Unraveled in Pages. Created and performed by Chia-Yin Cheng. Dramaturgy by Shih-Wei Wang. Echocardiography. Performed by Shao-Jun Peng, Li-Chu Chen, and Ming-Chu Yu. Directed by Mei-Hua Hsueh. Inspired by Fang Bei-Bei and Tang Xin Dan[1]. Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre, Taipei, Taiwan, November 7–9, 2025. Echo Puppet LAB (ECHO偶計畫), (hereafter Echo), is a three-year experimental puppetry initiative launched in Taipei in 2025. Its inaugural edition unfolded across two phases: a workshop series (May 26–August 30, 2025) that brought together creators, audiences, and enthusiasts in structured yet dialogic learning, followed by a performance program (November 3–16, 2025). Curator Pei-Yu Shih shapes Echo …
Month: July 2026
BOOK REVIEW: To Embody the Marvelous
To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusion in Early Modern Spain. By Esther Fernández. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021. 284 pp., 55 color illustrations. Hardcover $99.95, Paperback $34.95, ePub $19.99, PDF $19.99. To Embody the Marvelous is a wide-ranging study of Early Modern Spanish illusionary techniques, including moveable figures, puppets, and automata. Esther Fernández argues that “[e]arly modernity was a period of vigorous transformation” (8) in which knowledge and reason overtook religion and superstition, resulting in desengaño—a disillusionment with wonders and a growing need to strip away artifice and reignite awe based on the mechanical innovations of technology. …
From Silence to Thingness: The Théâtre de Cuisine Workshop as a Practice of Suspension of Use and Negotiation of Experience
Samuel Maverick Zucchiati This article examines the theatrical practice of Katy Deville and Théâtre de Cuisine through the theoretical lenses of Byung-Chul Han’s critique of performance society, John Dewey’s aesthetics of experience, and Ian Hodder’s archaeology of human-thing entanglement. Drawing on detailed observation of a five-day masterclass led by Deville within the Animateria Plus 2025 program, the article argues that object theatre functions as a counter-device to neoliberal logics: not by resolving the contradictions those logics produce, but by negotiating them through sustained, embodied attention to the resistant materiality of everyday and discarded objects. The workshop is read as a …
BOOK REVIEW: Spaces of Puppets in Popular Culture
Spaces of Puppets in Popular Culture. Grotesque Geographies of the Borderscape. By Janet Banfield. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. xii, pp. 221, 15 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $190.00, eBook $55.99, Paperback $55.99. Really, what sort of creature is Gonzo? Might Orville the Duck have been in a coercive relationship? Why is Pinocchio’s puppetness so often overlooked in illustrations? These are just a few of the questions raised over and above the real subject and themes of Jane Banfield’s academic volume, Spaces of Puppets in Popular Culture. Grotesque Geographies of the Borderscape. This book explores puppetness and the spaces of puppets or puppetry that …
BOOK REVIEW: Women and Puppetry
Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations. Edited by Alissa Mello, Claudia Orenstein, and Cariad Astles. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. viii–202. Illustrations 35 b/w, 1 color. Hardcover $152.00, Paperback $42.39, eBook $39.74. There is a growing body of scholarship in the field of puppetry focused on social identity. Recent publications like Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance and Making Meaning in Puppetry include analyses of puppet performance through an intersectional lens of identity. The earlier Women and Puppetry, edited by Alissa Mello, Claudia Orenstein, and Cariad Astles, is exclusively dedicated to the study of women’s impact …
REPORT: Winter 2026 Puppets in Japan
Claudia Orenstein The Shimokitazawa International Puppetry Festival, Tokyo, February 17–23, 2026; Fukaze Dekumawashi Annual Lunar New Year Performance, Hakusan, Ishikawa, February 15, 2026; Nozomi Nagai and Nemuridori’s Setagaya Art Museum Exhibit Opening Events on Oshirasama Project, February 21, 2026. This article reports on three puppet-related events that the author attended in February 2026 in Japan: the second edition of the Shimokitazawa International Puppetry Festival, featuring contemporary puppetry performances, discussions, and workshops; the annual Lunar New Year performance of Fukaze Dekumawashi, a 350-year-old bun’ya ningyō (a precursor of ningyōjōruri) troupe in Ishikawa Prefecture; and an exhibit and discussion from puppeteer Nozomi …
FOUNDERS OF THE FIELD: Henryk Jurkowski
Ida Hledíková This article presents Henryk Jurkowski, the Polish professor, pedagogue, author, historian, and theorist of puppet theatre. Jurkowski became a world-famous personality, internationally renowned for his two volumes, in English, of the history of European puppet theatre. This article references his most important published works, in which appear his essays on the aesthetics and theory of puppet theatre. It also highlights significant activities of his long professional career within the framework of pedagogical activity and those of UNIMA. Ida Hledíková is a professor, theatre researcher, critic, historian, and expert on puppet theatre at the Department of Puppetry (Katedra bábkarskej …
Gestures of Care: The Relational Puppetry Practices of Susan Linn, Edna Bland, and Pam Arciero
Felice Amato and Christine Garlough This article draws upon interviews with three prominent American puppeteers who work in applied puppetry, at the intersection of performance and care: Susan Linn, Edna Bland, and Pam Arciero. Building upon scholarship in puppetry and material performance, applied theatre, gender and women’s studies, and care theory, this article argues for socially engaged performance (in its broadest sense) as a mode of caring. We analyze the unique way that material objects, in the hands of these skilled practitioners, enhances their applied practices, cultivating the personal, relational, and even political potential of wonder, imagination, and play. Linn, …
The Marionettic Spine: An Interstitial Space between Puppetry and Neuroscience
Sogol Iranpour This article proposes the concept of the marionettic body as an analytic and aesthetic framework for rethinking embodiment under conditions of neurological alteration, with particular attention to multiple sclerosis. Rather than approaching sclerosis as the disappearance of movement or agency, the article argues that it exposes the relational and negotiated character of all embodied action. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the fold—understood here not as a metaphor of fluidity but as a principle of variable inflection—the study examines how rigidity, interruption, and delay reorganize rather than negate movement. Through an analysis of Ilka Schönbein’s puppetry practice, the …
PANEL REPORT: Pedagogy of the Small: Models, Miniatures, Devices
Pedagogy of the Small: Models, Miniatures, Devices. Concordia University, November 13, 2025. [Full video recording] This report is a reflective overview of the panel titled “Pedagogy of the Small: Models, Miniatures, Devices,” which took place in November 2025 at Concordia University, Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. The two-hour event encompassed a presentation on models as pedagogical and research devices for therapeutic and creative practices and concluded with a suitcase puppet show and a Q&A session. All the presenters addressed the transformative powers of models and miniatures differently: as spaces for political expression, ways to harness unruly research, to process traumatic events, or to offer …
