1 February 2020| New Scientist | 31RICHARD TERMINEDon’t miss
Watch
Underwater, directed
by William Eubank. The
crew of an ocean-floor
research lab must
scramble to safety
after an earthquake
devastates their home.
In UK cinemas from
7 February.Read
Physical Intelligence:
The science of thinking
without thinking
(John Murray) by Scott
Grafton explores the
fascinating yet often
overlooked connections
between how we move
and act in the world and
how we think.Visit
Meet Vincent van
Gogh arrives in London
on 7 February, after
enchanting audiences
in Beijing, Barcelona
and Seoul. Conjured
up by virtual and
augmented reality,
Van Gogh guides you
through his life.
TONI ALBIR/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCKPlay
Chimpanzee
Nick Lehane
Barbican Centre, London
Ran from 21 to 25 January
THE puppet, a life-sized female
chimp, is made out of wood, rope,
carved hard foam and papier
mâché. 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 lab, deprived of company,
her mind slowly deteriorating.
Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck
and Emma Wiseman operate the
chimpanzee, the sole actor in a
puppet play that made its London
debut last week. Chimpanzee,
by Brooklyn-based actor and
puppeteer Nick Lehane, was a
highlight of this year’s 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.
Lehane conceived the show
after reading Next of Kin, a memoir
by psychologist and primate
researcher Roger Fouts.
Modern efforts to communicate
with chimpanzees began in 1967,
at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Fouts and his colleagues found that
their chimpanzees, once taught
American Sign Language (ASL), used
it to communicate with each other,
creating phrases by combining signs
to denote novel objects.
A chimpanzee called Washoe was
the first to wield ASL in a convincing
fashion. Others followed: when
Washoe’s mate Moja didn’t know
the word for “thermos”, he referred
to it as a “metal cup drink”. When
Washoe was shown her image in
the mirror, and asked what she was
seeing, she replied: “Me, Washoe.”
As the sign-language studies
grew more ambitious, Roger and
Deborah Fouts and their colleagues
took the chimps into their own
homes, acculturating them as
humans as far as they could
to encourage communication.The Fouts’ chimps enjoyed a
relatively comfortable life once
they outgrew their human home.
But other chimps in similar
programmes found themselves
sold to research labs, living out
almost inconceivably solitary lives
of confinement and vivisection.
“About midway through his
career, Roger realised that this was
an experiment that should never
have been done,” recalls Joshua
Fouts, Roger’s son. “Out of thedesire to determine what it is about
humans that makes us special,
we’ve effectively condemned these
chimpanzees to a life of
incarceration. They’re enculturated
to our behaviours. They can never
be reintroduced to the wild.”
There are no captive chimps in
New York, so Nick Lehane’s research
for his play consisted of watching
videos. According to primatologist
Mary Lee Jensvold, he couldn’t have
picked a better strategy. “With video
tape you can take observation to a
minute level,” she says.
By the time Jensvold arrived to
advise on Lehane’s project, which
will continue to tour worldwide,
there was already a performance for
her to judge. For Lehane, that was
a heart-in-mouth moment: “I was
afraid that despite our best efforts,
we had missed the mark.”
He needn’t have worried.
“Chimpanzee was phenomenal,”
says Jensvold. “I was spotting
things that I knew other people in
the audience, people who weren’t
experts, weren’t going to notice.
He captured these incredible
nuances.” She pauses: “So the
level of suffering that he’s
depicting: he gets that right, too.” ❚A puppet chimp captures
the strange twists of a life
spent too close to humans
Growing up with chimps
A puppet play exposing the bold experiment of raising chimps in
human families is moving and deeply realistic, finds Simon Ings
“ Chimps, once taught,
used sign language to
communicate with
each other, combining
signs to create phrases”