Making Meaning in Puppetry

Materials, Practice, Perception
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-45813-7
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 602 g

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 puppet’s meaning-making systems work across the book’s three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppet’s design; Part 2 on Practice 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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Posner, Dassia N.

Orenstein, Claudia

Mello, Alissa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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 Blanco’s 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 Lee’s

Shank’s Mare

Ana Díaz 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

Über Autor(innen)

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 Director’s 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 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.