Claudia Orenstein | Hunter College (original) (raw)
Papers by Claudia Orenstein
Routledge eBooks, May 13, 2019
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In ... more there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In my opinion, Pegg is generally fair in all she says. Her sympathies appear to lie with the Republic of Mongolia and its democratic revolution of the early 1990s. But that does not make her hostile to China, and the coverage of Chinese attitudes toward Mongolian performance is invariably f a i r . In technical and production terms this is an excellent book. The pictures and compact disc are excellent. The index is very detailed and abounds in useful subheadings. The bibliography is a tour de force, and the writing style is always clear, even at its most scholarly. Occasionally the twentieth century is referred to as “this” century, and all her research and experiences are indeed from the last century. But mostly she has taken care to update. There are weaknesses. For instance, I would have liked a summative conclusion. But overall, this is a splendid book. It covers an enormous range of material, historical and contemporary, musicological and social, and succeeds in being fair at all times. It is likely to appeal more to specialists than to the general reader, but that does not make it in the least dry. Indeed, I found it always interesting and clear, despite its high scholarship. I recommend it strongly as a major contribution to our knowledge of the Mongolian performing arts.
Theatre Journal, 2001
... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... more ... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... the rhythmic structure of the music and adapt the music to the skill level of the ... The book concludes with an epilogue that discusses the changes nomai is undergoing today in response ...
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
Comparative Drama, 2012
Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ... more Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 224 + 4 color plates, 24 halftones. $25.00. Toward the end of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross evokes the unusual environment in which puppetry exists: It is a space where unexpected forms of life emerge, assert a form, shift shape and then disappear, not a vast space, not a great wilderness or a grand palace, but like some rumored corner of an old house, or some neighborhood in a city that you stumble across by surprise, where people under the shadow of war or poverty engage in commerce of peculiar sorts, trading in strange goods and using odd currencies, feeding unaccountable and suspect appetites. (158-59) In Puppet, Gross attempts to articulate the essence of the creatures that inhabit this space, their special nature, and our attraction to them. Each chapter is an encounter with a few particular examples of puppetry, sometimes from traditional forms, like Japanese bunraku or Sicilian rod puppets, and sometimes from innovative contemporary artists like Janie Geiser or Germany's Ilke Schonbein, who are exploring the boundaries of this world in new ways. Each chapter also provides a meditation on aspects of puppetry that captivate and puzzle us, leading to more profound consideration of the puppet's relationship to art and life. As Gross explains, "The puppet and the idea of the puppet move together here, the actual and imagined, or unknown, puppet, the visible and the invisible puppet" (4). Puppet is at once a book of personal reflections--based on Gross's own experiences with objects in performance, with literature that draws on the metaphor of the puppet, and with individual puppeteers--as well as an exposition on the nature of puppets, in all their variety, and how they work on the imagination. Chapter 4, "The Fate of Hands" for example, begins by proposing the hand or glove puppet as the "extension and tool of our will" (51) because of the palpable presence of the human hand inside the puppet's body. The hand puppet transforms a part of the self into a separate, distinct entity even as it remains inseparable from the puppeteer. Furthermore, "The poetry of the connection between hand and puppet is so intense in part because of the range of ways in which we live in our hands, and in which our hands connect us to the world" (52). This observation brings Gross to the work of the famous Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov, who, in his Attitude to a Lady, used simple balls on the index finger of each of his otherwise bare hands to act out a scenario of courtship and seduction. Gross articulates the complexities inherent in this simplest of puppets: "What you feel is the presence of a composite or double body, animate and inanimate at once, a relation perhaps echoing some image of a soul within a body, though never simply--it may be a body within a body, or a soul within a soul" (55). Gross builds on these insights to inform his reading of Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theatre, in which the main character is an aging puppeteer. While Sabbaths hands once had a special seductive life of their own, with age their powers have withered, "[a]nd the hardening of the puppeteer's hands keep pace with the hardening of the poet's own art" (59). Gross finds that the novel "reminds us that puppets offer a refuge for fantasies otherwise exiled" (60) and ends his chapter, "What I wonder is whether any actual puppet theatre could translate what the novelist's language seems to know" (62). Gross's full circle of reflections, from the unique expressive possibilities of hands in the art of puppetry, to the way Roth's novel redeploys those realities, and the metaphors they embody, in a different artistic sphere, mines the riches buried in the reciprocal connections between the puppet as both stage object and literary metaphor. While chapter 4 explores the physical presence of the puppeteer's body, chapter 5, "Wooden Acting" focuses instead on the puppet as object and objects used as puppets. …
Asian Theatre Journal, 2007
Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of Fran... more Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of France, gives itself over to an exciting festival of world puppetry. (1) Home of the Institut International de la Marionnette (International Institute of Puppetry), as well as France's own national school of puppetry, L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ESNAM), Charleville holds a special place in the hearts of puppeteers and puppet lovers across the globe, who have attended festivals there as far back as 1961, taken or offered workshops at the school, or pursued scholarly studies at the Institute's Centre de Recherches, which holds more than 6,000 books and 1,200 videos. The three-year hiatus between festivals, which some would like to shorten to two, helps build anticipation for what is perhaps the largest puppetry festival in the world. In September 2006, the festival offered more than 250 shows from more than forty countries as part of both its main program ("Programme In") and fringe ("Programme Off"), along with twelve exhibits on puppetry and an endless stream of street performers occupying every inch of open air space or perambulating around the city in striking costumes. With food stalls and puppet vendors set up along the main streets, stores and buildings throughout the town decorated with puppet figures, and nightly gatherings for beer, tartiflette (a local favorite dish), and free music at the festival's central locale, for ten days the town of Charleville fully immerses itself in its celebration of puppetry. A festival such as this gives Asian companies a chance to connect with European audiences outside of Europe's capital cities, as well as with accomplished puppeteers from around the world, contributing to the global dissemination and appreciation of puppetry techniques and traditions. While the festival was a success in many of these respects, Asian puppetry maintained a relatively low profile throughout the event. There were fairly few Asian offerings in Charleville, with most of the companies not surprisingly coming from France. However, the Asian companies that did come were mostly major troupes including both puppeteers and musicians. These performances were predominantly traditional forms, labeled "spectacle traditionnel" in the program. The Parc d'Exposition, located a ten-minute ride from the center of town, hosted consecutively the Theatre National des Marionnettes sur L'Eau (National Water Puppet Theatre) from Vietnam as well as the Joe Louis Theater from Thailand. The Vietnamese water puppets performed their usual fare, a series of vignettes about mythical animals and peasant life, to the accompaniment of live music and singing. Puppeteers hidden behind a screen, standing thigh-high in the pool of water that serves as the puppets' stage, operate the figures by means of long, submerged poles. Sliding through their watery setting, farmers plant rice, children swim, fishermen row their boats, and phoenixes and sea serpents dive and play, the latter spewing water and fire. This colorful performance was more or less identical to one at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York in 1996, and to those given regularly for tourists in Vietnam. In the large, overwhelming indoor space, with an audience of restless schoolchildren, who were given no introduction or explanation of the Vietnamese scenes, the event lacked some of the magic of the outdoor, moonlit version in New York's Damrosch Park, although the audience still oohed, aahed, and laughed at the puppets' sometimes surprising, sometimes comic feats. Since the Vietnamese water puppets were making a return visit to Charleville, many local and nearby residents, who make up the vast majority of the festival audience, had already seen the company per form. Posted far from the town's bustling center, this exquisite traditional art, so recently saved from extinction, sadly seemed submerged within the torrent of festival events. …
Routledge eBooks, Jun 13, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Theater, 2002
That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at onc... more That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at once artists and professionals who often wrote, as a Henry Fielding character so baldly put it, “to amuse the town and bring full houses.” So did Shakespeare; so did Molière. It is the fact that they did so with wit and vitality and extraordinary elegance of expression and situation that separates them from other boulevard playwrights in their era and ours. Anyone who has worked in the theater knows just what an act of virtuosity great playwriting is, and it should be celebrated as such—especially when the target audience is, as it is here, students. The book has an extremely tight critical palate. Its citations of plays and commentaries, indeed, the same passages in those texts, come up an astonishing number of times—so much so that students may be led to underestimate the variety of the era and overestimate modern critical consensus. On the other hand, if John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancaster Witches don’t enter the repertory of college theater troupes, it won’t be the Cambridge Companion’s fault. And truly, the regeneration of interest in these and other neglected texts is one of the volume’s clear victories. If only that interest could have been dramaturgically as well as academically evoked. With friends like The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, English Restoration theater needs still more friends. Claudia Orenstein
Mime journal, Feb 28, 2017
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, May 13, 2019
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In ... more there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In my opinion, Pegg is generally fair in all she says. Her sympathies appear to lie with the Republic of Mongolia and its democratic revolution of the early 1990s. But that does not make her hostile to China, and the coverage of Chinese attitudes toward Mongolian performance is invariably f a i r . In technical and production terms this is an excellent book. The pictures and compact disc are excellent. The index is very detailed and abounds in useful subheadings. The bibliography is a tour de force, and the writing style is always clear, even at its most scholarly. Occasionally the twentieth century is referred to as “this” century, and all her research and experiences are indeed from the last century. But mostly she has taken care to update. There are weaknesses. For instance, I would have liked a summative conclusion. But overall, this is a splendid book. It covers an enormous range of material, historical and contemporary, musicological and social, and succeeds in being fair at all times. It is likely to appeal more to specialists than to the general reader, but that does not make it in the least dry. Indeed, I found it always interesting and clear, despite its high scholarship. I recommend it strongly as a major contribution to our knowledge of the Mongolian performing arts.
Theatre Journal, 2001
... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... more ... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... the rhythmic structure of the music and adapt the music to the skill level of the ... The book concludes with an epilogue that discusses the changes nomai is undergoing today in response ...
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
Comparative Drama, 2012
Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ... more Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 224 + 4 color plates, 24 halftones. $25.00. Toward the end of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross evokes the unusual environment in which puppetry exists: It is a space where unexpected forms of life emerge, assert a form, shift shape and then disappear, not a vast space, not a great wilderness or a grand palace, but like some rumored corner of an old house, or some neighborhood in a city that you stumble across by surprise, where people under the shadow of war or poverty engage in commerce of peculiar sorts, trading in strange goods and using odd currencies, feeding unaccountable and suspect appetites. (158-59) In Puppet, Gross attempts to articulate the essence of the creatures that inhabit this space, their special nature, and our attraction to them. Each chapter is an encounter with a few particular examples of puppetry, sometimes from traditional forms, like Japanese bunraku or Sicilian rod puppets, and sometimes from innovative contemporary artists like Janie Geiser or Germany's Ilke Schonbein, who are exploring the boundaries of this world in new ways. Each chapter also provides a meditation on aspects of puppetry that captivate and puzzle us, leading to more profound consideration of the puppet's relationship to art and life. As Gross explains, "The puppet and the idea of the puppet move together here, the actual and imagined, or unknown, puppet, the visible and the invisible puppet" (4). Puppet is at once a book of personal reflections--based on Gross's own experiences with objects in performance, with literature that draws on the metaphor of the puppet, and with individual puppeteers--as well as an exposition on the nature of puppets, in all their variety, and how they work on the imagination. Chapter 4, "The Fate of Hands" for example, begins by proposing the hand or glove puppet as the "extension and tool of our will" (51) because of the palpable presence of the human hand inside the puppet's body. The hand puppet transforms a part of the self into a separate, distinct entity even as it remains inseparable from the puppeteer. Furthermore, "The poetry of the connection between hand and puppet is so intense in part because of the range of ways in which we live in our hands, and in which our hands connect us to the world" (52). This observation brings Gross to the work of the famous Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov, who, in his Attitude to a Lady, used simple balls on the index finger of each of his otherwise bare hands to act out a scenario of courtship and seduction. Gross articulates the complexities inherent in this simplest of puppets: "What you feel is the presence of a composite or double body, animate and inanimate at once, a relation perhaps echoing some image of a soul within a body, though never simply--it may be a body within a body, or a soul within a soul" (55). Gross builds on these insights to inform his reading of Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theatre, in which the main character is an aging puppeteer. While Sabbaths hands once had a special seductive life of their own, with age their powers have withered, "[a]nd the hardening of the puppeteer's hands keep pace with the hardening of the poet's own art" (59). Gross finds that the novel "reminds us that puppets offer a refuge for fantasies otherwise exiled" (60) and ends his chapter, "What I wonder is whether any actual puppet theatre could translate what the novelist's language seems to know" (62). Gross's full circle of reflections, from the unique expressive possibilities of hands in the art of puppetry, to the way Roth's novel redeploys those realities, and the metaphors they embody, in a different artistic sphere, mines the riches buried in the reciprocal connections between the puppet as both stage object and literary metaphor. While chapter 4 explores the physical presence of the puppeteer's body, chapter 5, "Wooden Acting" focuses instead on the puppet as object and objects used as puppets. …
Asian Theatre Journal, 2007
Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of Fran... more Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of France, gives itself over to an exciting festival of world puppetry. (1) Home of the Institut International de la Marionnette (International Institute of Puppetry), as well as France's own national school of puppetry, L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ESNAM), Charleville holds a special place in the hearts of puppeteers and puppet lovers across the globe, who have attended festivals there as far back as 1961, taken or offered workshops at the school, or pursued scholarly studies at the Institute's Centre de Recherches, which holds more than 6,000 books and 1,200 videos. The three-year hiatus between festivals, which some would like to shorten to two, helps build anticipation for what is perhaps the largest puppetry festival in the world. In September 2006, the festival offered more than 250 shows from more than forty countries as part of both its main program ("Programme In") and fringe ("Programme Off"), along with twelve exhibits on puppetry and an endless stream of street performers occupying every inch of open air space or perambulating around the city in striking costumes. With food stalls and puppet vendors set up along the main streets, stores and buildings throughout the town decorated with puppet figures, and nightly gatherings for beer, tartiflette (a local favorite dish), and free music at the festival's central locale, for ten days the town of Charleville fully immerses itself in its celebration of puppetry. A festival such as this gives Asian companies a chance to connect with European audiences outside of Europe's capital cities, as well as with accomplished puppeteers from around the world, contributing to the global dissemination and appreciation of puppetry techniques and traditions. While the festival was a success in many of these respects, Asian puppetry maintained a relatively low profile throughout the event. There were fairly few Asian offerings in Charleville, with most of the companies not surprisingly coming from France. However, the Asian companies that did come were mostly major troupes including both puppeteers and musicians. These performances were predominantly traditional forms, labeled "spectacle traditionnel" in the program. The Parc d'Exposition, located a ten-minute ride from the center of town, hosted consecutively the Theatre National des Marionnettes sur L'Eau (National Water Puppet Theatre) from Vietnam as well as the Joe Louis Theater from Thailand. The Vietnamese water puppets performed their usual fare, a series of vignettes about mythical animals and peasant life, to the accompaniment of live music and singing. Puppeteers hidden behind a screen, standing thigh-high in the pool of water that serves as the puppets' stage, operate the figures by means of long, submerged poles. Sliding through their watery setting, farmers plant rice, children swim, fishermen row their boats, and phoenixes and sea serpents dive and play, the latter spewing water and fire. This colorful performance was more or less identical to one at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York in 1996, and to those given regularly for tourists in Vietnam. In the large, overwhelming indoor space, with an audience of restless schoolchildren, who were given no introduction or explanation of the Vietnamese scenes, the event lacked some of the magic of the outdoor, moonlit version in New York's Damrosch Park, although the audience still oohed, aahed, and laughed at the puppets' sometimes surprising, sometimes comic feats. Since the Vietnamese water puppets were making a return visit to Charleville, many local and nearby residents, who make up the vast majority of the festival audience, had already seen the company per form. Posted far from the town's bustling center, this exquisite traditional art, so recently saved from extinction, sadly seemed submerged within the torrent of festival events. …
Routledge eBooks, Jun 13, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Theater, 2002
That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at onc... more That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at once artists and professionals who often wrote, as a Henry Fielding character so baldly put it, “to amuse the town and bring full houses.” So did Shakespeare; so did Molière. It is the fact that they did so with wit and vitality and extraordinary elegance of expression and situation that separates them from other boulevard playwrights in their era and ours. Anyone who has worked in the theater knows just what an act of virtuosity great playwriting is, and it should be celebrated as such—especially when the target audience is, as it is here, students. The book has an extremely tight critical palate. Its citations of plays and commentaries, indeed, the same passages in those texts, come up an astonishing number of times—so much so that students may be led to underestimate the variety of the era and overestimate modern critical consensus. On the other hand, if John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancaster Witches don’t enter the repertory of college theater troupes, it won’t be the Cambridge Companion’s fault. And truly, the regeneration of interest in these and other neglected texts is one of the volume’s clear victories. If only that interest could have been dramaturgically as well as academically evoked. With friends like The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, English Restoration theater needs still more friends. Claudia Orenstein
Mime journal, Feb 28, 2017
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge, 2019
Edited by Alissa Mello, Claudia Orenstein, Cariad Astles: Women and Puppetry is the first publica... more Edited by Alissa Mello, Claudia Orenstein, Cariad Astles:
Women and Puppetry is the first publication dedicated to the study of women in the field of puppetry arts. It includes critical articles and personal accounts that interrogate specific historical moments, cultural contexts, and notions of "woman" on and off stage.
Part I, ‘Critical Investigations’, includes historical and contemporary analyses of women’s roles in society, gender anxiety revealed through the unmarked puppet body, and sexual expression within oppressive social contexts. Part II, ‘Local Contexts: Challenges and Transformations’, investigates work of female practitioners within specific cultural contexts to illuminate how women are intervening in traditionally male spaces. Each chapter in Part II offers brief accounts of specific social histories, barriers, and gender biases that women have faced, and the opportunities afforded female creative leaders to appropriate, revive, and transform performance traditions. And in Part III, ‘Artists Speak’, contemporary artists reflect on their experiences as female practitioners within the art of puppet theatre.
Representing female writers and practitioners from across the globe, Women and Puppetry offers students and scholars a comprehensive interrogation of the challenges and opportunities that women face in this unique art form.
Film about Indian puppeteer Padmini Rangarajan in Hyderabad and her work using puppets to address... more Film about Indian puppeteer Padmini Rangarajan in Hyderabad and her work using puppets to address social issues like electronic waste. Includes traditional string puppetry from Andhra Pradesh.
A webpage to see more of my work in many areas. https://claudiaorenstein.wordpress.com/
Follow the Link to http://howlround.com/theatre-history-podcast-57-dr-claudia-orenstein-on-the-evolving-art-of-tolpavakoothu