{"id":3045,"date":"2020-01-26T22:42:13","date_gmt":"2020-01-26T22:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3045"},"modified":"2020-01-26T22:42:13","modified_gmt":"2020-01-26T22:42:13","slug":"me-washoe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3045","title":{"rendered":"“Me, Washoe”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Nick Lehane:\u00a0Chimpanzee <\/em><\/a>\u00a0at Barbican Centre, London
\nfor New Scientist, 20 January 2020<\/a><\/p>\n

The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper m\u00e2ch\u00e9. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, by Brooklyn-based actor and puppeteer Nick Lehane, is a highlight of 2020\u2019s London International Mime Festival. It is a moving story that is attracting attention from neurologists and cognitive scientists along with the usual performing-arts crowd.<\/p>\n

Lehane conceived the show after reading Next of Kin, a memoir by psychologist and primate researcher Roger Fouts. Fouts\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Fouts family\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

Chimpanzee vocalisations aren\u2019t under conscious control, but the apes can communicate using body gestures. \u201cThis happens naturally in the wild,\u201d says Mary Lee Jensvold, who advised Nick Lehane on his play. A former student of Roger Fouts, she too campaigns to end primate captivity. \u201cAnd because chimps live in communities that are relatively closed and quite aggressive with each other, each community has its own repertoire of gestures. Where there\u2019s some overlap, there are differences in how the gestures are articulated.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, each community speaks in its own accent, and this, says Jensvold, \u201creally speaks to chimpanzees being cultural beings\u201c.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The obvious question \u2013 what is it like growing up in a family that contains chimpanzees? \u2013 is the only question Roger Fouts\u2019s son Joshua struggles to answer: \u201cThe reality is it\u2019s all I knew.\u201d Joshua, now a media scholar, was raised in a family whose rituals involved members that weren\u2019t human, whose human members would sign to each other so the chimpanzees wouldn\u2019t feel left out of the conversation, and the experience has left him with a profound sense that every non-human has inherent sapience. \u201cWhen I\u2019m walking down the sidewalk, and I see a human walking with their dog,\u201d he says, \u201cI tend to greet the dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Washoe was the first chimpanzee to wield ASL in a convincing fashion. Others followed: when Washoe\u2019s mate Moja didn\u2019t know the word for \u201cthermos\u201d, he referred to it as a \u201cmetal cup drink\u201d. When Washoe was shown an image of herself in the mirror, and asked what she was seeing, she replied: \u201cMe, Washoe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers could hardly credit what they were seeing \u2013 and some of their peers still don\u2019t. Jensvold believes there may be a cultural conflict at work. \u201cIn 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,\u201d she says. \u201cOut of Europe comes an ethological approach, which is really more about taking the time to observe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sign language research has drawn Jensvold and her colleagues into animal welfare and protection. \u201cWe can\u2019t keep doing to them what we\u2019ve been doing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Joshua recalls the moment his father reached the same conclusion: \u201cAbout 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, we\u2019ve effectively condemned these chimpanzees to a life of incarceration. They\u2019re enculturated to our behaviours. They can never be reintroduced to the wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are no captive chimps in New York, so Nick Lehane\u2019s research for his play consisted almost entirely of watching videos. According to Jensvold, he couldn\u2019t have picked a better form of study. \u201cWith video tape,\u201d she says, \u201cyou can take close observation down to a minute level.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Jensvold got involved in Lehane\u2019s project, there was already a performance ready for her to judge. For Lehane, that was a heart-in-mouth moment: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He needn\u2019t have worried. \u201cChimpanzee<\/i>\u00a0was phenomenal,\u201d says Jensvold. \u201cI was spotting things that I knew other people in the audience, people who weren\u2019t experts, weren\u2019t going to notice. He captured these incredible nuances.\u201d She pauses: \u201cSo the level of suffering that he\u2019s depicting: he gets that right, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does Lehane\u2019s chimpanzee convey emotion, given that chimp and human expressions don\u2019t overlap at all precisely?<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of it is in the miming of breath patterns,\u201d says Lehane. \u201cShort little pants and hoots look happy; deep intense heaves and cough will register as a different emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things I think is so cool about\u00a0puppetry<\/a>\u00a0is that the audience fills in so many blanks,\u201d he says. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you the number of times that someone has said, \u2018How did you make the puppet cry?\u2019 \u2018How did you make the puppet frown?\u2019 \u2018I loved it when the puppet blinked!\u2019 It tickles me because I just didn\u2019t do any of those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is there a danger here that the audience is merely anthropomorphising his subject, interpreting his chimpanzee as little more than a funny-shaped human?<\/p>\n

In answer, Lehane quotes\u00a0primatologist Frans de Waal<\/a>: \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Nick Lehane:\u00a0Chimpanzee \u00a0at Barbican Centre, London for New Scientist, 20 January 2020 The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper m\u00e2ch\u00e9. She gazes out at the audience from a raised … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,622],"tags":[386,434,717,648,232,780,782,781],"class_list":["post-3045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-stage","tag-animals","tag-barbican","tag-biosemiotics","tag-language","tag-new-scientist","tag-primates","tag-puppetry","tag-zoos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}