‘The Camera Chooses the Star’: Trans-medial Ventriloquism in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man

Abstract

Despite its status as a largely wordless performance, Punchdrunk's 2013 production of The Drowned Man activates a ventriloquist paradigm to frame its engagement with form: both the physical body as performance media. The Drowned Man's message about voice and form reimagines immersive theatre's multi-medial potential by invoking ventriloquism's cinematic and theatrical legacies. By staging the dummy's moment of self-awareness, The Drowned Man encourages it audiences to question the extent to which they, too, are invisibly controlled. The production distorts form in order to stage a self-reflexive dialogue about voices, bodies, and performance. The result is often uncanny, unsettling, bewildering and bewitching: much like ventriloquism itself.