Populism and Ventriloquism

From its “idealized” association with the enigmatic prophesies of the Oracle at Delphi in the last century B.C. to the winnings of televised competition shows like America’s Got Talent respectively in 2007, 2015, and 2017, the art of ventriloquism has effectively manifested the popular desire to decipher the inviolable and yet dynamic interrelation between space and voice. With its rising popularity in the eighteenth century, ventriloquism had shredded its classical and spiritual demeanor and emerged as an appealing mode of entertainment. Though it seems to be a delightful fashion of performance, the “ventriloquial exchange” between the creator and the “dummy” often engenders a space that is filled with questions of power and legitimacy. Through the creation of a vocalic space, the ventriloquist becomes the subject as well as the recipient of perpetual dialogues. This vocalic space also contains the replies of the dummy and these responses are usually filled with an assertive agency. Locating the trajectory of ventriloquism from its religious implication to cultural amplification, this study investigates how an inanimate figure such as a dummy can acquire the perceptiveness of agency. While it is frequently presupposed that agency comes with an autonomous “body,” in a ventriloquial performance the “secondary” voice of the dummy receives a distinct identity by its assumed retorts to the creator. Accentuating the key facets of the performance studies, this analysis further focuses on how an insensate dummy attains the sensibilities of a body through the projection of the ventriloquist’s modified voice.