Introduction
Puppet Dramaturgy, as seen in the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
Ana Díaz Barriga is an independent puppetry practitioner and scholar with expertise in cognitive science. Ana’s work has appeared in Puppetry International, Theater Topics, and Puppetry Journal, among others. She has presented her research at conferences and symposia including the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium and Cognitive Futures. She also serves in the editorial committee for the UNIMAgazine, UNIMA’s international puppetry publication.
Independent researcher, Dr. Paulette Richards co-curated the Living Objects: African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum with Dr. John Bell. Her book, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States won a Nancy Staub Award for excellence in writing on the art of puppetry from UNIMA-USA.
Symposium, Archives, and the Life of Puppetry Scholarship Amidst its Practice
This special focus section on puppet dramaturgy for Puppetry International Research follows the central theme of the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series during the 2025 edition of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. The section illustrates how the body of reviews commissioned for the festival archive serves as a record for scholars, as documentation for artists, and as documentation for the festival itself (useful for grant acquisition). It also seeks to demonstrate how performance reviews can serve as foundations for in-depth research that more explicitly connects puppetry scholarship and practice.
Since its inception with the first edition of the festival in 2015, the Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium has offered a vibrant look at scholarly and artistic approaches to the craft and practice of puppetry. In 2022, Blair Thomas and Paulette Richards re-structured the panels around a central theme. This symposium format displays the festival’s recognition of puppetry as something more than entertainment—an artform that has deeper threads that need to be explicitly unpacked for the audience (and that the audience would be interested in engaging with). That same year, the festival began commissioning writers to review the festival’s performances. Richards recruited graduate students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University to review the shows. Since then, the strongest writers have returned year after year, developing a sharper critical lens.[1] As they have completed PhDs and secured faculty appointments, they have brought this theoretical understanding of puppetry and object performance into their teaching and research. The archive, then, served also as a training ground for young scholars to develop their writing skills and critical insights about object performance.
The archive provided a space for writers to question what writing about puppetry should look like; to explore the best ways of capturing the ephemeral life in this ephemeral form of performance. In this way, the writers were provided with a professional development opportunity, with the archive functioning as a research laboratory that furthers critical investigations in puppetry alongside the performances themselves. The archive lives on the Chicago Puppet Festival’s website with new material added each year. This special focus section advances the professional development pathway created for its writers.
Highlighting Puppetry Scholarship in the Puppetry Ecosystem
In its curation and presentation of international puppetry, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival has become a site for puppetry practitioners to meet each other and to keep abreast of what contemporary puppetry looks like worldwide. Considering the symposium and the archive, the festival is also a site for puppetry scholars to gather and find opportunities for research and connections. In this way, the festival invests as much in furthering scholarship as it invests in furthering the practice of puppetry. Furthermore, because of the festival’s defined location and timeframe, participants in these two threads of the field of puppetry interact with each other and with the same pieces, subsequently producing more work that then feeds back into the puppetry ecosystem. More importantly, the festival highlights the importance of puppetry scholarship and practice developing side by side. Although scholars address puppetry practices and performances regularly, these two areas of puppetry—practice and scholarship—are often considered separately, limiting the ways in which practice can enrich scholarship and, even more so, in which scholarship can enrich practice. The festival provides a playground where these two approaches to puppetry can more deeply feed off and benefit each other.
Puppet dramaturgy, the theme of the 2025 symposium, lets us clearly see how scholarship can illuminate elements of puppetry practice, while the practice provides scholars rich examples to engage with and investigate. The writers in this focus section explore what about puppetry makes it particularly suitable to tell certain kinds of stories; what tools puppeteers use to convey all the layers of meaning in a puppetry performance; and what are the many ways in which audiences make meaning and sense of the animated beings presented onstage. As co-editors of this special focus section, we asked the writers to keep puppet dramaturgy at the core of their inquiry as they approached the task of expanding their reviews into articles, considering the performances they saw at the festival as case studies that exemplified broader practices and themes within the artform.
Seeking to ensure a deeper integration with puppetry practice and to model ways of creating scholarship in community, writers were invited to participate in writing groups as part of the creation of this special focus section. The writing groups provided an opportunity for participants to explore together what the field and writing of puppetry can look like. In the groups, writers created in community, with regular feedback and accountability, adding to the professional development these reviews intend to provide. Furthermore, in addition to being reviewed by fellow puppetry scholars, each of these pieces was also reviewed by a puppetry practitioner, with the intention of interweaving scholarship deeper into the practice and moving past notions of scholarship as separate and exclusive only to some people or groups. Integrating practitioner reviews also aimed to encourage practitioners to engage with scholarship by ensuring that scholarship is relevant and functional to the practice of puppetry. Both approaches—the writing groups and practitioner peer reviews—model more accessible and inclusive ways of doing scholarship that exist in service of enriching puppetry as a whole.
In this special focus section, you will find the work of five authors, delving into how collaboration, materiality, and embodiment shape the dramaturgy of puppetry performances. In “The Puppets of Dr. Caligari, or Putting the Guignol Back in Grand Guignol,” Jesse Njus compares the original film that inspired puppet theatre company Cabinet of Curiosities’ adaptation with its most recent staging to understand how this presentation of the tale of the somnambulist seeks to encourage audiences to wake up and take action. Skye Strauss takes us on her journey of making meaning of Théâtre de l’Entrouvert and Chicago Puppet Festival’s Anywhere by delving deeper into the source texts and considering how the visual dramaturgy of the puppet staging allows for a multiplicity of interpretations in “Reflecting Off the Ice:Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s Anywhere as Lived Experience and Classical Adaptation.”
Then, Katherine McNamara examines the unseen things that puppets illuminate by bringing Plexus Polaire’s Dracula – Lucy’s Dream in conversation with the novel it is based upon and Northern Athabascans’ understanding of the imagination in “Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Depiction.” In “The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry,” Opalanietet presents Ty Defoe’s Skeleton Canoe as an example of how materials can indigenize puppets, beginning to create foundations for what might be termed Native Puppetry. The section closes with an interview with Peter Balkwill and Amethyst First Rider, in which Joelle Estelle Mendoza inquires about their collaboration for the celebration of the Buffalo Treaty shown in the film Iniskim – Return of the Buffalo.
Through the different focuses of their writing, these five authors expand the scope of puppetry simultaneously, inviting the general theatre community in by highlighting issues that puppetry illuminates within other fields of study. We hope you enjoy this section and share it with others who might find these themes of interest. Finally, we would like to thank Tim Cusack for copy-editing the early versions of these reviews, all the peer reviewers who shared their time and knowledge to enrich these pieces, and Claudia Orenstein for encouraging the creation of this special focus section.
Notes
[1] This development often happened with the support of more senior puppetry scholars such as Drs. Dassia Posner and Claudia Orenstein, who we wish to thank for their commitment to training writers of puppetry scholarship.
