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 …
Category: Reviews
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 …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Wakka Wakka’s Animalia Trilogy
Wakka Wakka’s Animalia Trilogy: Animal R.I.O.T., The Immortal Jellyfish Girl, and Dead as a Dodo. By Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage. Directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage. Jellyfish and Dodo also written with help from the ensemble. Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Chicago, Illinois, January 18-28, 2024. Wakka Wakka’s completed Animalia Trilogy was performed in full for the first time at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January 2024, uniting three distinct but thematically linked productions: Animal R.I.O.T. and The Immortal Jellyfish Girl (both of which had already premiered elsewhere) and Dead as a Dodo, which premiered at …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Psychic Self Defense
Psychic Self Defense. Created, Written, Directed, and Designed by Normandy Sherwood. Dream Music Puppetry Program. HERE Arts Center, New York, NY. September 12-30, 2023. On a crisp September night in New York, I stand outside the HERE Arts Center by the backstage entrance waiting to see Psychic Self Defense, the fall production of HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry program. It feels like the show has already begun when the usher escorts the audience in small groups from the lobby, where everyone has been congregating, back to the street toward the backstage entrance. A creature in a tall headdress with a …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly
Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly. By Happenstance Theater. Co-Directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell. 59E59 Theaters, New York, New York, November 29 to December 24, 2023. Upon arriving on the third floor of the 59E59 theatre complex in New York City to attend a performance of Adrift in December 2023, audience members are greeted by the costumed artistic co-director of Happenstance Theater, Mark Linden Jaster. Jaster’s company is an ensemble-driven troupe from the DC/Baltimore metropolitan area that creates original theatrical pieces rooted in physical comedy and clown technique that in his words “tend to go nostalgic … look retro” …
EXHIBITION REVIEW: The Calling: The Transformative Power of African American Doll and Puppet Making.
Kathy Foley The Calling: The Transformative Power of African American Doll and Puppet Making. Camila Bryce Laporte, curator, and Phyllis May-Machunda, curatorial consultant. City Lore Gallery. New York, NY. October 6, 2023 to March 3, 2024. This exhibit in a one-room space in New York’s East Village seems simple—dolls, soft sculpture figures, assemblage, quilts, and puppets by twenty-six contemporary Black artists juxtaposed in the gallery. Figures are arranged 1) to evoke the chronology of the African American diasporic experience and 2) to create dialogue about loss, trauma, and resilience. Doll making heals the spirit and builds community for these otherwise …
EXHIBITION REVIEW: Stillness, Silence, and Shadows: Indonesian Wayang Exhibit at Yale
Performance and Court in Indonesia. Asian Art Galleries, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. In Indonesia, wayang shadow puppets are presented to the audience in a dizzying swirl of sound and action. The dalang story-teller brings the artfully perforated puppets to life with deft manipulations of shadows that change shape to the shifting rhythms of a clanging gamelan orchestra. As the dalang sings, chants, jokes, and punctuates the dialogue with percussive clacks of a cempala, the characters interact with a rich array of human emotions. The puppets praise, seduce, flatter, betray, mock, and battle each other with gestures that …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: The King’s Dream
The King’s Dream. Created and performed by Michael Schuster, music performed by Rachel Saul. ARTS at Mark’s Garage, Honolulu, Hawai’i, 21 and 28 May 2023. Compelled by isolating pandemic years, puppeteer and storyteller Michael Schuster plunged into creativity. He researched, wrote, and built The King’s Dream, an intimate nineteenth- century storytelling style performance based on the historical interactions between Hawai’i’s reigning monarch, King David Kalakaua, and Elias Abraham Rosenberg. Rosenberg was an Eastern European Jewish emigrant, who had arrived in Honolulu during the tumultuous years of 1886-1887, when the Hawaiian monarchy was under severe political pressure from the Missionary Party …
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: 9000 Paper Balloons
9000 Paper Balloons. By Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott. Director and Dramaturg Aya Ogawa. Japan Society, New York, New York, Oct. 28-30 2023. Co-created by Japanese artist Maiko Kikuchi and American puppeteer Spencer Lott, 9000 Paper Balloons, performed at the Japan Society NYC from October 28-30, follows the transpacific journey of a swarm of “Fu-Go” balloons (hydrogen balloon bombs deployed by Japan against the United States near the end of World War II) from their creation in Japan to their destined destruction either during the journey above waves or on US soil. The balloons’ trajectory intertwines with the intergenerational story …
BOOK REVIEW: Women and Puppetry
Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations. Edited by Alissa Mello, Claudia Orenstein, and Cariad Astles. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 242 pp., 35 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $170, paperback $49.95, eBook $49.95. There is no shortage of women artists who use puppets as their medium, and there are many female scholars. But we have fallen behind in documenting and analyzing women’s contributions to puppetry’s artistic, cultural, and social efficacies. Women and Puppetry, which collects essays from scholars and practitioners, carries out tasks that cannot be delayed any longer. Its well-thought through introduction points out the inadequate recognition of female artists, the …
