Volume 2, No.1 of PIR continues to forefront the international nature of our publication with articles focusing on puppetry and related arts in Iran, Turkey, Ukraine, Japan, Taiwan, and throughout Africa. I am, as always, grateful for the wonderful work of the PIR team—Melissa Flowers Gladney, Colette Searls, Karen Smith, Skye Strauss, and Jungmin Song—who help bring this material to publication. I am also delighted to welcome some new members aboard. Pune Dracker, PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, with a strong background in editing, has offered invaluable help on the current issue, and I look forward to having her assistance on future editions. Professor Emeritus Kathy Foley, past President of UNIMA-USA, who has been involved with PIR since its inception, will be providing further editorial help with upcoming issues.

This edition includes an important Focus Section on Puppets and War: Contemporary Perspectives from Ukraine, guest edited by Matt Smith and Nataliia Borodina. The papers in this section grew out of a series of Zoom seminars held in June 2023, a collaboration between Ukrainian and UK scholars who examined the state of puppetry under war conditions in Ukraine. Smith and Borodina provide an informative introduction to the seminar and the papers, which you will find within the Focus Section. The timely articles here highlight the resilience of artists and the continued power of puppetry in the face of crises, violence, and trauma. I am both grateful and admiring of the guest editors and authors who persevered in bringing the papers to publication, managing translations back and forth between English and Ukrainian at every step of the revision and editing process, while also dealing themselves with the effects of war. Their work is a tribute to what can be achieved through international collaboration. It advocates for further strengthening cross-cultural relationships in our field even as global situations might threaten to create divisions.

Outside this section, Salma Mohseni Ardehali’s article, “Animism and Performing Objects in the Processions of Muharram,” considers the animation and performative nature of objects carried in Iranian Shia processions, while offering insights into the nature and impact of these events. Deniz Başar’s article, “Ethnography of Woman Karagöz Puppeteers in Turkey,” explores the various ways women have been barred from learning, crafting, and performing karagöz shadow puppetry, as gatekeepers construct and maintain boundaries around national heritage. The article also reveals the numerous incursions women are making into the field through a variety of novel routes. I am grateful to all of our peer-reviewers, who generously offered their time and feedback in reviewing all the articles in this issue. 

The third issue of PIR also contains several robust Reports. Our Report section provides opportunities for articles that give a view into significant puppetry events and a place for artists to describe and reflect on their own work and creative processes in critical ways. Seiko Shimura and Robin Ruizendaal take us through the development, creation process, and results of their workshop, which borrowed techniques developed in Taiwan to connect college students in Osaka with bunraku puppetry and other traditional arts. Students in the workshop participated in a performance that substituted accessible shadow puppets for complex bunraku figures. They combined traditional elements, such as bunraku narration techniques, with elements more familiar to the young participants, like using Vincent van Gogh as a central character, to bring students to an appreciation of traditional arts. Fedelis Kyalo’s report gives a detailed account of a series of important UNIMA events designed to enrich puppetry training in Africa while connecting artists across the region. Kyalo offers an informative overview of both the “Tomorrow’s Puppets in Africa” training program held in 2023, which took place in various countries including Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Togo, and the “4th Provocation: Roots and Wings” conference in South Africa in November 2024. In his two report articles, Rahul Koonathara offers rich accounts of two interesting symposia that took place in Connecticut, USA, in 2024. The “Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium” was organized by the Ballard Institute and Museum in conjunction with their exhibit on the Wonderland Puppet Theatre, a pioneering interracial troupe founded by Alice Swann and Nancy Schmale in the US in 1961. The event brought scholars of puppetry together with researchers in urban planning and other scholarly fields to examine the work of the troupe and the related issues of racial discrimination in housing and employment that form part of its story. The “Wayang, Ecology, and the Sacred” symposium, held at Yale University, explored connections between these significant themes in Indonesian shadow puppetry through talks and performances from participants connecting from the US and, remotely, from Indonesia. 

The issue also includes reviews of two recent books, Paulette Richards’ Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States, reviewed by Keith Byron Kirk, and my own Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, reviewed by Lawrence Switzky, as well as two performance reviews, Cheyenne Bryant’s review of Human, written and directed by Nehprii Amenii, and Marzieh Ashrafian’s review of Song of the North, created and directed by Hamid Rahmanian.

Claudia Orenstein
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY