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 …
Category: Book Review
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 …
BOOK REVIEW: The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America
The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America. By Jo Ann Cavallo. London, New York: Anthem Press, 2023. xxiv, 303 pp., 30 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $110.00, softcover, eBook $27.99. Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian at Columbia University, has published widely on Italian chivalric epic and its performance traditions in the Mediterranean. Her most recent publication, The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947), is based on Sicily’s opera dei pupi marionette tradition, which was classified by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001. While critical literature has tended to focus on how the …
BOOK REVIEW: A Galaxy of Things: The Power of Puppets and Masks in Star Wars and Beyond
A Galaxy of Things: The Power of Puppets and Masks in Star Wars and Beyond. By Colette Searls. New York: Routledge, 2023. xii, 129 pp., 11 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $136.00, softcover $48.95, eBook $48.95. Star Wars and Lucasfilm have become so celebrated for the pioneering use of digital effects that it is easy to forget how much of their world is made up of material things. Colette Searls is here to remind us of how much puppets and performing objects shape and make the world of Star Wars, and what a fun, fascinating and insightful reminder it is. Her analysis …
