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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. It develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppet's meaning-making systems work across its three distinct parts.
List of contents
ForewordIntroduction Part 1: Materials1. Reading the Material of Performance
2. Notes on a Material Dramaturgy
3. A "Paper" Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company
Moby Dick4. Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blanco's Puppetry
5.
Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire
6. Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma
Part 2: Practice7. The Radicality of the Potato People
8. The Puppet Body as Performance Archive
9. Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese Puppetry
10. Queer Thinking of Puppetry
11. Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Müller, Ophelias, and Recurrent Hamletian Machines
12. Puppetry and Technoculture
Part 3: Perception 13. The Relationality of Puppet Life
14. In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Kory¿ Nishikawa V & Tom Lee's
Shank's Mare15. Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a Cognitive Lens
16. Puppetry as Phenomena
17. Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice, Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company
Afterword
About the author
Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian, translator, dramaturg, & 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 (co-edited), 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 other 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.
