Making Meaning in Puppetry
Materials, Practice, Perception
1st Edition
Published on 9. September 2025
304 pages
978-1-040-38931-7 (ISBN)
Description
From ice puppets to robots, from intricate marionettes to abstract forms, Making Meaning in Puppetry investigates the elusive and multifaceted how of how puppets make meaning in performance.
This engaging collection develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppet's meaning-making systems work across the book's three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppet's design; Part 2 on Practice investigates the interresponsive collaboration between puppet and puppeteer; and Part 3 on Perception considers how spectators understand and read a puppet production. The volume thus traces the full evolution of a puppet, from its raw materials, to its performance possibilities, to the moment it comes to imagined life. The seventeen chapters, authored by experts in the field, build bridges between puppetry and related fields, such as robotics, phenomenology, cognitive science, and queer theory, while using the puppet as their primary anchor of analysis.
Making Meaning in Puppetry is ideal for students of theatre and performance studies, theatre artists, scholars, and anyone who is fascinated by this rich performance form and wants to understand it more deeply.
This engaging collection develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppet's meaning-making systems work across the book's three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppet's design; Part 2 on Practice investigates the interresponsive collaboration between puppet and puppeteer; and Part 3 on Perception considers how spectators understand and read a puppet production. The volume thus traces the full evolution of a puppet, from its raw materials, to its performance possibilities, to the moment it comes to imagined life. The seventeen chapters, authored by experts in the field, build bridges between puppetry and related fields, such as robotics, phenomenology, cognitive science, and queer theory, while using the puppet as their primary anchor of analysis.
Making Meaning in Puppetry is ideal for students of theatre and performance studies, theatre artists, scholars, and anyone who is fascinated by this rich performance form and wants to understand it more deeply.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
47 Halftones, black and white; 47 Illustrations, black and white
File size
4,02 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-040-38931-7 (9781040389317)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Dassia N. Posner | Claudia Orenstein | Alissa Mello
Making Meaning in Puppetry
Materials, Practice, Perception
Book
09/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€206.70
Shipment within 10-20 days
Dassia N. Posner | Claudia Orenstein | Alissa Mello
Making Meaning in Puppetry
Materials, Practice, Perception
Book
09/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€63.60
Available immediately
Persons
Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian, translator, dramaturg, and puppeteer. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, USA. Her books include The Director's Prism: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (coedited), and Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (co-edited).
Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, is co-editor of four books on puppetry from Routledge, author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, and Editor of the online journal Puppetry International Research.
Alissa Mello is a writer, editor, theatre artist and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Their interests include women and performance, gender, identity and practice. Their co-edited books include Sandglass Theater: The Time Before the Glass Turns Over and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations.
Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, is co-editor of four books on puppetry from Routledge, author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, and Editor of the online journal Puppetry International Research.
Alissa Mello is a writer, editor, theatre artist and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Their interests include women and performance, gender, identity and practice. Their co-edited books include Sandglass Theater: The Time Before the Glass Turns Over and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations.
Content
Foreword
John Bell
Introduction: Recentering the Puppet
Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and Alissa Mello
PART 1
Materials
1 Reading the Material of Performance
Dassia N. Posner
2 Notes on a Material Dramaturgy
Laura Purcell-Gates
3 A "Paper" Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company Moby Dick
Skye Strauss
4 Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blanco's Puppetry
Carlos A. Ortiz
5 Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire
Felice Amato
6 Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma)
Kathy Foley
PART 2
Practice
7 The Radicality of the Potato People
Denise Rogers Valenzuela
8 The Puppet Body as Performance Archive
Jane Catherine Shaw
9 Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese Puppetry
Claudia Orenstein
10 Queer Thinking of Puppetry
Heather Jeanne Denyer
11 Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Muller, Ophelias, and Recurrent Hamletian Machines
Mayumi Ilari
12 Puppetry and Technoculture
Lawrence Switzky
PART 3
Perception
13 The Relationality of Puppet Life
Dawn Tracey Brandes
14 In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Koryu- Nishikawa V and Tom Lee's
Shank's Mare
Ana Diaz Barriga
15 Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a Cognitive Lens
Pia Banzhaf
16 Puppetry as Phenomena
Kate Brehm
17 Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice, Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company
Emma Smith Minkley
Afterword
Will Bixby
John Bell
Introduction: Recentering the Puppet
Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and Alissa Mello
PART 1
Materials
1 Reading the Material of Performance
Dassia N. Posner
2 Notes on a Material Dramaturgy
Laura Purcell-Gates
3 A "Paper" Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company Moby Dick
Skye Strauss
4 Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blanco's Puppetry
Carlos A. Ortiz
5 Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire
Felice Amato
6 Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma)
Kathy Foley
PART 2
Practice
7 The Radicality of the Potato People
Denise Rogers Valenzuela
8 The Puppet Body as Performance Archive
Jane Catherine Shaw
9 Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese Puppetry
Claudia Orenstein
10 Queer Thinking of Puppetry
Heather Jeanne Denyer
11 Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Muller, Ophelias, and Recurrent Hamletian Machines
Mayumi Ilari
12 Puppetry and Technoculture
Lawrence Switzky
PART 3
Perception
13 The Relationality of Puppet Life
Dawn Tracey Brandes
14 In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Koryu- Nishikawa V and Tom Lee's
Shank's Mare
Ana Diaz Barriga
15 Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a Cognitive Lens
Pia Banzhaf
16 Puppetry as Phenomena
Kate Brehm
17 Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice, Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company
Emma Smith Minkley
Afterword
Will Bixby
