Puppetry and Object Theatre

verity healey shares the journey and impact of Walk with Amal, an interactive, artistic project that centered on a large puppet refugee girl travelling through Europe.

Can a new holiday hatch humans closer to freedom? Eli Nixon's homage proposal messes with time, place, and puppets towards building inter- and intra-species solidarities.

Leda Farrow considers the history, legacy, and symbolic potential of Mr. Punch, a hand puppet characterized by his violent acts.

Denise Rogers Valenzuela shares the way that learning to perform improvised crowd scenes with large, flat puppets—called naked population puppets or potato people—encourages an embodied practice that resists individualism.

In 2021, Ian McFarlane and Laura Stinson of North Barn Theatre launched into a bicycle tour that brought a puppet circus to rural communities across Nova Scotia. They discuss the creation and performance of their show, which joyously embraced troublemaking as a path to activism.

Sarah Plummer kicks off the puppet series by introducing the series contributors and exploring the way their work highlights puppetry’s capacity to form solidarities among humans and nonhumans.

Jonathan Mandell shares his experience at New York City’s first-ever official Puppet Week.

Emily LeQuesne discusses space as it relates to puppetry and shares a practical, five-step dramaturgy system for puppet theatre, which she developed, called the Mosaic Scale.

Emilio Williams sits down with Jesús Caballero to talk about the lost puppetry genre called la máquina real and Jesús’s company in Spain that works to reimagine this Baroque art form. / Emilio Williams entabla una conversación con Jesús Caballero sobre un género de teatro de títeres olvidado de nombre la máquina real y los esfuerzos de Jesús y su compañía en España por recuperar esta tradición barroca.

Sarah Plummer discusses how puppets aid socially engaged groups during protests in three key ways: amplifying tension, creating accessible messaging, and evoking solidarity.

Esther Fernández and Jason Yancey introduce their series, Where Puppets Move, sharing how the 2020 conference “Puppet Theatre: In the Beginning Were Puppets” at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre inspired their questions about reimagined performance spaces.

Priscilla Solis Ybarra reflects on her experience watching Virginia Grise’s a farm for meme at home, during the pandemic, with her eighty-two-year-old mother whose life shares parallels with the story in the play.

Jennifer Rodrigo sits down in conversation with Sabera Shaik, the artistic director of Malaysia’s Masakini Theatre Company, about the country’s fragmented arts community, shadow theatre, and more.

Marina Tsaplina examines the complexity of the word “disability,” how puppetry can push forward disability justice, and disability aesthetics, offering what she deems a “grammar of animacy” for artists working with disability.

Caroline Reck, artistic director of Glass Half Full Theatre in Austin, Texas, talks about how her company uses clown and object theatre to engage people in the battle against climate change.