To start with, I would like to ask the good reader to bear in mind that the current essay does not represent a scientific (as far as this is possible) or a religious understanding of the soul. Instead, it is a highly personal reflection and analysis, based on my own experience with puppets and puppet theatre. Therefore the word 'soul', like many other words in this article, has personal connotations rather than being denotative. Exactly as in directing, I can only hope here that my understanding of the world and words will at least partially correspond with those of the reader.

'A child is playing with a puppet.' Reading this simple sentence, we at once imagine a small person who moves around an object with the shape of a human being or an animal for his own amusement, talks with it, talks for it, etc. In this mental picture the 'child' obviously has a soul whereas the 'puppet' has no such thing.
The small person consists of bone, flesh, blood and skin - the puppet, on the other hand, is made of plastic, wood, cloth stuffed with cotton or some other material. We therefore see one material moving the other material, but what moves what? A stupid question - the child naturally moves the puppet! But why? Because the child wants to move the puppet - the child has a will. The puppet has no will - it does not move. Why does the child want to move the puppet? Because it is great fun. And why is this great fun? Because when it moves the puppet, the puppet seems alive. A child wants to bring the puppet to life, wants it to be a companion who will communicate, reply and 'move' the child as well. The child wishes to give a piece of plastic a soul. Considering how impatient children are in activities where they are not immediately successful, it is doubtful that they would be prepared to spend days, months and years trying to give the puppet a soul if it did not occur easily. If unknown creatures from another planet watched the scene 'child playing with a puppet', it would not be that easy for them to distinguish who was moving whom, because occasionally the child's will becomes the puppet's will, and the child's life becomes the puppet's life so intensely that even the child can no longer judge (and of course does not want to) who is playing with whom. The puppet starts a new game, argues with the child, consoles him and laughs at his jokes; the child, in turn, is ready to burst out crying when the puppet gets hurt. What then differentiates the plastic puppet from the flesh-and-blood child?
As this scene progresses, inevitably a mother's voice is heard in the kitchen: 'Dinner!'. The child grabs the puppet and hurries to the kitchen, dragging his playmate with him. The child has disrupted the play, the living toy has once again become a piece of plastic, and the aliens from another planet are confused: life in the plastic object has ceased without dying.
So, a puppet has a soul given to it by the child who plays with it, who believes in its being alive, in its soul. When the child's attention wavers and he no longer believes, the puppet's soul and life vanish as well. After his meal, if the child does not feel like drawing, she again brings her puppet to life. Now, however, a new question arises: where does the child get the soul to be given and taken? The only credible answer, at least to me, is from inside himself. The child shares his soul with a puppet, directing part of his soul to the puppet for the duration of the game. Part of him sees the world through the eyes of the puppet, the other part through his own eyes. One becomes two (or more). Who, how and for how long, in reference to providing the child of muscle, bone, blood and skin with a soul, is not my topic here.

making of rao heidmets' conquistador

The described example contains a simplified key also for understanding the whole performance-puppet manipulation. A puppet is credible only when the puppeteer directs part of his soul into it - dividing his consciousness in two, seeing the world through the eyes of the puppet and operating through the puppet's body just as truthfully as through his own, taking into consideration the peculiarity of the puppet's material and form. The instant when the puppeteer disrupts this connection the puppet stops playing and becomes a mere actor's prop. During its development, the puppet theatre has turned into a highly elaborate complex of the performing arts. The notion of a 'puppet theatre' has become quite vague and can today designate almost any playing around with material form within the time and space known as a 'performance'. I still find that the above-mentioned soul-giving is valid, uniting all those different layers and developments. According to the same principle, life can be given to any object irrespective of its external form.
A few years ago I had to put together a production with the MA puppet students of the Drama School at the Estonian Academy of Music. Instead of text, I decided to have material as the foundation of the performance and, to make life even more complicated and interesting, I chose material that we normally see and use every day, although, unlike theatre, for very practical and mundane purposes. A truly mundane material that is so widespread that we hardly notice it: everyday paper.
We began 'taming' the material from two opposite directions. We carefully examined the physical and chemical ingredients of paper, its various types and ways of making it, as well as all areas and possibilities of its usage. I also asked the students to recall personal experiences and associations related to our material, paying special attention to childhood, when all experience is more direct, alert and emotional, a time which provides the main direction for perceiving the world for the rest of one's life. In this way we approached the essence and significance of paper and produced the necessary basis for bringing the material to life or 'spiritualising' it.
As life starts with breathing, the students' next task was to focus on an ordinary A3 piece of paper and discover the rhythm of its breathing. They had to be careful not to 'violate' the material by forcing external movement upon it. They were expected to believe in the possible breathing of the material and only help it with its 'needs' - to act as a sort of 'nurse' to an organism whose 'muscles' required help in moving. Rationally speaking, it involved the projection of the students' own imaginations on paper, and the students were always partly aware that this was just a game. Still, the game was serious and the result of approaching the material from inside was organic and credible. An illusion was created of paper coming to life. At the end of this time- and effort-consuming process, we reached the next and even more complicated stage: where the 'living' paper wants to go and what to do with its newly acquired life. Also, what the material 'sees', what it focuses on and how it relates to the object of its attention. From the paper's 'organic need to breathe' we moved on to its 'consciousness and will', and by the same method reached the material's voiced 'self-expression'. Again keeping to the role of a 'nurse-helper', the students improvised etudes that might have seemed dull and static to a bystander, perhaps resembling a ward of quiet lunatics or a too-long film about the life of amoebae. However, this laboratory task afforded them a valuable experience of an organic contact with an object being revived. Essentially the same principle is valid in a game with a modelled puppet, only in that case there are many more conditions involved: the puppet's form, colour, possibilities of movement, environment, script, the prepared text etc.
The audience had so far occupied an insignificant place in our laboratory work, but now we included them as well, starting with 'guessing games'. The student had to - hiding behind the screen for the sake of neutrality - express by means of a paper napkin and without using words a freely chosen wish or idea, so that the other students would understand. Quite quickly we realised that the napkin 'made itself clear' to the viewers within a few seconds (we must naturally consider here the small circle of those who played and those who guessed, where singular sign systems emerged, not necessarily understandable to outsiders. The exercises were nevertheless useful in discovering the different means of expression available to the material).
The students then had to find 'the story of their own paper' that would influence and interest them. They could now choose a suitable type of paper to fit their stories. The stories were all vastly different and exciting, for example attaching candy wrappers, denoting childhood dreams, to rolls of toilet paper in the shape of sheep.
If I now ask whether those rolls of toilet paper had a soul, I would say that they did not. However, in the course of the performance we believed in their life and soul and 'helped them to act' according to completely credible logic. We did that so precisely and intensely that the rolls acquired all the external features of possessing life, and during our artistic fantasy world, in the time and space of the performance, the toilet rolls acquired souls. Exactly the same thing happens to a piece of plastic in a child's game.

A similar faith in the soul of things often exists outside the time and space of play. In the Orient the faces of the puppets used in theatre are covered with a piece of cloth when they are not being used, because at that time a puppet does not obey people. When it's not under human control, it could thus see or do something untoward, and an evil soul might slip into it and force the puppet into disobedience during the performance. My father was a sculptor and, when I was a small boy, the shelves in our bedroom groaned under the weight of numerous bronze, firebrick and gypsum busts. These were quite ordinary heads during the daytime but at night shadows emerged around them. They seemed to move around, and nobody could convince me then that the heads were not staring at me, not planning and plotting something, that they were not alive. Our ancestors believed in the souls of trees, water and stones, taking them offerings to show their good will. This kind of faith has in fact survived to this day in many sensitive people. Science provides many intellectual explanations for how the world operates, but it gives little nourishment for the soul. So there is always a nagging doubt that there should be something else that our five senses are unable to grasp. And this is good, because if it were otherwise, we would not have art, music, churches, temples or theatre.
Where did I actually get to with this reflection? Maybe nowhere I had not been before, or maybe to the following admission: 'Yes, a puppet has a soul if we believe it.' Or, it could be that we simply do not know what puppets think about our souls when we have turned our backs on them.

Vahur Keller (1976) is an actor, director, scriptwriter, lecturer. Since 2003 works as director and dramaturge at the Estonian Puppet Theatre in Tallinn.