From ice puppets to robots, from intricate marionettes to abstract forms, Making Meaning in Puppetry investigates the elusive and multifaceted how of how puppets make meaning in performance. It develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppets meaning-making systems work across its three distinct parts.
From ice puppets to robots, from intricate marionettes to abstract forms, Making Meaning in Puppetry investigates the elusive and multifaceted how of how puppets make meaning in performance.
This engaging collection develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppets meaning-making systems work across its three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppets design; Part 2 on Performance investigates the interresponsive collaboration between puppet and puppeteer; and Part 3 on Perception considers how spectators understand and read a puppet production. The volume thus traces the full evolution of a puppet, from its raw materials, to its performance possibilities, to the moment it comes to imagined life. The seventeen chapters, authored by experts in the field, build bridges between puppetry and related fields, such as robotics, phenomenology, cognitive science, and queer theory, while using the puppet as their primary anchor of analysis.
Making Meaning in Puppetry is ideal for students of theatre and performance studies, theatre artists, scholars, and anyone who is fascinated by this rich performance form and wants to understand it more deeply.
Foreword
John Bell
Introduction: Recentering the Puppet
Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and Alissa Mello
PART 1
Materials
1 Reading the Material of Performance
Dassia N. Posner
2 Notes on a Material Dramaturgy
Laura Purcell-Gates
3 A Paper Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company
Moby Dick
Skye Strauss
4 Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blancos
Puppetry
Carlos A. Ortiz
5 Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of
Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire
Felice Amato
6 Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and
Myanmar (Burma)
Kathy Foley
PART 2
Practice
7 The Radicality of the Potato People
Denise Rogers Valenzuela
8 The Puppet Body as Performance Archive
Jane Catherine Shaw
9 Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese
Puppetry
Claudia Orenstein
10 Queer Thinking of Puppetry
Heather Jeanne Denyer
11 Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Muller, Ophelias, and
Recurrent Hamletian Machines
Mayumi Ilari
12 Puppetry and Technoculture
Lawrence Switzky
PART 3
Perception
13 The Relationality of Puppet Life
Dawn Tracey Brandes
14 In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Koryu-
Nishikawa V and Tom Lees
Shanks Mare
Ana Dķaz Barriga
15 Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a
Cognitive Lens
Pia Banzhaf
16 Puppetry as Phenomena
Kate Brehm
17 Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice,
Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company
Emma Smith Minkley
Afterword
Will Bixby
Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian, translator, dramaturg, and puppeteer. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, USA. Her books include The Directors Prism: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (coedited), and Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (co-edited).
Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, is co-editor of four other books on puppetry from Routledge, author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, and Editor of the online journal Puppetry International Research.
Alissa Mello is a writer, editor, theatre artist and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Their interests include women and performance, gender, identity and practice. Their co-edited books include Sandglass Theater: The Time Before the Glass Turns Over and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations.
