The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper mĆ¢chĆ©. She gazes out at the audience from a raised platform and, through movement alone, weaves her tale. When she was young, she lived as part of a human family. Now she is incarcerated in a research laboratory, deprived of company, her mind slowly deteriorating.
Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, and Emma Wiseman operate the chimpanzee, the sole actor in a puppet play running at the Barbican Centre in London. The play, Chimpanzee, by Brooklyn-based actor and puppeteer , is a highlight of 2020ās . It is a moving story that is attracting attention from neurologists and cognitive scientists along with the usual performing-arts crowd.
Lehane conceived the show after reading Next of Kin, a memoir by psychologist and primate researcher Roger Fouts. Foutsās tales of experiments in fostering young chimpanzees in human homes had obvious dramatic potential. Then, as Lehane looked deeper, he discovered a much darker story.
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The Fouts familyās own chimps enjoyed a relatively comfortable life once they outgrew their human home. But other chimpanzees in similar programmes found themselves sold to research labs, living out almost inconceivably solitary lives of confinement and vivisection.
Modern efforts to communicate with chimpanzees began in 1967 at the University of Nevada, Reno, when primatologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner set up a project to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimp called Washoe. These experiments have so transformed our view of chimp culture that many of the original researchers are campaigning to end the practice of keeping primates in captivity. (It is still legal to keep primates as pets in the UK.)
Chimpanzee vocalisations arenāt under conscious control, but the apes can communicate using body gestures. āThis happens naturally in the wild,ā says Mary Lee Jensvold, who advised Nick Lehane on his play. A former student of Roger Fouts, she too campaigns to end primate captivity. āAnd because chimps live in communities that are relatively closed and quite aggressive with each other, each community has its own repertoire of gestures. Where thereās some overlap, there are differences in how the gestures are articulated.ā
In other words, each community speaks in its own accent, and this, says Jensvold, āreally speaks to chimpanzees being cultural beingsā.
As the sign-language studies grew more ambitious, the Gardners and their colleagues Roger and Deborah Fouts took the chimps into their own homes, acculturating them as humans as far they could to encourage communication.
The obvious question ā what is it like growing up in a family that contains chimpanzees? ā is the only question Roger Foutsās son Joshua struggles to answer: āThe reality is itās all I knew.ā Joshua, now a media scholar, was raised in a family whose rituals involved members that werenāt human, whose human members would sign to each other so the chimpanzees wouldnāt feel left out of the conversation, and the experience has left him with a profound sense that every non-human has inherent sapience. āWhen Iām walking down the sidewalk, and I see a human walking with their dog,ā he says, āI tend to greet the dog.ā
Roger Fouts and his colleagues found that their animals used ASL to communicate with each other, creating phrases by combining signs to denote novel objects.
Washoe was the first chimpanzee to wield ASL in a convincing fashion. Others followed: when Washoeās mate Moja didnāt know the word for āthermosā, he referred to it as a āmetal cup drinkā. When Washoe was shown an image of herself in the mirror, and asked what she was seeing, she replied: āMe, Washoe.ā
The researchers could hardly credit what they were seeing ā and some of their peers still donāt. Jensvold believes there may be a cultural conflict at work. āIn the US, comparative psychology has historically been a very lab-based science, where you set up these contrived experiments in order to answer your research questions,ā she says. āOut of Europe comes an ethological approach, which is really more about taking the time to observe.ā
The sign language research has drawn Jensvold and her colleagues into animal welfare and protection. āWe canāt keep doing to them what weāve been doing,ā she says.
Joshua recalls the moment his father reached the same conclusion: āAbout midway through his career, Roger realised that this was an experiment that should never have been done. Out of the desire to determine what it is about humans that makes us special, weāve effectively condemned these chimpanzees to a life of incarceration. Theyāre enculturated to our behaviours. They can never be reintroduced to the wild.ā
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There are no captive chimps in New York, so Nick Lehaneās research for his play consisted almost entirely of watching videos. According to Jensvold, he couldnāt have picked a better form of study. āWith video tape,ā she says, āyou can take close observation down to a minute level.ā
By the time Jensvold got involved in Lehaneās project, there was already a performance ready for her to judge. For Lehane, that was a heart-in-mouth moment: āI was afraid that despite our best efforts, we had missed the mark. If anyone was going to think that we had missed something vital about chimp movement or behaviour, it would be Mary Lee.ā
He neednāt have worried. āChimpanzee was phenomenal,ā says Jensvold. āI was spotting things that I knew other people in the audience, people who werenāt experts, werenāt going to notice. He captured these incredible nuances.ā She pauses: āSo the level of suffering that heās depicting: he gets that right, too.ā
How does Lehaneās chimpanzee convey emotion, given that chimp and human expressions donāt overlap at all precisely?
āA lot of it is in the miming of breath patterns,ā says Lehane. āShort little pants and hoots look happy; deep intense heaves and cough will register as a different emotion.ā
āOne of the things I think is so cool about puppetry is that the audience fills in so many blanks,ā he says. āI canāt tell you the number of times that someone has said, āHow did you make the puppet cry?ā āHow did you make the puppet frown?ā āI loved it when the puppet blinked!ā It tickles me because I just didnāt do any of those things.ā
Is there a danger here that the audience is merely anthropomorphising his subject, interpreting his chimpanzee as little more than a funny-shaped human?
In answer, Lehane quotes primatologist Frans de Waal: āTo endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.ā
runs 21 ā 25 January 2020 atĀ Barbican Centre, London
