Puppetry Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article focuses on Pili, a popular Taiwanese transmedia puppetry that features martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences through CGI (computer-generated image) animation, and examines relations mediated between puppetry,... more

This article focuses on Pili, a popular Taiwanese transmedia puppetry that features martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences through CGI (computer-generated image) animation, and examines relations mediated between puppetry, camera, and animation. Pili productions use the traditional performing art of puppetry and add novel elements-combining craft techniques with filming technologies-to create a new transmedia genre. This new genre is not easily classified based on traditional puppetry forms, such as the conventional ideas of a puppet show, "puppet animation," or digital puppetry, as it is something in-between. Through exploring unfolding relations between puppeteering and filming, puppetry and animation, and old and new media forms, this study explicates how the transformation of traditional puppetry responds to the affordances of new media. Animation, camera movements, and digital editing collectively expand the possibilities of traditional puppetry craft and performance. The new form of puppetry rearranges disciplines, genres, and aesthetics. This analysis sheds light on Pili puppetry through animation and transmedia thinking to contextualize how animation's life-giving potential transgresses screen and genre categories.

W trakcie porządkowania i opracowywania ogromnego archiwum Jana Dormana, artysty polskiego teatru lalkowego, odnaleziony został maszynopis ze swego rodzaju manifestem dormanowskiej filozofii przedmiotu jako takiego i przedmiotu w teatrze.... more

W trakcie porządkowania i opracowywania ogromnego archiwum Jana Dormana, artysty polskiego teatru lalkowego, odnaleziony został maszynopis ze swego rodzaju manifestem dormanowskiej filozofii przedmiotu jako takiego i przedmiotu w teatrze. Tekst ten dopełnia się z innymi licznymi spostrzeżeniami Dormana na temat roli przedmiotu/ rekwizytu w teatrze, rozproszonymi wśród notatek, odręcznie pisanych scenariuszy, w programach spektakli. Dormana idea przedmiotu czyni z niego wehikuł idei, medium realności i teatralności zarazem. Manifestu będzińskiego reżysera nie sposób nie czytać jako ścieżki myślenia o przedmiocie w teatrze równoległej do wypowiedzi programowych Tadeusza Kantora. Kantorowskiej idei „przedmiotu biednego”, przedmiotu najniższej rangi. Artykuł jest propozycją anlizy filozofii przedmiotu u Dormana, a odwołania do spektakli i przedmiotów charakterystycznych dla teatru tego twórcy służą refleksji tak nad teatralnymi funkcjami przedmiotów, jak i ich rolą jako mediów pamięci.

Among the hand-puppet theatres that cropped up in New York during the 1920s was the Modicut theatre, an offshoot of the flourishing Yiddish theatrical literary culture. Created in 1925 by artists-writers-satirists Zuni Maud and Yosl... more

Among the hand-puppet theatres that cropped up in New York during the 1920s was the Modicut theatre, an offshoot of the flourishing Yiddish theatrical literary culture. Created in 1925 by artists-writers-satirists Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, Modicut enjoyed great success in Yiddish-speaking communities in the United States and Europe. Modicut, satirizing Jewish and general politics and culture of the day, provided an experience unlike anything previously seen in Yiddish theatre.

Digital Media and Learning Issue. James Paul Gee, Nicholas E. Husbye, & Jennifer Connor-Zachocki (Eds.) This chapter examines the digital literacy practices that emerge when young children play together with digital apps on touchscreen... more

Digital Media and Learning Issue. James Paul Gee, Nicholas E. Husbye, & Jennifer Connor-Zachocki (Eds.)
This chapter examines the digital literacy practices that emerge when young children play together with digital apps on touchscreen devices. Children’s collaborative composing with a digital puppetry app on a touchscreen--with many hands all busy dragging, resizing, and animating puppet characters, and many voices making sound effects, narrating, directing, and objecting--appears aimless, chaotic, and in sharp contrast to the orderly matching activities in prevalent letter and word recognition apps that dominate the early childhood educational software. The crowded collaboration around a single touchscreen looks messy but produces a complex text built with 1) touches, swipes, and other embodied actions that make up digital literacy practices, 2) sensory or multimodal layers of colorful images, dialogue, sound effects, and movement that make up animated stories; and 3) negotiation and pooling of children’s individual story ideas for shared pretense that make up playful collaboration—all contained on a 9.7 inch screen.

ABSTRACT: The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the... more

ABSTRACT: The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

There is a common misconception about government's and corporations' missions are in conflict. Although it is not so but more important is what government races with which corporation. The governments that are passive about this economic... more

There is a common misconception about government's and corporations' missions are in conflict. Although it is not so but more important is what government races with which corporation. The governments that are passive about this economic change demonstrates how it's unprofitable to stay not act upon dynamics of economics thus transitioning into puppet government phase. It is harder to see true intention hidden unless an existence of rebel towards system. In order to profit from new global world without borders, appropriate thing is to join ongoing race and have courage instead of forfeiting. In the scene of history, the governments had never lost their dominance even facing very hard times, but only their plans had been changed. Thinking about the future might be more important than joining ongoing race but it is more lucrative to do both. It requires strong foresight to understand whole picture, analysis along with their past, infiltrating inside instead of responding from outside, most importantly not to get lost and not belong there while in the process of integration. The Trojan Horse goes changing of its name while taking advantage of the struggle in between the governments and their opponents on field of qualified information processing; The transnational corporations.

The conception of the child that a researcher holds has implications for research methods. This article adds to work that mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-child in Childhood Studies, exploring what their conceptual tools do to... more

The conception of the child that a researcher holds has implications for research methods. This article adds to work that mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-child in Childhood Studies, exploring what their conceptual tools do to research methods and analysis. I map how puppet production emerged as a research method during an ethnography at a high school and how the students and I co-theorised the methodological value of puppet production. Exploring one particular puppet production, it is argued that puppet productions, analysed with young people, may open up conceptual possibilities, but must be examined alongside the dynamic conditions of their creation and analysis.

2020 Award: Vincenzo Maselli, University of Rome

2019 Award: Eric Herhuth, Tulane University

During COVID-19, Susan Linn has drawn upon her extensive experience as a therapist and her virtuosic ventriloquism to develop a virtual, screen-based approach to supporting children and families that are sheltering-in-place. She and her... more

During COVID-19, Susan Linn has drawn upon her extensive experience as a therapist and her virtuosic ventriloquism to develop a virtual, screen-based approach to supporting children and families that are sheltering-in-place. She and her puppet, Audrey Duck, provide a crucial social-emotional space for play and make believe, drawing upon the opportunities presented by the relational triangularity possible in ventriloquism between child, practitioner, and puppet. By examining her work, one can gain insights into the nature of ventriloquism, as well as best practices for supporting children experiencing trauma and adversity.

The history of puppetry is full of supernatural bodies on stage that dramatically or subtextually represent their quest of coming to life and gaining autonomy from their masters. A puppet’s performance often reflects on its condition of... more

The history of puppetry is full of supernatural bodies on stage that dramatically or subtextually represent their quest of coming to life and gaining autonomy from their masters. A puppet’s performance often reflects on its condition of existence: How does a random object become an animated body on stage? This practical and theoretical question energizes South Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong’s (b. 1980) body of work. Jeong extends the possibilities of puppetry by choreographing her entire body as her animation technique. Moreover, she explores the various dimensions of the object’s liveliness by way of sexuality. In fact, in Jeong’s exploration of animacy, this stage life of the object always already involves intimacy and sensuality. She crafts and manipulates her performing objects that range from simple masks to dummies to machines, embraced carnally with them in the double entendre of playing with control. Reflecting on the six performances Jeong created between 2008 and 2019, I am repeatedly reminded that there is no anima, no life, and no agency for objects devoid of sexual being.

In this essay, I will attempt to define ‘thingness’ in relation to puppetry using Elizabeth Grosz’s essay “The Thing” as a basis (Grosz, 2009). Using this definition I will evaluate two instances during the process of my Masters Sustain... more

In this essay, I will attempt to define ‘thingness’ in relation to puppetry using Elizabeth Grosz’s essay “The Thing” as a basis (Grosz, 2009). Using this definition I will evaluate two instances during the process of my Masters Sustain Independent Project #WATERLOOBRIDGE where I believe an awareness of an object’s ‘thingness’ could enhance the performativity of the puppet: One, the development of our purpose-made puppet, the other, a sticky-note that unstuck and fell during a work-in-progress performance.

This article will discuss how the puppet's body is the perfect vessel to reclaim the voices of those that have been 'othered'. 1 It examines the history of the fractured puppet and the emergence of disability-affirmative puppet theatre in... more

This article will discuss how the puppet's body is the perfect vessel to reclaim the voices of those that have been 'othered'. 1 It examines the history of the fractured puppet and the emergence of disability-affirmative puppet theatre in the twenty-first century, exploring the puppet's ability to fracture, reform and move in new and exciting ways that allow different approaches of expression; these seek to challenge how the body, the puppeteer and the puppet are viewed. I will examine how puppet plays, A Square World, Meet Fred, The Iron Man and my own show Pupa, represent disability through puppets' bodies in new and interesting ways. Through the use of the puppet’s body, these shows seek to shine a light on the absurdity of an exclusive world and make us question the cultural constructions around the disabled and puppet body.

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries brought heightened visibility of puppets and performing objects in various fields of cultural performance, so that we might call these last decades ‘a puppet moment’ – as Claudia... more

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries brought heightened visibility of puppets and performing objects in various fields of cultural performance, so that we might call these last decades ‘a puppet moment’ – as Claudia Orenstein points out in the introduction to the book "The Routledge Companion to the Puppetry and Material Performance" (London, 2014). We are profoundly convinced of the truth of this reflection and we see in this point of view an important research challenge, one that leads toward a discussion about the processes, tendencies, and influences shaping contemporary puppetry in different countries. The intention of our monograph is to present theoretical and practical ideas, analyses and questions which have arisen since the turn
of the century under the influence of the latest puppet performances and works inspired by puppet art. The collection of articles naturally represents only a few of the possible approaches to these topics, but we hope it provides a glimpse of multidirectional contemporary reflection and different perspectives of research now being applied to (and demanded by) puppet art.

"The puppet as an educational tool" is a written text in an accessible and immediate form. In addition, the topics covered were developed on the basis of the author's long experience in the field. The content is therefore full of... more

"The puppet as an educational tool" is a written text in an accessible and immediate form. In addition, the topics covered were developed on the basis of the author's long experience in the field.
The content is therefore full of concrete and enlightening examples and, among the many proposed activities to be carried out, we point out an easy and quick technique to build puppet-characters: an activity that can be performed, at the various educational services, both together with families and children (with the support of adults).

In 'The Death of "The Puppet"?' (2015) Margaret Williams writes: "We've become so used to seeing 'the puppet' as a character and to theorising about it as a character that we've forgotten that it can be something else." Many puppet and... more

In 'The Death of "The Puppet"?' (2015) Margaret Williams writes: "We've become so used to seeing 'the puppet' as a character and to theorising about it as a character that we've forgotten that it can be something else." Many puppet and object theatre practitioners ground their practice in the question "Why a puppet?". If the only answer is that it stands in for what could otherwise be a human performer, it's generally considered good practice to just use a human performer. But when the answer diverges from the purely character-driven, multiple layers of possibilities, meanings and modes of inquiry are opened up. These possibilities can be extended through the intersecting fields that comprise New Materialisms (Bennett, Braidotti, Deleuze and Guattari et al), which affirm matter's inherent vitality and seek to restructure cultural binary imaginaries about humans and the "natural" world, and therefore around subjectivity and relationality. Material culture work, including Thing Theory (Brown et al), looks at the ways in which objects are embroiled within constructions of subjectivity and identity. Puppetry frequently makes an appearance in the writings around new materialisms, particularly theatrical scholarship around performing objects (e.g. Schweitzer and Zerdy) as puppets have a lot to say to notions of matter with agency, reevaluations of deadness and aliveness, and the subjectivity of objects. Drawing on the analytics of new materialisms opens puppetry to a two-way gesture: as both a practice and an analytic. This paper will unpack the potential of approaching puppetry through the lens of what I call 'material dramaturgies' ('dramaturgy' here drawn from Elinor Fuchs's approach), which draw on multiple disciplinary frameworks including New Materialisms (agentive materiality) and Thing Theory (human meaning/subjectivity embedded into objects). Using Wattle and Daub's The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak (2015/17) as a case study, the paper will focus on the materiality of puppets performing modernist historical narrative, arguing that puppets are uniquely situated to intervene in such performances through a material dramaturgy of the hybrid performing object that, in the case of Tarrare , uses puppetry as an analytic to foreground the

BLURB: Javanese shadow puppetry is a sophisticated dramatic form, often felt to be at the heart of Javanese culture, drawing on classic texts but with important contemporary resonance in fields like religion and politics. How to make... more

BLURB: Javanese shadow puppetry is a sophisticated dramatic form, often felt to be at the heart of Javanese culture, drawing on classic texts but with important contemporary resonance in fields like religion and politics. How to make sense of the shadow-play as a form of world-making? In Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind, Bernard Arps explores this question by considering an all-night performance of Dewa Ruci, a key play in the repertoire. Thrilling and profound, Dewa Ruci describes the mighty Bratasena’s quest for the ultimate mystical insight.
The book presents Dewa Ruci as rendered by the distinguished master puppeteer Ki Anom Soeroto in Amsterdam in 1987. The book’s unusual design presents the performance texts together with descriptions of the sounds and images that would remain obscure in conventional formats of presentation. Copious annotations probe beneath the surface and provide an understanding of the performance's cultural complexity. These annotations explain the meanings of puppet action, music, and shifts in language; how the puppeteer wove together into the drama the circumstances of the performance in Amsterdam, Islamic and other religious ideas, and references to contemporary Indonesian political ideology. Also revealed is the performance’s historical multilayering and the picture it paints of the Javanese past.
Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind not only presents an unrivalled insight into the artistic depth of wayang kulit, it exemplifies a new field of study, the philology of performance.

Kalamazoo 2019, paper abstract

The puppeteer could be compared to a dualistic god, in-between light and darkness, performing all roles at the same time, able of being everywhere in just one place. In Shadow Theater there is a common flexible dimension, in the space of... more

The puppeteer could be compared to a dualistic god, in-between light and darkness, performing all roles at the same time, able of being everywhere in just one place. In Shadow Theater there is a common flexible dimension, in the space of reality, resulting from the interaction among the unseen one, who is moving the sticks in the backstage, and the audience, standing in front of a sheet of cloth, suspended by the rhythm of a plot where "performers" are made of leather cuts instead of flesh and blood.
The history behind the origins of Shadow Plays is not clear but its geographic expansion unites continents into a common fact. Even though puppets have been frequently associated with younger ages, traditional plays in Shadow Puppetry are rather adult in content and this is perhaps one of the reasons why they attract different age groups. Melancholic feelings for a long passed happy childhood or the lack of better activities are also to be considered as good reasons to join the crowd. But while Shadow Plays might lack a full educational concept in its basis they do have a moral dimension presented in a more or less clear way. Performed among different cultures, Shadow Theater seems to have developed distinct regional characteristics concerning the main heart of the narrative, the combination of extra activities complementing the storytelling and the materials used in the construction of visual effects.
This paper intends to explore the role of the master puppeteer in this form of theatrical art as well as the use of its image in other sorts of discourses, the puppet's appeal towards the audience as an inanimate object owner of free-will and the influence of puppetry in other media

‘Indian, Folk: Genesis and Origin of Puppetry’ for the Social Vision Journal publication. The article is an outcome based on the interactive discussion with my father-Shri T.Rangarajan-Theatre person about ‘Bharat NatyaShastra and Folk... more

‘Indian, Folk: Genesis and Origin of Puppetry’ for the Social Vision Journal publication. The article is an outcome based on the interactive discussion with my father-Shri T.Rangarajan-Theatre person about ‘Bharat NatyaShastra and Folk Oral narratives’ which I had last week. The exhaustive discussion compelled me to write down the article.The importance of oral narratives that has constituted as the firm base of beliefs and ritual practices among the traditional puppeteers- nomadic group across the country. Perhaps the strong belief of this folk theatrical art form originated from Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati. Again, the Goddess Parvati treated as a daughter of the puppeteers or adivasis.
There are different folk stories narrated in South and North India on the origins of the traditional puppetry art form. This paper presents some of the oral folk stories about the origin of puppetry in Indian Context

This paper focuses on puppet performance in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s television science fiction series of the 1960s, analysing the aesthetic and cultural significance of the puppet body and voice. Anderson began making puppet series... more

This paper focuses on puppet performance in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s television science fiction series of the 1960s, analysing the aesthetic and cultural significance of the puppet body and voice. Anderson began making puppet series for British television in the 1950s, and by the end of the 1960s, his company had made Supercar (1961), Fireball XL5 (1962), Stingray (1964-5), Thunderbirds (1965-6), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-8), and Joe 90 (1968).

This article examines two aspects of Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy in relation to the development of Neutral Mask pedagogies in twentieth-century French mime training, specifically those responding to nineteenth and early twentieth-century... more

This article examines two aspects of Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy in relation to the development of Neutral Mask pedagogies in twentieth-century French mime training, specifically those responding to nineteenth and early twentieth-century marionette theories of movement. The first is his strategic use of disorientation through lack of instruction (via negativa) in order to make visible inculturated embodied habits; the second is his emphasis on the performer embodying genuine ‘pleasure’ as she pretends to have a different emotion. The paper examines these techniques in the context of Neutral Mask training, and its development during the twentieth century in France, in order to consider the ways in which they both reflect and revise nineteenth- and early twentieth-century marionette theories of performer movement as espoused in particular by Heinrich von Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig. It considers the ways in which constructions of the ‘natural’ body as pursued by Jacques Copeau and later Étienne Decroux and Jacques Lecoq respond to these marionette theories which seek to do away entirely with interior states such as consciousness and emotion, and in placing these responses alongside Gaulier’s deployments of disorientation and ‘pleasure’. It suggests that Gaulier’s techniques of disorientation serve a similar function to donning the neutral mask in stripping away learned habits of movement, and that his emphasis on experiencing and demonstrating ‘pleasure’ in the pretence of performance both reflects marionette theories by replicating the puppeteer/puppet dynamic, and revises them by foregrounding emotionality.

Myth, Imagination & Intangible Heritage in Hampi Going Beyond Ruins Hampi is a small village located in North Karnataka south of the Tropic of Cancer in the Deccan Plateau. It is possibly the largest and perhaps best preserved medieval... more

Myth, Imagination & Intangible Heritage in Hampi Going Beyond Ruins Hampi is a small village located in North Karnataka south of the Tropic of Cancer in the Deccan Plateau. It is possibly the largest and perhaps best preserved medieval cities in India ruled by Hindu rulers of the Vijaynagar Empire and has been enlisted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Innumerable secular and sacred structure punctuate the raw beauty of the landscape, where majestic boulders and ruins are provided relief by the pristine river Tungabhadra. This article argues that neither a tourism oriented visits nor conservation programs should be limited to just accessing the archaeological sites, and the natural environment, one must aspire to connect and relish the entire ecosystem within which both the

There is a growing awareness of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to performance studies, but little attention has been paid to puppetry in this context. In an attempt to open up the field of puppetry to McConachie’s’cognitive... more

There is a growing awareness of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to performance studies, but little attention has been paid to puppetry in this context. In an attempt to open up the field of puppetry to McConachie’s’cognitive turn’, a cognitive approach is here taken to Blind Summit’s ‘The Table’. The solo puppet protagonist Moses is described here as a ‘brain on legs’, a lively, funny and poignant figure who hovers on the brink of epic greatness but remains forever fixed to his table top. ‘The Table’ is analysed from three angles : firstly the use of environmental ‘affordances’ in James Gibson’s sense ; secondly kinesthetic empathy as described by Antonio Damasio, Shaun Gallagher et alia ; and thirdly,intimately linked to both, emotion. It is by virtue of Moses’s limitations that we are able to glimpse our own potential as human beings, richly embedded as we (and his operators) are in a world of limitless ‘affordances’ or ‘opportunities for action’ in James Gibson’s sense ; and able to grow cognitively and emotionally through our contact with others.