Short description:

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. 

Long description:

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 its three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppet?s 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.

Table of Contents:

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1: Materials

1.     Reading the Material of Performance

2.     Notes on a Material Dramaturgy

3.     A ?Paper? Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company Moby Dick

4.     Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blanco?s Puppetry

5.     Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire

6.     Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma

Part 2: Practice

7.     The Radicality of the Potato People

8.     The Puppet Body as Performance Archive

9.     Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese Puppetry

10.  Queer Thinking of Puppetry

11.  Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Müller, Ophelias, and Recurrent Hamletian Machines

12.  Puppetry and Technoculture

Part 3: Perception

13.  The Relationality of Puppet Life

14.  In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Kory? Nishikawa V & Tom Lee?s Shank?s Mare

15.  Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a Cognitive Lens

16.  Puppetry as Phenomena

17.  Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice, Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company

Afterword