The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance

The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance
Author: Dassia N. Posner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317911725

The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance offers a wide-ranging perspective on how scholars and artists are currently re-evaluating the theoretical, historical, and theatrical significance of performance that embraces the agency of inanimate objects. This book proposes a collaborative, responsive model for broader artistic engagement in and with the material world. Its 28 chapters aim to advance the study of the puppet not only as a theatrical object but also as a vibrant artistic and scholarly discipline. This Companion looks at puppetry and material performance from six perspectives: theoretical approaches to the puppet, perspectives from practitioners, revisiting history, negotiating tradition, material performances in contemporary theatre, and hybrid forms. Its wide range of topics, which span 15 countries over five continents, encompasses: • visual dramaturgy • theatrical juxtapositions of robots and humans • contemporary transformations of Indonesian wayang kulit • Japanese ritual body substitutes • recent European productions featuring toys, clay, and food. The book features newly commissioned essays by leading scholars such as Matthew Isaac Cohen, Kathy Foley, Jane Marie Law, Eleanor Margolies, Cody Poulton, and Jane Taylor. It also celebrates the vital link between puppetry as a discipline and as a creative practice with chapters by active practitioners, including Handspring Puppet Company’s Basil Jones, Redmoon’s Jim Lasko, and Bread and Puppet’s Peter Schumann. Fully illustrated with more than 60 images, this volume comprises the most expansive English-language collection of international puppetry scholarship to date.

Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects

Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects
Author: Claudia Orenstein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000910717

This anthology of essays aims to explore the many types of relationships that exist between puppets, broadly speaking, and the immaterial world. The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize these relationships? The first of two volumes, this book focuses on these questions in relation to long-established, traditional practices using puppets, devotional objects, and related items with sacred aspects to them or that perform ritual roles. Looking at performance traditions and artifacts from China, Indonesia, Korea, Mali, Brazil, Iran, Germany, and elsewhere, the essays from scholars and practitioners provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing the ritual and spiritual aspects of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally. This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.

Humor and Comedy in Puppetry

Humor and Comedy in Puppetry
Author: Dina Sherzer
Publisher: Popular Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1987
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 9780879724122

This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this book's focus is on a central and dominant feature--humor and comedy.

Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects

Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects
Author: John Bell
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2001-04-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780262522939

This volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, looks at puppets, masks, and other performing objects from a broad range of perspectives. Puppets and masks are central to some of the oldest worldwide forms of art making and performance, as well as some of the newest. In the twentieth century, French symbolists, Russian futurists and constructivists, Prague School semioticians, and avant-garde artists around the world have all explored the experimental, social, and political value of performing objects. In recent years, puppets, masks, and objects have been the focus of Broadway musicals, postmodernist theory, political spectacle, performance art, and new academic programs, for example, at the California Institute of the Arts.This volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, looks at puppets, masks, and other performing objects from a broad range of perspectives. The topics include Stephen Kaplin's new theory of puppet theater based on distance and ratio, a historical overview of mechanical and electrical performing objects, a Yiddish puppet theater of the 1920s and 1930s, an account of the Bread and Puppet Theater's Domestic Resurrection Circus and a manifesto by its founder, Peter Schumann, and interviews with director Julie Taymor and Peruvian mask-maker Gustavo Boada. The book also includes the first English translation of Pyotr Bogatyrev's influential 1923 essay on Czech and Russian puppet and folk theaters. Contributors John Bell, Pyotr Bogatyrev, Stephen Kaplin, Edward Portnoy, Richard Schechner, Peter Schumann, Salil Singh, Theodora Skipitares, Mark Sussman, Steve Tilllis

The Semiotic Web 1989

The Semiotic Web 1989
Author: Thomas A. Sebeok
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 813
Release: 2011-10-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110874091

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics
Author: Paul Cobley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2005-11-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134545479

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics opens up the world of semiotics and linguistics for newcomers to the discipline, and provides a useful ready-reference for the more advanced student.

Props

Props
Author: Eleanor Margolies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137413379

This diverse book brings together theoretical and practical viewpoints on objects in performance, how they can be part of theatre scenery, equal partners in performance, or autonomous things. Through close analysis of specific performances, Eleanor Margolies examines actor training, scenography, materials, construction techniques and object theatre. The text investigates a number of critical questions, including: what the difference is between a theatre prop and an everyday object; how audiences respond to the various ways that props are used by actors and designers; and whether devising with 'stuff' affect the making process or the attitudes to materiality embodied in performance. With discussions of papier mâché and collapsing chairs, fake food and stage blood, Props is an essential sourcebook for students, practitioners and researchers of theatre, design and prop-making.

Inside the Drama-House

Inside the Drama-House
Author: Stuart Blackburn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1996-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520916807

Stuart Blackburn takes the reader inside a little-known form of shadow puppetry in this captivating work about performing the Tamil version of the Ramayana epic. Blackburn describes the skill and physical stamina of the puppeteers in Kerala state in South India as they perform all night for as many as ten weeks during the festival season. The fact that these performances often take place without an audience forms the starting point for Blackburn's discussion—one which explores not only this important epic tale and its performance, but also the broader theoretical issues of text, interpretation, and audience. Blackburn demonstrates how the performers adapt the narrative and add their own commentary to re-create the story from a folk perspective. At a time when the Rama story is used to mobilize political movements in India, the puppeteers' elaborate recitation and commentary presents this controversial tale from another ethical perspective, one that advocates moral reciprocity and balance. While the study of folk narrative has until now focused on tales, tellers, and tellings, this work explores the importance of audience—absent or otherwise. Blackburn's elegant translations of the most dramatic and pivotal sequences of the story enhance our appreciation of this unique example of performance art.

Semiotics in the United States

Semiotics in the United States
Author: Thomas A. Sebeok
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1991-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism & Collections
ISBN: 9780253115300

"As a glimpse onto U.S. American semiotics through the mind's eye of a witness, participant-observer, architect, and midwife, this slim but rich book fulfills its title." -- Journal of Linguistic Anthropology "This book is an invaluable historical, conceptual, and anecdotal account of the rise of semiotics in the United States." -- Review of Metaphysics Sebeok, who has done more to establish the field of semiotics in the United States than any other single scholar, here draws upon his personal experiences of half a century to present the achievement and current status of semiotics in this country. He focuses on salient individuals and intellectual issues, including theatre, television, folklore, sociology, tourism, and graphic design. He also examines semiotic applications to architecture, marketing and advertising, jurisprudence, and medicine.

Aspects of Puppet Theatre

Aspects of Puppet Theatre
Author: Henryk Jurkowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2014-01-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137338458

Henryk Jurkowski's seminal 1988 text, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, was groundbreaking in its analysis of puppetry as a performing art. This new edition of a classic brings the original text back to life, including four additional essays and a new introduction, edited and translated by leading puppetry scholar Penny Francis. Henryk Jurkowski's seminal 1988 text, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, was groundbreaking in its analysis of puppetry as a performing art. This new edition of a classic brings the original text back to life, including four additional essays and a new introduction, edited and translated by leading puppetry scholar Penny Francis.