Alissa Mello

Paulette Richards

Hazel Briar

Laura Purcell-Gates

Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance investigates and expands the multifaceted how and what of puppetry and material performance. This engaging collection explores how puppetry and material performance challenge and transform representations of race, gender, and disability through the powerful medium of object and effigy forms. The book also examines gender roles within puppetry and how puppetry addresses societal anxieties about the other and bodies traditionally excluded from normative spaces. Part 1: Reframing Puppetry Through Race, Gender, and Disability establishes a theoretical foundation for understanding puppetry as a site of intervention—whether in political protests, theatrical productions, or educational contexts. Part 2: Negotiating Identities builds on this foundation by examining how puppetry operates as a tool for reshaping identities and expanding representation. Part 3: Performances of the Other emphasizes how puppetry challenges established norms of embodiment and inclusion, offering possibilities for cultural reclamation and the redefinition of marginalized identities. Featuring nineteen chapters by leading experts, this collection illustrates how puppetry can challenge conventions, articulate nuanced identities, and illuminate complexities of race, gender, and disability. Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance is ideal for students of theatre and performance studies, theatre artists, scholars, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of puppetry and material performance.

Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance

Claudia Orenstein

Dassia N. Posner

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.

Materials, Practice, Perception

Making Meaning in Puppetry

Cariad Astles

Women and Puppetry is the first publication dedicated to the study of women in the field of puppetry arts. It includes critical articles and personal accounts that interrogate specific historical moments, cultural contexts, and notions of "woman" on and off stage. Part I, "Critical Perspective," includes historical and contemporary analyses of women’s roles in society, gender anxiety revealed through the unmarked puppet body, and sexual expression within oppressive social contexts. Part II, "Local Contexts: Challenges and Transformations," investigates work of female practitioners within specific cultural contexts to illuminate how women are intervening in traditionally male spaces. Each chapter in Part II offers brief accounts of specific social histories, barriers, and gender biases that women have faced, and the opportunities afforded female creative leaders to appropriate, revive, and transform performance traditions. And in Part III, "Women Practitioners Speak," contemporary artists reflect on their experiences as female practitioners within the art of puppet theatre. Representing female writers and practitioners from across the globe, Women and Puppetry offers students and scholars a comprehensive interrogation of the challenges and opportunities that women face in this unique art form.

Critical and Historical Investigations

Women and Puppetry

Alissa Mello

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