 42), or “low art” intended merely for fun and entertainment” (Endo 151). Although the name would indicate that is addresses a wider audience (which may have been the case decades ago, when cheap entertainment was not so readily available as it is today), taishū engeki caters to a specific category of people. The performers are organised in small itinerant troupes who spend about one month in a specific location, putting on two shows daily—one starting at noon, and one in the evening. In most cases, the show has two parts: one is a play, followed by a free program of dancing, acrobatic features, and even playing instruments such as drums or shamisen. The audience itself consists of two categories: the local people, living in the vicinity of the small theatres where performances are held, and who might attend each new show two or three times, and the fans, who follow their favourite actor from place to place to the limit of their time and financial resources. When it comes to performing arts, Japan’s most famous form of theatre is definitely kabuki: a performative genre highly appreciated by the Japanese and whose extravagant costumes and make-up, as well as exaggerated gestures eliminate some of the language barriers and make it (at least to a certain degree) comprehensible to non-Japanese speakers. Besides kabuki, noh (a highly ritualised form of theatre characterised by its use of masks) and bunraku (puppet theatre) are most often mentioned together, popular both within and outside the borders of Japan as entertainment and objects of scholarly research. As a scholar of Japanese studies, I had learned about these three categories in my first year as an undergraduate student, but it took me over ten years in Japan to discover taishū engeki, something that Robert Schneider and Nathan Schneider (256) ironically call “a weed in Japan’s exquisite garden of classical theatre and a living fossil in the detritus of Asian modernity”. Is taishū engeki really a fossil or a weed accidentally left on the stage of classical theatre? Its faithful fans would beg to differ, and so would the accomplishments of some troupes, who are entirely self-sufficient, renting the venues where they perform and travelling with their own light and sound systems, as well as hundreds of exquisite costumes and wigs. To give just an example, Aotsuki Shinya, the leader of Gekidan Kokoro, told me that he possesses more than two hundred wigs, and mid-September this year will attempt to perform 120 different dances, with different costumes, during the three days that will celebrate his birthday. In contrast with noh or kabuki, where each gesture is highly stylised and must be performed in a pre-defined order, in a set context, taishū engeki is flexible: plays are based on known stories, but the plot is overly simplified, so that the audience can focus on the main characters and the way they perform more than on the storyline, and the second act is actually the main attraction of the show, when the actors can showcase their special skills to the delight of the audience. Kabuki developed in the seventeenth century, and it was aimed at the “common people”, while “the true professionals, the performers of the [noh] and the kyōgen [comedy], began to retreat behind the curtain of refinement” (Tsubaki 4). In the twenty-first century, noh has become more of a mixture of performance and ritual, appreciated by a small number of specialists, and often staged to accompany religious manifestations. Kabuki, on the other hand, has taken its place as the most valued theatrical art, with fans and aficionados vying for the best seats (whose prices can go up to 30,000 Japanese yen, and yet are hard to procure), but taishū engeki shows no signs that it might ever reach that level of popularity. In 1995 Marilyn Ivy saw it as a “discourse of the vanishing”, an art that might disappear as, while “it appears to carry on an unarguably Japanese knowledge” (239), it has failed to create a “boom” or a vast audience. While novelty is part of the performance, it seems to somehow be not new enough, not entrancing enough. The actors are talented, creative, and versatile, but they do not attain the fame level of their kabuki counterparts. Despite all these, as an anthropologist, I could not help but wonder why taishū engeki has not attracted more scholarly interest. The studies on this topic, both in Japanese and English, are far less numerous than those on butoh, for example, “a post-modern dance genre” which has been the focus of both practical and theoretical interest on the part of Japanese studies specialists. To give just an example, in his book on Japanese theatre, Benito Ortolani has a subchapter on butoh, but does not even mention taishū engeki. Prince(ss) Charming My first encounters with taishū engeki were due to a class project—I had started teaching a class on theatre as ritual performance, and wanted my students to have a first-hand experience. The project was a success: students who had shown no enthusiasm at all when reading the syllabus were mesmerised once the performance had begun, to the level that they had attended shows by themselves, and even started following the actors on various social networks. Taishū engeki surpasses all expectations of a first-time viewer. It follows a canon, just like kabuki, but that canon is audience-oriented, so without having ever been part of that audience, it is difficult to imagine what will happen on stage. As mentioned above, each performance has two parts: the first one is a play, whose content changes during the one-month performance, usually based on historical events familiar to the audience, but not restricted to that, an intermission during which the leader of the troupe greets the audience, talks about the schedule for the remainder of the month, and promotes the merchandise available for sale (T-shirts, fans, boxes of sweets), followed by a free-style show where the performers are free to display their best skills. Photography is not allowed during the first part—and this may be due to the fact that most troupe leaders create their own plays using the vast available materials, and are reluctant to share that with other troupes—but is encouraged during the second part. Video taking is forbidden at all times. Crossdressing is a significant part of the performance, with men playing the part of women who are attractive to other women, and women playing the part of men who also attract women. The actresses, however, never become the star of the troupe. Just like in the case of Takarazuka Theatre, where the otoko yaku (women playing the male roles) receive significantly more appreciation than the female counterparts, the heavily made-up male actors of taishū engeki represent the dreamy ideal of their dedicated fans. Each performing group is centered around one male actor who is representative of the troupe—usually the leader or the leader’s son, and who gathers a dedicated fan base composed of women (most of whom are middle-aged or older). These women try to attend as many shows as they can, literally showering their favourite actor with money. The few available studies on taishū engeki tended to focus on two major aspects: crossdressing (mostly of the onnagata—men playing women—type) and on the money the actors receive while on stage. Fig. 1: An actor on the Gofukuza Stage (Osaka) displaying money gifts, 13 June 2018. Schneider and Schneider, for example, looked into how gender is performed, and what rules are applied when performing gender. Their conclusion? There are no clear rules, as “taishū engeki plays with gender, but it also quite simply plays gender” (262). My own interest was not in the actual gender performed, but in the most pervasive and permanent element of all taishū engeki performances: seduction. Those who go to see these shows may do so for mere amusement—and their expectations are never disappointed, as the costumes are complex and flamboyant, and the performers are skilled dancers, but those who go faithfully do so due to their admiration for a certain actor. The first act (the historical play) is a convention where the star appears slightly more human—less make-up, sometimes performing the role of a man—always strong and masculine, which is quite an artistic feat seeing that even in the role of a man, the actors will wear specific make-up and false eyelashes. The Takarazuka Revue, an all-female group founded in 1914, has a large and consistent fan base made-up almost entirely of women who fall in love with the actress playing the main male roles—a phenomenon explained by the desire to temporarily live in a fantasy world. The difference between the Takarazuka actresses and the taishū engeki actors is that the former do not aim to seduce, but to invite the audience into a dream world, while the latter’s goal is to fully entrance. Regardless of the gender they play, the taishū engeki stars create erotic characters, just like their kabuki precursors, where, as Samuel L. Leiter (212) puts it, “eros remained primary”. Dressed in kimonos of intricate patterns that go far outside the lines of tradition, and are representative of the creative spirit of the performer, using make-up which completely transforms their physiognomies through the heavy use of eyeliner, glitter, false eyelashes, and wearing exquisite wigs, the actors invite the audience into a dream world where the Fairy Godmother gave the best dress to the prince, not the princess. For hundreds if not thousands of years, the folktales focussed around the image of a beautiful prince, the kalos kagathos hero (beautiful and virtuous, the ancient Greek ideal) who takes the maiden from distress and into a happily ever after. Taishū engeki heroes switch perspectives: it is not Prince Charming, but Princess Charming, an utterly beautiful creature who enchants the female audience by being the impossible. Princess Charming represents an embodiment of the best possible features—beauty, glamour, grace, sex appeal, elegance—and none of the negative ones—lack of manners, roughness, insensitivity. Moreover, Princess Charming is accessible. For a mere 2,000 yen, anybody can spend three hours in her company, and shaking her hand starts at a similarly low price—2,000 or 3,000 yen for a trinket bought during the intermission, to hand over as a gift during the performance. Fig. 2: Aotsuki Shinya as a romantic lady in a flowing kimono, Gofukuza, 9 July 2022. Dressed as females, the actors move their bodies with the grace of a geisha, bat their eyelashes, smile coquettishly, and even wink at the audience. As males, they are either abandoned lovers who drown their sorrows in drink, or fierce warriors dancing with masks and swords. In all circumstances, they present exaggerated feminine or masculine ideals, with the difference that femininity is emphasised through the overuse of garments and accessories, while masculinity will almost always involve a certain degree of nakedness: chest, arms, legs. The reasons are both practical (showing various naked body parts would destroy the dreamy feminine beauty wrapped up in layers of cloth and glitter), and symbolic: femininity is mysterious and fragile, and thus cannot easily be revealed, while masculinity must re-assert its strength and vitality. The body presented on stage is more of an artistic act than the performance itself, because it is there that most of the actor’s talent is poured. Creating a persona means borrowing from the “traditional” Japanese culture which includes geisha, courtesans, heavy wigs, and heavily embroidered kimonos, as well as the contemporary manga and cosplay culture. With exaggerated eyes and hairstyles as the central features of the head, the characters moving in front of the audience seem to have directly descended from (or drawn the viewers into, “Take On Me” style) the pages of a fantasy manga. An interview with Aotsuki Shinya (stage name), leader and star of the Kokoro (“Heart”) troupe conducted on 15 June 2022, did not offer any insightful glimpses into the metamorphosis process. While acknowledging that he cannot present his true self on stage, thus using make-up to become Aotsuki Shinya, the actor did not admit to any conscious attempt of becoming attractive. In his own words, all their efforts are for the benefit of the audience, directed towards helping them have fun. “Tanoshii”, “fun” seemed to be a key concept when staging a new performance, and the reasoning behind that is easy to follow. Unlike the more elevated kabuki, a taishū engeki theatre is a small cosy place where the audience can interact quite freely with the performers, who do not shy away from showing momentarily glimpses of the face behind the mask: forgetting a line and admitting to it, laughing at a joke said by another actor, kneeling prettily to receive gifts from their fans. Rather than gender fluid, the bodies in taishū engeki are genderless because they are not, nor do they claim to be, real. An actor on the traditional stage is a photography, or, if the setting includes fantastic elements, a painting of an imaginable universe. An actor on the taishū engeki stage turns their body into a manga drawing: something that does not exist in real life, but it is highly desirable. Kabuki actors staged eroticism by impersonating women; taishū engeki actors play with desire becoming in turns both Cinderella and the Prince. Figs. 3 & 4: Aotsuki Shinya as a fantastic character (fig. 3) and as the god Susano-wo slaying the dragon (fig. 4). “Fantasy, Sweet Fantasy” Analysing the loyalty that Takarazuka actresses inspire into their fans, Makiko Yamanashi interprets it as something that goes beyond (dreams of) physical love or mere escapism, and sees it as the desire to belong to an ideal community of women—friends, sisters, mothers. While not wrong, this approach seems to gloss over the real erotic feelings and the longing for something not of this world which are most definitely present among performative arts (be they kabuki, revue, vaudeville, butoh, modern theatre) aficionados. The men performed by the Takarazuka actresses do not exist in real life, and just as in the case of taishū engeki actors, make-up plays a crucial role. Lorie Brau even mentions an incident where an American director hired to stage a production of “West Side Story” required the actresses playing male roles to give up their false eyelashes—a change that did not last after the director left (86). The taishū engeki actors are warriors who bring back to life the god Izanagi, the creator of Japan, who fought an army of underworld monsters, while wearing eyeliner, eyelashes, and sparkling make-up. They are completely unrecognisable without make-up, and yet changing their appearance takes approximately ten minutes, much less than it would take a drag queen to turn from ordinary man into glamorous woman (at least forty minutes). I am not mentioning here the drag queens by chance—the two types of performances are similar enough that they lead to collaborations. On 10 June 2022, the troupe Kokoro performed at the Gofukuza Theatre in Umeda in the company of five drag queens well known on the Osaka stage: Feminina, Rulu Daisy, Madame Cocco, Ozu, and Il Rosa. One characteristic of drag performances is that they are actor-centred: they are not about the storyline, but about the performer’s creation—“channeling your inner femininity, fusing it with the male, and creating something otherworldly” (Hastings). The noticeable difference between drag and taishū engeki is that drag is actor-oriented, while taishū engeki is audience-oriented. Drag queens interact with the audiences and entertain, but the focus is internal, towards freeing something that had been developing within. Taishū engeki actors do choose their characters, of course, and have individual preferences, but this is secondary to their goal of captivating the audiences. Both categories of performers learn to re-invent their bodies, to re-create them on stage; however, in one case we witness an individual metamorphosis from real life to theatrical persona, and in the other we have one individual who can shapeshift into whatever character might work better magic on the people in front of him. Drag is about freedom while taishū engeki is about seduction. Fig. 5: Il Rosa and two actors of the Shin troupe, Gofukuza, 10 June 2022 Taishū engeki may not be kabuki: it is not celebrated by the media or the researchers, and many people in contemporary Japanese society see it as an inferior form of entertainment. Considering the low price of the tickets and the fact that shows are seldom sold out, one might worry about its future. Nevertheless, a visit to the backstage of Gofukuza during the month when Shin was performing revealed a large room full of costumes, and another one full of wig boxes—more than two hundred, according to Aotsuki Shinya. The Shin troupe was founded five years ago, so everything was still new and shiny—a sign that the genre will not disappear any time in the near future. The same visit, when I could interact with the actors in their day-to-day attires, using their regular voices, and standing near the costumes and wigs like exhibits in a museum, made one more thing acutely clear: the fact that their performances are a fantasy world. More of a fantasy world than a kabuki performance (to remain consistent with the comparison), where the setting is clearly a setting, separate from the audience. The blurred lines between stage and audience, between performance and flirting of the taishū engeki create a tangible fantasy, where one can not only fall in love with the Prince(ss) Charming, but maybe even take them to a ball. References Brau, Lorie. “The Women’s Theater of Takarazuka”. TDR 34.4 (Winter 1990): 79-95. Endo, Yukihide. “Reconsidering the Traveling Theater of Today’s Japan: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Stigmatized Form of Japanese Theater.” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 2.3. Hastings, Magnus. Why Drag? Hong Kong: Chronicle Books, 2016. Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing. Modernity Phantasm Japan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Kurata, Ryosuke. “Taishū Engeki as a Show Business: Exploring the Segmentation of Customers.” Mathesis Universalis 17.2. Leiter, Samuel L. “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters.” In A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, ed. Samuel L. Leitner. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. 211-229. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre. From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1995. Schneider, Robert, and Nathan Schneider. “A Dive and a Dance with Kabuki Vaudeville: Taishū Engeki Comes Back!” New Theater Quarterly 36.3 (2020). 29 July 2020 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-theatre-quarterly/article/abs/dive-and-a-dance-with-kabuki-vaudeville-taishu-engeki-comes-back/BB72486E86C79B70730B6F2DB5EC0FF8>. Yamanashi, Makiko. A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop. Leiden: Global Oriental, 2012.

I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html

IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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