THE CHIMP PROJECT

Set in the Congo Republic, The Chimp Project is about Lisa, an adolescent and sexually aware chimp, trained in the art of sign language, who has outgrown Johannesburg and her career in television commercials. Sonya, Lisa's human flatmate, takes her to a rehabilitation sanctuary in the Congo where they meet Tadashi. This young Afro-Japanese primatologist is appalled at Lisa's taste for cigarettes, gin, human food and, more importantly, the gift of language.   The Chimp Project explores the implications of passing human language on to another species and then attempting to take it away. It questions the relationship between Man & Animal, Natural & Cultural. Should Lisa have been taught language at all? Can real communication with wild chimps become a path toward preservation of their natural habitat? Or is Lisa a new Frankenstein monster for the 21st Century?

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ADRIAN KOHLER Scriptwriter, Peter Esterhuyzen and zoologist, Barak Morgan first approached me with a proposal to create a play centred on chimpanzees early in 1998. For my part, I was immediately excited by the unique opportunity of representing these animals with puppets. When films are made using chimpanzee characters, they have to be trained and bribed into doing what the camera wants of them. With puppet chimpanzees we would be in complete control. We began mining the rich literature around the subject from Jane Goodall's accounts of her early years at Gombe to Donna Haraway's searing insights produced in the course of her 'undercover narrative' which revealed many of the unacknowledged agendas behind chimpanzee research.   We learnt about the captive chimps who had been taught to use sign language in the '60s and '70s. We also knew that startling discoveries had been made concerning the social aggression and sexuality of chimpanzees, with strong resonances for human sociality. I became aware that many proposals, connections and valences between the great apes and us had been noted, but their implications for our understanding of what is 'natural' had never been explored. Because we were working with puppets, we seemed to be in a unique position to play with some of the ideas emanating from the research.   We then organised a trip to the Gombe Stream National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where we spent ten days with the family of wild chimps that have been studied by Jane Goodall and her Institute since the early '60s. This was a vital experience for us. Finally we could witness chimp culture at first hand: their hunting, their forms of communication and their tool use. We acknowledged and celebrated a culture centred on unique social rituals.   But what struck me was how artificial this wild sanctuary had become. There was something eerie in the way the chimps would walk right past us as if we were extras in a daily soap in which they were the nonchalant, full-time stars. Despite their wildness, these chimps had become totally habituated to human beings. Coupled to this, the lush forests of Gombe rise in stark contrast to the barren areas outside its narrow borders. I asked myself what the status could be of this strange Eden, threatened on three sides by refugee settlers filtering down from Burundi, Uganda and the Congo.   On our return, the play slowly began to evolve. We were aware that we'd be working against a backdrop of thousands of naturalistic documentaries and articles produced by National Geographic and others. And in a way we made a deliberate attempt to deconstruct this naturalism. By bringing Lisa into the play as the central character, she herself confronts and contests what is natural.   The same problem posed itself when the time came to design the puppets. How to represent these animals? We knew how important grooming was to the social life of the chimpanzees and therefore hair seemed a prerequisite. However, an early hairy prototype proved lifeless and boring. Clearly less naturalism was called for and the lantern-like frame puppets covered in thin gauze were the result.   Unwittingly these puppets serve to illustrate Freud's assertion that man is a prosthetic god - our mastery over an array of aids and implements giving us astonishing powers. However the prosthesis that renders us godlike is neither a telescope nor a microscope, but rather a puppet. The mechanisms clenched in our fists extend our imaginative reach. The puppets ape our movements whilst we sweat and struggle to reproduce the movements of apes, projecting our own aspirations through the breath of our kin-animals, the chimps.   To represent by misrepresenting is part of this project. To problematise the idea of Nature and the Natural. In focusing on an attempt to rehabilitate a domesticated animal, I'm not drawing on the Eden mythology of Born Free, the classic middle class romance about a 'natural' world that we've become alienated from, but which actually never existed. What I have is this strange creature, Lisa, who has become the recipient of one of the touchstones of our humanity, our language. Is this an inevitable transference? Is evolutionary engineering in the new century as unstoppable as genetic engineering became late in our last century?   Ultimately, we have been forced to confront the ancient and paradoxical dualism between culture and nature and to pose the question: Does it exist?

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PETER ESTERHUYZEN This play had its genesis one Saturday afternoon when my friend and collaborator Barak Morgan began entertaining me with stories about wild chimps, based on the work of Jane Goodall. He told me stories about the chimps called Goblin, Gremlin and Greybeard: stories that illustrated the complex reciprocal social relationships and power dynamics within chimp communities. He spoke about Jane's discovery that different chimp communities groups appear to have different 'culture': different ways of collecting food, fashioning primitive tools or using medicinal plants to fight disease. Finally, he related the story of the Kasakela chimp community and their four year long furtive war waged against the Kahama community which ended in the latter community being wiped out. The anecdotes, which evoked in my mind a kind of chimp Middle Earth, were startling: chimp behaviour seemed to include acts of empathy, altruism, murder and war - behaviour which I had always regarded as uniquely human.   I had long admired Handspring Puppet Company's work with William Kentridge. When I bumped into Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler at a party that same evening I mentioned the idea of using puppets to explore the world of chimps. Basil and Adrian were intrigued by the idea, and a few months later the four of us found ourselves in the forests of Gombe.   Coming face to face with wild chimps was a profoundly unsettling experience: they were quite unlike any other animal I had ever encountered. So humanlike and yet so completely other: they defied conventional categorisation as animal or human.    In the forest reserve of Gombe it seemed only natural that these unique creatures should be granted the special rights which form the basis of the Great Ape Project's world campaign. But as soon as we ventured beyond Gombe into the eroded landscape and stark poverty of the surrounding villages, the picture started to muddy again. At night, while staring out at the lights of the fishing boats on Lake Tanganyika, we had many a heated discussion about the rights of people versus the rights of chimps. Did the local people get any benefit from a reserve like Gombe? How long would the forest or the chimps last if people were allowed in? Is it blind human arrogance that makes us think that only we have rights? Yet can we talk of chimp rights at all? What would happen if chimps started claiming their rights? What if their idea of rights conflicted with our idea of the rights we wanted to confer on them. If chimps could talk...    We turned to the books we had brought on signing chimps and so began our long sojourn in the controversial, intriguing, often tragic world of cross-fostered chimps that have been raised as human children and taught to communicate using sign language. One of the most famous of the signing chimps was Lucy, who had a vocabulary of 120 words of human sign language. Lucy's life was a caricature of a 70s American teenager. She enjoyed watching soap operas, poured and mixed her own drinks, paged through magazines and became sexually aroused when she saw pictures of naked human men. Lucy thought that she was human.    From our camp outside the forest, Lucy's suburban America seemed a universe away. And yet this great divide was one that Lucy herself was forced to cross. At ten she became too big for her domestic world and was sent to a chimp rehabilitation colony in the Gambia, where she was successfully weaned off gin and tonic and magazines, and taught with other orphan chimps how to survive in the African Forest.    The real Lucy died at the hands of poachers. But the arrival in the forest of a signing chimp and her long-suffering human companion seemed a fitting place to begin a journey into the ever-shifting 'border zones' between human and animal, nature and culture.    ABOUT PETER ESTERHUYZEN Peter Esterhuyzen is a former academic and literacy teacher turned professional writer. In 1989 he co-foundered a comic publishing company called The Storyteller Group.   Since then he has written more than forty comic books and text books, and helped create three popular comic series. He first collaborated with Handspring Puppet Company on a multimedia educational series for children called Spider's Place. After leaving the Storyteller Group, he freelanced in the television industry for three years before making his television debut as a co-creator and co-writer of the controversial series, Yizo-Yizo. He is currently working on the sequel. The Chimp Project was his second play.

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WARRICK SONY The main theme was developed from four initial melody cycles written for strings, percussion and turntables, inspired by the images in sections of the documentary film, Heart of Darkness, shot by Dewald Aukema.   The slow lyrical feel of the film, echoed some of the African moods that I recognised on the first reading of the script.    Each of the four cycles was composed using the same tempo, therefore rhythmically interchangeable with each other. This forms the basis of much Central and Southern African music. I felt that if elements worked rhythmically together, opportunities for improvisation with harmony could be opened up thus allowing the element of chance to play a greater role in the composition. This framework set the basis for further experimentation through computer manipulation using many contemporary hip-hop techniques.   Further 'random' events were introduced to the composition through the use of turntable work, providing an audio ambiguity between the 'found' and the 'composed'. Sound design and processing applied to the recordings of the string quartet provided surprisingly dramatic qualities more usually encountered in totally synthetic domains, yet they retain the (abstract) human or animal spirit. The same can be said for the similar manipulations of normally conservative areas of film sound design.   Many of the bird sounds have been treated and manipulated from scratched in vinyl sources.   Many thanks to Chris Letcher for his help with string arrangements and guitar and also Mhlanga Roxx for his bass and the Spiral String Quartet for coming in all the way from Noordhoek.   ABOUT WARRICK SONY Warrick has worked in the electronic media as a composer, producer, sound engineer and sound designer on a multitude of films, documentaries, art events, theatre, dance and project albums. He is the founder and sole member of Kalahari Surfers, recording projects at Shifty Studios in the mid '80s. They are known for five albums of politically radical musical song/satire, released through the independent London label, Recommended Records. During this time he toured Europe playing concerts in East Berlin, Moscow, Riga, Leningrad. Collaborations over the years include work with composer Shaun Naidoo on Seasons of Violence, a docu/opera which won an honorary mention in Linz, Austria, an album with Soweto poet, Lesego Rampolokeng, (including a series of concerts in Brazil), a composing collaboration with the late James Philips on the music for the William Kentridge/Handspring production of Faustus in Africa, as well as composing sonic art pieces for Faultlines with Malcolm Payne. The Brown and the Green at the Pretoria Art Museum and a piece with Rodney Place for the Adelaide Arts Festival. He has produced albums for Sony Music and for BMG. Recent collaborative projects with Brendan Jury, under the name Tran-Sky, include William Kentridge/Handspring's Ubu And The Truth Commission, an album titled Killing Time and various live concerts including a tour with British group Massive Attack and a recent recording collaboration with ex Orb members, Greg Hunter and Chris Wesson for the MELT 2000 label. Warrick hosted the Brian Eno workshop sessions at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. As Trans-Sky he recorded the themes of an SABC children's show and recently released a single with kwaito king, Arthur entitled Dubaceous

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Author: Peter Esterhuyzen Director: Adrian Kohler Co-director: Kurt Wustmann Composor: Warrick Sony Puppet Manipulators: Busi Zokufa, Louis Seboko, Basil Jones, Tau Qwelane, Yvette Coetzee, Fourie Nyamande, Rajesh Gopie Puppet Designer and Maker: Adrian Kohler Set design: Nadya Cohen Lighting Design: Wesley France Director of Video: Deborah May Costumes: Hazel Maree Video Animation: Gerhard Marx and Deborah May Video Editor: Catherine Meyburgh Theatre Sound Design and Control: Simon Mahoney Company Tour Manager: Wesley France Stage Manager/Video Operator: Leigh Colombick Props and Set Painting: Leigh Colombick Assistant Puppet Carver: Luke Younge Assistant Puppet Makers: Tau Qwelane and Monique Fagan Sign Language Instruction: Olga Mnikathi Tai Chi Instruction: Leo Ming Production: Handspring Puppet Company, Art Bureau (Munich) with Theaterformen 2000, the National Arts Council, the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts and the Market Theatre Foundation (Johannesburg). Co-production: Schausburg and Stadforum München, Kunstfest Weimar and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen.

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