Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects

Author: John Bell
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262522939
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
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 Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance

Author: Dassia N. Posner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317911725
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
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.

Masked Performance

Author: John Emigh
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213362
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Growing out of a series of articles written over a 15 year period, and illustrated with over 100 photos, this volume offers a narrowed focus examination of various performing traditions that rely on the expressive power and imagination of masks. It explores the redefinition of self into "other," when the mask is worn, and examines actors and their performances in Papua New Guinea, Orissa, India, and Bali.

Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects

Author: Claudia Orenstein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000910717
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
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.

Figures in the Fourth Dimension

Author: Ellen Rixford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578158655
Category : Mechanical movements
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Book Description

Humor and Comedy in Puppetry

Author: Dina Sherzer
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879724122
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
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.

Disrupting the evolutionary chain of suppression

Author: Golaleh Yazdani
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1387880535
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Book Description
As an art form, puppet theater can inform society, and that can lead to breaking the cycle of suppression in a community. While this thesis is partly dedicated to the effect of suppressive culture on the individual and social identity, the vast portion of this work focuses on the importance of puppet theater.

The Mask Handbook

Author: Toby Wilsher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113412239X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
This book, from Europe’s leading Mask director and co-founder of the Trestle Theatre Company, provides a fascinating demystification of the process of using masks. Full of simple explanations, and collating over twenty-five years’ experience of writing for, directing and acting in masks, The Mask Handbook examines how masks have the ability to play the fundamental game of theatre – the suspension of disbelief. The Handbook includes: an introduction to the origin of masks advice on preparing, making and using masks tips on writing, devising and directing maskwork lots of fun and effective practical exercises. This accessible and inspiring handbook will empower teachers, directors and actors to fully explore the world of the mask.

The Stage Life of Props

Author: Andrew Sofer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Fresh and provocative readings of familiar stage objects provide new ways of understanding theater, dramatic literature, and culture

Puppet

Author: Kenneth Gross
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226309606
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
“Offering endless insights into the strange and archaic world of puppets . . . This is a book of literary mysticism, rich with accrued culture.” —John Rockwell, The New York Times Book Review The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.