The puppets by Damiët van Dalsum (1943) are
inextricably bound up with her person, for each of them incorporates a part of
herself. “Each puppet is a piece of my own ‘being’ , she says. A personal
experience or an event in her life can lead directly to the making of a play.
In 1992, after seeing on the news that German
neo-nazis had burned a Turkish family she was deeply shocked and made ‘Kleine
Frederik’, a children performance on the theme of discrimination. Damiët van
Dalsum is able to get her emotions off her chest by using puppets. It is the
medium she chooses to communicate with the outside world.
Kleine Frederic
After having studied for two years at the theatre
school in Maastricht, Van Dalsum came into contact with puppetry more or less
by chance. In 1965 a friend asked her to stand in during puppet show.
Improvising – there was no script – and relying on her fantasy, she began the
play. It meant a real self-discovery. Puppetry would henceforth never let go.
A puppet play by Van Dalsum is in the first place
recognizable through the individuality of the design. Unlike the typical puppet
plays we are all familiar with her puppets do not have modelled heads. And
their bodies do not consist of a piece of cloth. Van Dalsum is unorthodox both
in the choice of her materials and in the way they handled. In a piece of dried
fruits she finds the head of a soldier. And upside downs fan becomes the body
of the Poppenvrouwtje. For the head of the Boike figure Van Dalsum uses the
upper part of a bell, with the handle forming the nose. Two circles of bent
wire with small round mirrors in them are the eyes. Boike’s torso is a piece of woven gold
thread, and orange scarf froms arms and legs. Knots are made at four
extremities of the thin cloth so as to suggest hands and feet. In the
performance Boike rides on a horse. For this Van Dalsum uses an Afghan bell,
whose form corresponds to the line of the horse’s back. When the two clappers
are struck in the right rhythm they imitate the sound of a galloping horse.
Boike, uit Blauwbard
Van Dalsum works associatively and intuitively when
making her puppets. She lets her feeling guide her in rejecting the one form
and regarding the others as the only once that is right. Her point of departure
is always her inner world. When getting down to work she only only has a vague
and unarticulated idea of what the puppets are going to look like, but in
various materials the right forma emerges from her hand.
In the last forty years Van Dalsum has experimented
with all sorts of forms of material theatre. In the late Sixties she started
making an manipulating glove and stick puppets. In 1983, with the ‘Lord
Wanhoop’ show, she made the changeover to marionette theatre, which continues to be her favourite form of
theatre.
If you look at the development of her designs then you
see that these have simplified over the years. Now that Van Dalsum is more
familiar with the effects of different materials, she manages to convey her
message in het own ‘language’ using a minimum of means.
Van Dalsum feels more affinity with children than with
adults. “I think the child in man is often very tender and vulnerable. The
adult in man, on the other hand, is hard and cold. Man allows himself to be
guided too much in his life by reason, so there’s hardly any space left over
for fantasy”. She wants her play to evoke emotions in her spectators so as to
bring them closer to themselves.
Not alone in her attack on the over-dominant status of
reason in our culture. Dadist and Surrealist artists wer als concerned with
this theme. Striking parallels with Van Dalsum’s work can be seen in their
motifs and their way of working. An art historical viewpoint shows us the
visual tradition that lends meaning to her work. However, these sorts of
questions are not relevant for her. She is simply herself.
Sharing with the Surrealists a penchant for the world
of dreams and fantasy. We know of certain Surrealists artists that they tried
to use ‘automatic writing’ to gain access to their subconscious, with the aim
of giving free rein to their thoughts and fantasies. This method shows a
similarity to free and intuitive way of working of Damiët van Dalsum.
In surveying the work of her we may conclude that her
work is characterized by a strong individuality. The choice of materials and
design of her puppets are completely her own.
Boebele, het circuskind
Source;
In de hand gehouden, Catalogus Exhibition Centrum Beeldende Kunst Dordrecht.
Tekst Carolien van den Akker
