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: Summer 2024
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: Early European Puppetry Studies Conference
Early European Puppetry Studies Conference. Yale University, Connecticut. October 13-14, 2023. The article summarizes the offerings at the two days of presentations at the Early European Puppetry Studies conference organized by Michelle Oing and Nicole Sheriko at Yale University in October of 2023. Participants from a wide range of disciplines, including Medieval Studies, Art History, and English, investigated how using puppetry studies as a lens could help shed new light on a variety of performative events from early Europe. In so doing, the event demonstrated the promise this research area holds as a new field of study. Claudia Orenstein, Theatre Professor at …
Anamorphosis: Puppetry, Animation, and Automation in William Kentridge
Mark Sanders Among contemporary artists, William Kentridge is notable for having worked across multiple media. Of particular note are the ways in which the techniques of his animated films intersect with elements from his collaborations in puppet theatre with Handspring Puppet Company, and how his ideas about automaticity reveal puppetry as a condition of possibility both for filmmaking and for the drawing that, in Kentridge’s filmic work, underpins his Drawings for Projection (1989-2020). Tracing these intersections and ideas, this essay asserts the relevance of anamorphosis as an explanatory concept. Mark Sanders is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at New …
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 …
From the Editor
Welcome to the second issue of Puppetry International Research. While still relatively new, PIR is already experiencing some shifts and new growth. We initially intended to be a fall/spring publication. However, UNIMA-USA has asked us to move to a summer/winter schedule in order to stagger with the publication calendar of its long-established magazine, Puppetry International. This change accounts for the delay in the launch of our second issue. With the current edition, PIR is also welcoming several new members to the team: Skye Strauss as Book Review Editor, Colette Searls as Performance Review Editor, and Jungmin Song as Exhibition Review …
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 …
