Making Meaning in Puppetry

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 puppet's meaning-making systems work across its three distinct parts.

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

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 puppet's meaning-making systems work across its three distinct parts.

Inhalt

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