Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects. By Claudia Orenstein. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. 188 pp.27 B/W Illustrations. Hardcover $170.00, Paperback $42.95. In 2011, Handspring Puppet Company began performing I Love You When You’re Breathing, a puppet’s address to critics about the basics of a subtle, complex art. As the protagonist, Puppet, says at the beginning of that performance, “You might know plenty about theatre-theatre, but now you’ve come to hear me talk about what’s different in puppet theatre.” Claudia Orenstein’s Reading the Puppet Stage is likewise a book about the foundations of puppet …
Author: Melissa Flower Gladney
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Song of the North
Song of the North. Created and directed by Hamid Rahmanian. Music by Ramin Torkian, featuring vocalist Azam Ali. OZ Theatre, Nashville, Tennessee, 20 April 2024. As battle sounds fill the OZ Theatre in Nashville, shadowy figures of soldiers and weapons materialize on a large screen, shrouded in the fog of war. This dramatic opening sets the stage for Hamid Rahmanian’s innovative shadow puppet theatre production, Song of the North, inspired by Ferdowsi’s tenth-century Persian epic, Shahnameh (Book of Kings)[1]. Song of the North is part of the KINGORAMA project, founded by Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard, which produces cultural products …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: HUMAN
HUMAN. Written and directed by Nehprii Amenii. Music composed by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby with sound design by Joo Wan Park. Choreography by Amparo “Chigui” Santiago, and lighting, projections, and scenic design by Marie Yokoyama. Puppet design and building by Dan Jones and Nehprii Amenii. A Puppetry NOW featured performance at the Center for Puppetry Arts, Atlanta, Georgia, January 17-28, 2024. Nehprii Amenii’s puppet theatre piece, HUMAN, considers a world where human beings have faded into extinction. Detached from the goodness of their hearts, the once-prosperous human race destroyed itself, and all that remains on Earth are the sea …
BOOK REVIEW: Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States
Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States. By Dr. Paulette Richards. New York: Routledge, 2024. 312 pp., 82 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $153.00, eBook $41.64, Paperback $41.60. In her well-constructed study, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic, researcher and puppet artist Dr. Paulette Richards elaborates several crucial questions into a new and generative format by engaging her topic through lines of inquiry that build on the work of previous theorists while also providing much needed expansions of the culturally charged work accomplished by objects in performance. In addition, Richards asks us to consider the many aspects of lived experience …
CONFERENCE REPORT: Wayang, Ecology and the Sacred Symposium
Wayang, Ecology and the Sacred Symposium. Yale University, Connecticut. November 9, 2024. The article summarizes a single-day symposium on the theme of Wayang, Ecology, and the Sacred organized by Professor Matthew Isaac Cohen with support from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Participants from a wide range of disciplines, including Theatre, Visual Arts, Puppetry, Ethnomusicology, and Museum Studies, investigated how wayang puppet traditions are both sacred and related to ecological issues. Rahul Koonathara is currently pursuing graduate studies at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies under the guidance of Professor …
CONFERENCE REPORT: Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium
Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, University of Connecticut, October 25-26, 2024. The article summarizes the presentations of the two-day “Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium” organized by The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, with support from the University of Connecticut, in October, 2024. This exhibition explored the fifty-year interracial collaboration of two pioneering puppeteers, Alice Swann and Nancy Schmale, in the late twentieth century. The symposium investigates the works, influences, and societal challenges faced by Alice Swann and Nancy Schmale, who lived in the Concord Park community inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of …
Animism and Performing Objects in the Processions of Muharram
Salma Mohseni Ardehali In Iran and in Shia Islam, and in the mourning ceremonies of Ashura, some performative/theatrical rituals have developed. One of the most common and prominent of these is the procession. These processions are classified as mass mourning rituals. However, since the process of “performing” has a relatively specific beginning, middle, and end and a predetermined ritual, and more importantly, a large number of people who watch or accompany these processions, in this article we consider such processions to be a kind of ritual “performance” that has highly figurative theatrical elements. These elements (objects and figures) are expressive …
Opening Doors to Tradition: The Osaka Bunraku Workshop as a Model for Engagement
Seiko Shimura and Robin Ruizendaal This report examines an interactive traditional performing arts project conducted in Osaka in January 2024, designed to inspire students to engage with and appreciate traditional arts in a globalized context. The project demonstrated that traditional performing arts can integrate modern creative elements while preserving their cultural essence, offering a replicable model for engaging younger audiences. By participating in production and performance, students overcame preconceived notions of traditional arts as “difficult and old-fashioned” and discovered their joy and value. The study underscores the importance of hands-on educational experiences and innovative approaches that balance tradition with modernity …
Mane Bernardo and Sarah Bianchi’s Acting Hands: Pantomime of Hands and Modern Puppet Theatre
Bettina Girotti In this article I analyze a series of performances, developed since the 1950s by Mane Bernardo and Sarah Bianchi, that uses the puppeteer’s bare hand, which led to the creation of a technique called pantomime of hands. [1] I will examine the limits of the traditional definition of puppet and the practices it encompasses, along with the notion of experimentation proposed by Bernardo, an idea marked by the tensions between traditional and modern puppet theatre. I aim to place this new technique among others that contributed to the modernization of the puppet theatre in Argentina. Bettina Girotti holds …
Pictures and Puppet Performance: Peter Schumann’s Bedsheet Paintings
John Bell Late in his life, and influenced by the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of his wife Elka, and his frustration with the persistence of US-supported wars around the world, Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann began a new phase in his art and theatre making by creating hundreds of paintings on discarded bedsheets, and then using them in different ways in Bread and Puppet productions of the early 2020s, especially productions focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The article argues that this reflects Bread and Puppet’s continuing interest in exploring new forms, as …
