 so good afternoon ladies and gentlemen hello I'm Blair Thomas the director of the puppet festival and very glad to welcome you here to the seventh floor the studio theater for our the third of our our book talks about puppetry and today is being moderated by Dacia Posner so Dacia is a scholar and a puppeteer and a dramaturg and a professor at Northwestern University and so very glad that she's able to fill this role today and so without further ado I'll pass it on to Dacia thank you hello everyone and thank you for coming I'm so excited to talk about this new book Claudia has been my colleague for a long time and I heard a lot of this book in bits and pieces over various conferences and phone conversations and on a bus in South Africa and so I'm really really excited to finally have been able to read it and I have to say it's one of the more generous and accessible books I have ever read and so I'm really excited to talk about it with you all and with with with Claudia first so let me tell you a little bit about the order of the day we're gonna spend probably 40 minutes in conversation I've tried to set up a conversation that essentially walks you through the order and the ideas of the book so that you feel like you know what we're talking about we have some images from the book as well and then we'll turn it over to you and you can ask all your amazing questions but first let me do a bio all right Claudia Orenstein is professor of theater and performance at Hunter College CUNY and a scholar of puppetry performing objects material performance also activist theater both in regard to contemporary practices globally and to traditional forms in India and Japan she's founding editor of puppetry international research PIR an online peer review scholarly journal devoted to puppets masks and related arts along with the new book we're discussing today reading the puppet stage reflections on the dramaturgy of performing objects she has co-edited several scholarly anthologies devoted to puppetry puppet and spirit ritual religion and performing objects with Tim Kusak don't miss the discussion of that book here tomorrow at 430 women in puppetry critical and historical in the investigations with Alisa mellow and Karyed assholes Astles which won the Unima USA Nancy Stubb award in 2022 and the relic companion to puppetry and material performance edited with me also and John Bell she worked as a dramaturge on Stephen Earnhardt's multimedia production wind-up bird Chronicle shown in Edinburgh and Singapore and on Tom Lee in Kuromeninho master Koryu Nishikawa the fish shanks mayor a feature of this festival a couple of years ago she's also the author of festive revolutions the politics of popular theater and the San Francisco Mime Troop co-editor with James Peck of Elizabeth pink ping chong Robert LaPage multimedia interrogations and an intro to theater textbook the world of theater tradition and innovation co-authored with Mira Falner she's a longtime board member of the puppetry organization Unima USA and the recipient of a 21-22 full-bite research fellowship for research on ritual puppetry in Japan welcome Claudia thank you that was the short version that was the short version I was like oh my goodness Claudia you have a lot of books so what I wanted to talk about today what as I was just saying to the amazing audience here one of the things I really love about your book is how generous it is what you do essentially is you begin at your beginning at the moment when you didn't know anything about puppets you just had this curiosity and you just had this suspicion that watching puppetry is different from watching live actor theater and so you put together this reading group and you read all this stuff and there wasn't the sort of explosion of scholarship then that there is now in in part because you're a central part of that explosion of of scholarship so I just wanted one wanted to know if you could talk to us a little bit about why you wanted to write this book first of all and second of all why you chose this humble and generous and accessible tone okay thank you first of all thanks for all being here and thank you Dacia for lovely introduction and Paulette for helping out and for this fabulous festival I feel really honored to be here so let's see the book comes from several things I teach at Hunter College which is a City University campus we have a theater department that's not that's not no we don't have a puppetry program you know it's just I once in a while get to teach a puppetry course and I've been teaching these classes and we often have a mix of undergraduates MA students when we had our MA program MFA playwrights and sometimes PhD students so I call it the one-room schoolhouse you know everybody comes in and every people are smart they have backgrounds and mostly backgrounds in theater and everybody's new to puppetry although sometimes I have a professional puppeteer who's in there and you know you never know who's going to show up at Hunter and one impulse there are several impulses to this book one was that there are things that every time I teach this course I want them to know it's like you know we have a whole theater department with all courses in all different areas but we only get one puppetry class and this semester just meeting once a week you know for two hours and yet there's this whole world of puppetry that I want them to know about so I want them to know about all the venues and organizations I want them to know about some of the wonderful artists I want to know how to think about it and it's a lot of exhaustive material to be sort of telling them you know every time so partly this book is a kind of compendium of that like okay it's and I just started teaching that class yesterday so chapter one is what I would have said you know today in class you go read it let's talk about it so that's one impulse and I think the generosity that you're describing and thank you for that kind of comes out of that too because of the students that we have you know that they are smart and they're from theater backgrounds but don't know anything about puppetry and my goal is to rope them in you know make them puppet lovers so that's one reason I think the another impulse in the book is that being involved in the puppetry world so much and I come from a theater background and I've always been kind of interested in puppetry very stylized performance and also a lot of my early work is on Asian theater and political theater where there's a lot of puppets so it's always been kind of there but I wasn't like fully immersed in that puppetry world early on but I felt sometimes when I got involved in puppetry that you know I wanted more communication between the world of puppetry which can sometimes be a little insular and the sort of world of theater in general especially scholarship and academia and that people in other areas of theater should know about what's going on in puppetry and why this is such an exciting form and as I say in the introduction you know I kind of take people through a journey of how I came to get really involved in puppetry and it was going to these fests Henson festivals in New York and it was the most exciting theater I was seeing and I wanted you know so it's part of that conversation so the book is also kind of directed I mean I really hope puppeteers will find interesting things in there but it's also kind of directed at theater people who suddenly become interested in puppetry and they don't really know where to start or what to think about or how to think differently or what is this art and sometimes you see shows where people are incorporating a puppet in their theater piece and maybe they need some support in thinking differently about you know what that world is about and so I wanted to kind of be that bridge I guess as well as I think one more impulse is that well we can we can sort of talk more about the different chapters like I really wanted to start more kind of critical conversations about not just how wonderful a puppet is and how mesmerizing that is which a lot of the theory kind of can sometimes get stalled on but to start thinking now more about watching puppetry across a production and analyzing that yeah and that really comes across I'm really excited to talk about that aspect of the the book what I want to do before those you know there's this what you're I have all of these tabs is if I'm going to be able to find everything that I want to find but I was able to find this sentence while you were talking that that really resonates with what it is you're just saying you write once we move ourselves out of the way and put materiality in the center of our thoughts and creativity to see what materiality itself can express new realms of artistic possibilities open up so what strikes me is is the way in which you know we've all seen shows where the prop is the point or the puppet is the point but the actor is so interested in sort of emoting right or the actor is so interested in drawing attention that they sort of lose touch with the fact that what's what's what it's about right then is you know Desdemona scarf for instance and I feel like the same thing can happen with academic writing people want to sound smart or they want to impress or they feel like they need to you know meet certain bars and really celebrate their their own selves in their own work and by putting the material the story of your journey the resources that are out there you're writing a book that de-centers that and really puts the subject itself at the center and therefore allows it to grow and so that's another thing that really struck me is you know not only are you generous in the sense that you don't assume that anybody knows anything coming into it and that that's any sort of problem but you give callouts to all the people whose work you've engaged with all the festivals that you've seen the people that you've collaborated on projects with and in so doing you then point people to sort of who are the people who are asking these same questions on the US theater scene so that's another thing that I I'm really excited about yeah I mean I really felt like it was the puppetry world has been so generous to me and welcoming I mean especially as an academic you know academia can sometimes be a little bit of a prickly prey the place right but I think ever since I've gotten involved in puppetry people the community is so supportive so I really did want to make sure that that people were were as you say called out you know I wanted to honor the people who are involved in this community and all the work people do and I want you know want that generosity to spread so I you know sometimes I have to say you know I first started writing some of it sometimes I had a little bit of an attitude like I just need to tell them this thing you know and then after I you know then I went through a second draft and I like pulled myself out actually a lot so I'm glad that that came across I also want to say something else because I was thinking about it recently when you we were talking last night about you know what the tone of the book and I had started I realized that in the back of my mind when I was in college one of the things I was given to read in some class was Robert Edmond Jones the dramatic imagination and it's a kind of book which is just like and I realized I didn't realize this before but I just looked it up and it it's it's subtitle also has the word reflections in it like it's reflections and something else about about you know the theater and it was just it was sort of like this like let me talk to you about interesting things I've seen and thoughts I've had and a very different you know so not to be a textbook and not to be so scholarly but let's talk and have an engaging conversation about interesting ideas and maybe a book you feel like kind of I hope carrying with you and sort of sitting you know and spending a little time with and going back to and that you might kind of you know I think there are fewer books like that around and so somewhere I wasn't exactly saying I want to do that but it was somewhere in the back of my mind and maybe it's a coincidence but maybe it's not that Robert Edmond Jones directed this production of Stravinsky's out of his wrecks with these giant puppets that hung over the stage and he also was he also worked on Eugene O'Neill's first production of The Great God Brown where all the characters were masks on top of masks and they take off their masks and there's another mask underneath so I think I think that he has a material sensibility as well yeah the other thing I want to point to and then we'll start talking about the content of the book along these same lines is the wonderful bibliography that you have at the end so as Nick knows from puppetry at Northwestern there are pages and pages and pages of resources that are compiled so that you know you've done the the the short cutting for folks who because puppetry sources aren't necessarily as easy to find as Shakespeare sources and so having somebody who's put them all together for you is also a really great resource yeah I mean when I like I said when I would teach this class and when we've had master's students in it I've always asked them to do you know a paper at the end and they're really weren't when I first started there wasn't really a lot of material or material that was easy to get to and I started collecting a library in my office and offering to you know lend it to students and you know started making this list and so this was another thing that I didn't have to you know necessarily do this time around teaching the class like it's in here you know so and I would often sort of just hand them something and I as I started doing it I was thinking I want the annotation to be kind of it didn't end up exactly this way but the idea behind it was like if you came to my office and said oh this is you should read because of and like me talking to you like oh here this has I like this because of that you know and that was a little very personal and in the end I tried to be a little bit more general about what the book does so I didn't quite go all the way through but that was an impulse to okay fabulous let's start talking about the book then so in in the first chapter you talk a lot you bring in Basil Jones who's one of the co-founders of the South African Company handspring puppet company Basil Jones writes this really beautiful piece where he talks about the the goal of the puppet or the task of the puppet is always to strive toward life and that he talks in the in the context of War Horse about during that production process that sometimes audience members complained that they couldn't really absorb the spoken text because the puppets were so interesting to watch and that that striving toward life is is mesmerizing and it is the central story of the puppet do you want to talk a little bit about that yeah I mean I'll tell you that you know actually the first chapter which is called a puppet being in a puppet doing wasn't in my original idea I was trying to jump-start like there's a lot of literature if there's anything in scholarship about puppetry early on about what's captivating about the puppet and the object and I wanted to move forward on that like what else can we talk about in terms of the a full production or what's going on and then so it wasn't originally there and I thought you know what I gotta start with the object so let's go back and then I thought I would dig in a little bit and I really wanted to use Basil so wonderful in writing about that and because he starts the conversation about what is the drama you know what is the text and if it's puppets making the text you know or it's trumping and sort of gave me also think of it's trumping the written text then what kind of texts are there or what kind of stories or how do those emerge and how do they move forward and he has a wonderful I mean again the reason I sort of make generous nods to everybody is because he has a whole lifetime of working with puppets that you know he'll know all kinds of things that I don't about creating those shows but I also wanted to offer maybe a different point of view from my background and my perspective of how we're how to make make a show and what to look for and what if you're not going to trump a text well then what kind of structures or texts or models or shows journeys are there how can we move that so I use him to jump that up but it also gave me an opportunity to say well you know one of those other things I want my students to know is how we think about the materiality of the puppet and what those choices are and it's not just this or that choice there's every choice you know so the question is what choices are you making and why what is it that meaning is expressing on the stage and to really attune them to that to those kind of questions right and so even though you know it doesn't negate the fact that we're absolutely fascinated by watching inanimate objects come to life but one of the things that you're I think probably the main thing your book does or tries to do is to say okay once we've established that actually how objects are designed what they look like the materials they're made of how they unfold in time what the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer is where you direct your gaze what the materials are all of those things can be analyzed with a great deal of sophistication and all of those things can really be mapped out very carefully and very thoroughly and so what you're doing over the remainder of the book is you're sort of giving folks a window into that the first chapter where you do that is called the dramaturgy is in the object and I want to talk about two examples from that chapter that explore what this means in two different ways the first one is the the the Indian tradition of kavad boxes we're gonna look at an image of that in just a second but what's remarkable about it is that there are every single part of the story I don't want to you know say what you're about to say but what what strikes me about that is that every part of the story is sort of already designed into these boxes do you want to describe them while we're waiting okay so we're gonna see this image so has anybody here know a kavad box is a couple of people so I tell and one of the things I do in the in the book I allow myself I mean you talked about you know the need academically to sort of you know cite everything I sort of allowed myself to just I want to tell stories I want to talk about my journey so the first story I tell in this chapter is about encountering one of these objects I took students on these study abroad programs to India and we stopped at this fair and I see these objects these boxes and the thing that's amazing about them is they they start closed up and they're beautifully painted and then there's a first set of doors that open and you go oh that's interesting and then there are these panels that unfold and they unfold on both sides and it's like this amazing thing that keeps unfolding this is the artist who built this carpenter who made this particular box and then at the very end there's two last panels that open up and there are sculpted figures in the back now they have a wonderful tradition of ways of using this Nina Sabnani is just fabulous woman whose scholar who like has written a fabulous book on this and knows everything about it and they go to these homes out in the deserts of Rajasthan and it's kind of a traveling altar and she talks about how it's constructed to sort of give you the experience of going into a temple and all the different stages of it I didn't know this at the time and I was just looking at it and I of course I think it's I mean of course it's very important I spent a lot of time studying traditional forms it's very important to know what the traditions are so I take a little bit of a liberty saying like I encountered this object and what was exciting to me was maybe not exactly how the tradition uses it but what I was seeing was a kind of dramaturgy in the object that is an unfolding of a story so the sort of everything closed up at the beginning where we are in anticipation and we're wondering what is this story going to be about and somehow the story is all encased in it like all the big the end is already in the beginning you know it's very dramaturgically satisfying and in that way and then the first doors open it's a kind of introduction and then the physicality and the phenomenology of the opening is this expression of story development and then at the very end these last two doors that open in the back you get three dimensions so there are paintings and so what the actual puppet performers do of this is they have a peacock feather and they point to the stories as they're telling the stories and I was kind of saying okay well yes there those images are there but those are the so two-dimensional images you're looking at that and then suddenly there's this three-dimensional forms in the back that's kind of an epiphany or something that takes you to another level so what I saw in the boxes and I thought was instructive which I wanted to put in that is like seeing a structure something that was object and material and constructed that was expressing dramaturgy expressing story so yeah so then you go you go on to give a bunch of different examples but one of my favorites partly because I saw this show at the festival last year did anybody see Anywhere last year yes so Anywhere is a production by a French company and it tells the story of Oedipus's wanderings and Oedipus is made of ice and so he melts over the course of the production and so another thing you talk about then is what happens when the material itself tells the story and in this in this case it's the degradation of material over time what does ice do in warm places it melts and then how does that capture the story of Oedipus as well yeah so in the book one of the things I'm talking about is that sorry just thinking about that materiality oh so that you know the excitement of puppetry right what makes the exciting is animated material right the inanimate becoming animate if that's the case then that's where the excitement is and the story is in that is somehow in that so how does that happen and this is a wonderful example because and I also talk a lot about like expectation like we already know if it's an ice like if I say ice puppet you're like oh what is that like and then you're like thinking how do they keep it going like you know what it does and so it's appealing to all of our really tactile and you know sensibilities and our knowledge about this material in its expressing the story and it already has its own physical journey in it and then that journey maps on and connects with the journey of the story and anywhere is also it's not the the Oedipus that third of the trilogy of Oedipus that where in the in the ancient Greek drama he actually goes into this clearing and they go to find him and he's disappeared you know but it's but it riffs off of that I mean it and obviously is capturing that idea and so the idea that your puppet is actually going to disappear so there's this kind of so what I'm interested in is like what are the pleasures of puppetry where do you find the the juiciness and the excitement and it's like there's all the things that a puppeteer is doing and this is a kind of extra exciting because the material is actually alive itself it's telling its own story in the telling and where those two come together for me is exciting and so what I'm trying to kind of impart in the book it's a lot of wonderful things about puppetry but what excites me is maybe something like that where these this is happening together with the story and you talk a lot I made sort of a list of things that you talk about that really struck me along these same lines you talk about the pleasure that the audience gets you you talk about transformation you talk about unlocking possibilities you talk about unfolding and playing with expectations you talk about invitation and there's a way in which in your analysis of puppetry it's really very fundamentally audience centric and it it it captures at least you know in in your analysis in the examples you use it really captures the the things that we find most pleasurable about theater right so I want to talk about the next chapter though can there's a graph that you use the chapter next chapter is called the image aspect of the puppet and you make a distinction between objects and images and I want to make sure that you get a chance to explain this because I don't want to get it wrong but what we've been talking about so far is you know the materials of the object or the way that the object unfolds over time you're also talking about the design of the object and in this chapter you you begin by talking about a lot of flat forms you know ranging from comic book style puppetry to wayang kulit to the work of Hamid Rahmanian whose song of the north was shown here last weekend to scroll traditions can you talk a little bit about how you think the image aspect of the puppet makes a kind of meaning that's distinct from say the materials okay that's great I want to just talk into your last point about the audience perspective that I kind of think of this book like an introduction like a lot of ways people are introduced to puppetry and often it's about how to build a puppet or how to perform a puppet and I think of this as a kind of introduction in terms of how you watch like what are we watching for and how is puppetry as I say asking us to watch maybe differently than other kinds of theater so this you know it's not I'm not saying that the book is like fully crisply delineated all the elements of puppet in a nice order you know I was excited about imagery and thinking about first of all a lot of contemporary puppeteers who are bringing it like if you bring on stage something which is a picture you know where how does that become an interesting new way of thinking about it and you know I guess if we look at this so I started this I thinking about this idea of the two aspects of the puppet where we talk a lot about the kinetic way the puppet is built and the objectness of it but of course it has all these visual qualities and I didn't quite go into an analysis of the visual qualities of particular puppets and I hope somebody here perhaps who is really a visual artist could do that because that's a great thing to have and I don't know have that you know background to go into that detail but what I was looking at was and actually this came really early when I first started doing puppetry and we were thinking a lot of things were starting to be using early on computers online and I started thinking of like all the fonts on words and then the words dancing and like this image becoming kind of a puppet and where was this and then all the ways in which as you see here like picture storytelling animation film people always ask me is that you know part of puppetry and I'm like yeah but why you know and so hopefully here and I'm sure there's you know theoretical things people can also think about on this and we can have conversations but there's things that sort of gather around the idea of picture maybe it's even a almost a better term than image and things that gather around the idea of object and they also overlap and something like the pop-up book is a kind of interesting thing where it's in the realm of picture and then the picture comes to life off the page and like are we excited because that's an inanimate thing becoming animate or because it's a picture becoming an object you know that it's the picture that's brought to life rather than the object that's brought to life so I I kind of tease out in this chapter some of these like examples where we're looking between things or thinking about how images are brought on to stage we might go to this picture yeah let's go to the blind summit yeah one next so this is the cut the picture I chose for the cover of the book blind summit you probably maybe if you you know about it's wonderful company from the UK and what they're most famous for is their show the table how many people have seen the table or some version of it which has a bunraku style puppet it's very funny very wonderful puppet called Moses yeah doesn't tell much about the story of Moses but he tells a lot about bunraku puppetry and I tend to be excited about puppet tree that questions the form or tells us and teaches us something about what the form is and what it can do but I first saw this show along with that and this one is tends to be less known it's called paper story and I used it as the cover of the book because I thought like well the book says reading the puppet stage and there's definitely some things here to read but what is going on are these puppets or are they what are they their pictures are they puppets are they pictures and what are the like the people there what are they doing like I hope it asks it asks you to ask questions about you know how the title of this book relates to what we're seeing here and in this show the four performers open up this suitcase the attache case that they put on the table and the entire show is them pulling these pictures one out of another out of this and showing them to the audience so the pictures are on their own telling a kind of visual story but the way they're pulled out the way that they're then set up the the motion and you know rhythm of how they disappear is adding to that story so I find this kind of exciting to think about in terms of what is the picture doing and then what is the object doing and you might not I mean a piece of paper it's so thin maybe it's not like what kind of an object is that you know it doesn't have all those kinetic things and yet here's this fascinating production that is done where it's riffing off of these these two ideas and the and what the images are doing have a role in relationship to the object makes you think more about that distinction perhaps and it's a really it's a really great example of sort of how puppetry even if you want to focus on sort of one aspect of of analysis there's so much hybridity going on and so in this instance you have these comic book style drawings but then you have this virtuosic choreography by the performers and I would imagine then you also have the sort of feel of the paper and the sound of the paper and the ability to crumple paper and the you know the the rippling sound of the paper as it gets pulled out and another another artist that you and then I was gonna say just the paper surprises like you see these papers and then suddenly there's this long paper right right yeah and another example that you include in this same chapter is the example of Claire Dolan who runs this Banners and Cranks festival and you know there's this another form of storytelling tradition where you have all of these painted or drawn images and then you point to the images and then you're able to tell the story that way but she of course does that in this different way where she creates this hybrid costume story board yeah I first I want to say something there's a lot of examples in the in the book in this chapter about scroll storytelling traditions and I think people involved in puppetry really understand that as part of puppetry but then when you think about it like you know why is that so I guess that's also an impulse here so she does this wonderful if you've ever seen been to Banners and Cranks festival that she's put together at the beginning she sings this history of picture storytelling and she does it by pointing to all of these things that are on this images that are on the dress she's wearing that tell the story the history and so she sings and she's telling the history and so so there's the pictures like you know you could have a scroll like we have this banner here and there are traditions where you know you just point to the different images and you know tell the story as a narrator and it's either unfurled or you're basically looking at the images in this way but now suddenly we have this other element that's brought in because not only is it this wonderful dress that has these panels that open up in all these new ways but then in the middle she'll like spin around you know and then she's got a like some things are on her back she's got a turn so we suddenly have this you know a human performer who's performing these images and they're all coming together so I like your word hybridity maybe it's not so much about pulling apart these different what's image what's object but trying to think about where movements coming from where expression is coming from and in that way tease apart the analysis and again for the sake of understanding why it's interesting or exciting you know like this is very exciting to me that you know she's first because you're then part of your brain is also interested in this dress she's built and what's gonna open next and you know where on her body a certain image is and how we're relating and already thinking about her body in relationship to these physicalities I mean this this imagery both of these examples I think help us transition to the last main body chapter of the book which is about humans and objects and about the many many different ways you can have really dynamic relationships between the puppet and the puppeteer and one of the examples you talk about in that chapter is based on I mean you give this wonderful sort of story of a journey of giant puppets and streets that you weren't able to see but what you do talk about close to the end of that chapter is a project that you worked on which was Tom Lee and Corey Unishikawa the fifth shanks mayor which was shown here I think two or three five two or three festivals ago and one of it and Corey Unishikawa the fifth uses this tradition that's been in his family since the 1800s of Kura Mani or cart puppetry he's sitting you can't see it that much in this image but he's sitting on this little cart that allows him to and he attaches the puppet's feet to his own feet and then he can roll very seamlessly around the stage in this beautiful way some of you may have seen Paper Moon use use that same technique that they that they learned from from these artists as well but one of the things that's really striking is it also allows the puppeteer's face to be really close to the puppet so if you could talk about sort of what you've discovered in terms of how we analyze the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer yeah well I was on a Fulbright recently I spent a lot of time in Japan years ago and then I was able to go back on a Fulbright and look at ritual puppets in ritual in Japan and I was seeing a lot of these puppets and I think I found it when talking about the relationship of the puppeteer to the puppet it struck me that it would be really interesting to use Japanese puppets as an example partly because I know a lot about them and I want to tell people about what I know but also because there are several different traditions that are using very similar style puppets but the relationship of the puppeteer to that puppet is different so those of you who know what we mostly talk about is Bunraku and the Japanese Bunraku tradition as done in Osaka at the National Theater in Osaka or Ningyo Joruri as it's also called uses exactly the same puppet more or less I mean doesn't have the pegs on the bottom but very similar puppet and in fact these this tradition grew out of that tradition at a point when puppetry became less popular in Japan after a big heyday this tradition and getting three people for every puppet was really expensive you know and they found a way we'll do one the same fully articulated character but with one person and this using the cart and suddenly the puppet can do different things and as you say there's this intimate relationship because in the Bunraku theater the we also can see the master puppeteer but because there are those three performers and they're trying to all choreograph together they're sort of trying all the time to stay behind the puppet and to stay out of each other's way in a certain sense but here it's like there's this immediate connection and it's almost like I don't drive a stick shift but it's a little bit like driving a stick shift I imagine you know you're cut your arms moving and your your feet and your whole body's moving at once and your the expression especially from a master puppeteer here and we can talk about that we have a wonderful analysis of this in another book that Dusty and I are working on from a one of your students that and I think this puppet this particular chapter is all about the fact that it's not just a visible or an invisible puppeteer right there's all kinds of ways to be visible and that the puppeteer here really is imparting and very skillfully choosing how to impart emotion of their own to our view of that act performer in puppet and Nishikawa has also developed a flamenco performance where because this puppet does a lot of stomping and he does a kind of flamenco dance with a puppet that's a flamenco dancer not this kind but and when you see him do it and his son who's really getting to be a very fabulous puppeteer also is learning this now probably mastered it by now you can see like that bravado I guess of the Spanish dancer that he completely changes his own physicality and the you know the dancer is you know doing all these very flamenco style movements so it's definitely there and then there's another form called the otome bunraku or young women's bunraku which is another relationship of the same kind of puppet it was I don't want to go into history now but you know started as a women's form to basically see the beautiful young women at a time when that was very exciting on the Japanese stage behind the puppets standing up and kind of dancing with them and again there are obviously differences some might be slightly bigger puppets or slightly they have to change them the way they manipulate but they all come out of this same tradition but the relationship of the performer to the object is different and so it's a it's I think it's good set of examples to highlight same kind of puppet basically but different forms giving you I mean we look at them as tradition so they have a certain kind of dish but when you start let's say you weren't in that specific tradition or like the flamenco one like what can you mine or what can you think about or get out or what kind of meaning can be created in that choice I want to transition to audience questions because I'm sure you have many but as a part of doing that I want to make one last comment and if we could look at the the hairy ape on shocked photo for this what I noticed is that you're the story of your book sort of comes full circle what you do is you in this again really generous way you begin with sort of your own journey and your own path of discovery and you celebrate all the people that you encountered along that journey and at the end you celebrate your students and you celebrate their discoveries and there's this sort of equalizing that that you bring into the telling of that story by by just essentially showing all of us when you do pay attention to these different elements and when you celebrate the material materiality of the object and when you de-center yourself then it unlocks all kinds of material possibilities and all kinds of ways of expressing things that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of if you want you know like 30 second version but I want to make sure that we that we yeah I love my students one of them is sitting right here and that if I can reel them in and get them involved in puppetry then oh great there's more people who can help me out because I'm not super talented at anything and you know like oh wow like I just started my puppetry class this semester yesterday and nobody's a puppeteer people come from all different kinds of backgrounds and it's like oh you have some art skills oh you have it okay yeah let's all like we're gonna you're all gonna be collaborating a little while so I was I mean I it was just a joy to be able to work with students and then they get excited and then they want to do more things and yeah that's it I forget what word you used oh yeah you you you talk about the joy of them all being infected with puppet disease yes all right let's turn it over to you all for questions well the question was what was the project that sparked your curiosity for puppetry yeah so in the late 90s early 2000s in New York the Henson Foundation was sponsoring with the public public theater in New York this series of puppet festivals that brought puppetry from around the world and they were very popular in New York and you know I was just seeing like really unusual things and I think what was what was I was responding to was there was like some puppet shows that had like beautiful puppets but like they were doing Shakespeare or something and it like just it felt like too much language and I didn't know how to think about that and El Periferico de Objetos this Argentinian company did this show with these dolls they were like old dolls and it's about violence it's a story of violence I had to like go look it up again when I was writing about it because I I just remember being so kind of astonished these old dolls that they had found and the way they were being used and then the sort of violent things that happened and I there was like so much information coming at me visually and I like was like this is blowing my mind but I don't know what's going on and I want to talk about it and one of the things I tell as part of this journey in the book is I was I offered to teach a course at the CUNY Graduate Center where they have these PhD classes on puppetry because I was thinking like let me get those graduate students who are so smart they're reading all that theory like let's all talk and then they'll tell me what's going on you know and then those puppet shows were the festivals were canceled like they stopped happening and I was like oh well I already committed to teaching this class so what am I gonna do but you know I was like I you know I was saying I want someone to explain what's going on and I want to know how to think about this and I was trying to find material and there may be have been things maybe more in Europe you know that one could look at but I was struggling and thinking what let you know stuff I was looking for wasn't explaining these things to me another any other questions yes yeah though they'll bring you a microphone um and India I've spent yeah the the question was do do Japan and India and other areas of the world have big puppet traditions yeah Japan and India both have lots of puppet traditions they are fabulous places to find out I actually started going to India because I was taking students I created from another series of stories I like telling stories I won't tell them all now but I started a study abroad program in India with a colleague taking students to study kathakali dance drama and but I was also getting interested in puppetry and then all kinds of things started happening that I started connecting to a lot of puppeteers there and there are every kind of string shadow rod all kinds of puppetry depending on what area you're in traditional forms that are related to a ritual often talking telling stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics in Japan also a lot of puppet traditions I really went I had this Fulbright that I had a few years ago I was saying I wanted to look at ritual of puppetry that take place in ritual like festivals and other things like that and one of the reasons I constructed it that way and then didn't just end up looking at those was I wanted to look at basically everything that's not bunraku it was like I love bunraku it's so gorgeous and there is a lot of stuff written on bunraku but there's a lot of other things the puppet traditions most of them happen maybe just once a year at a festival you know so it's not like a full entertainment world but different interesting forms of manipulation and different kinds of puppets so I just wanted to know more about that and share it in other ways I've been giving talks about what I've seen and these things aren't unknown I mean they're they're all cultural assets and there are places that people have written about them but I just felt like in the kind of conversations that I was having people who knew a lot about puppetry if you said Japan what they said was bunraku which of course is important and it's beautiful and and I want them to know about some of the other lovely traditions that they could be interested in yeah some of those traditions have been around for a thousand years have been continuously performed for a thousand years yes yes what do you think is the American tradition of puppetry versus something that's been around for thousands and thousands of years and how does it rank to it okay well this is when I turned to John Bell John Bell American puppet modernism because I think if we say something okay this is a really huge generalization and people who've been involved in a lot of American puppetry for a long time will should be very critical of me but we tend in the United States to be more interested in innovation in personal you know artistry of a particular artist rather than the establishment and a perpetuation of a tradition so I think that's an important it's not that we they don't have that in other places too but I think that's so much part of how America thinks about art you know which again is huge generalization so you know let's put that in caveats but I think that's a big thing and being able to borrow from any tradition which can become problematic when you're looking at other forms etc you know a lot of we're going to talk tomorrow and my colleague Tim Cusack is here about the book on puppet and spirit forms that are you know connected to in other countries that are connected to and I go a lot to Asia so I don't write so much about puppetry in Europe so that's just my background is more in Asian theater so I'm usually talking from that perspective where there's a lot of traditions that are related to ritual and connected in deep social ways to communities not thought about as you know puppets for children but for the whole community because it's and in Africa you get this to puppets that are for teaching stories that are moral tales or about social social ways of being and so that there's there are traditions that please find them in the US and argue against me but there are a lot more traditions in maybe other places that have long roots in connecting to the community and not just being an entertainment performance maybe that might be you know what you're saying reminds me some folks may not know who Ellen van Volkenberg is who gives this series its name she invented the word puppeteer and was a Chicago puppeteer one of the founders of the Chicago Little Theater all about the innovation that you're talking about all about sort of exploring what was possible and did this beautiful Midsummer Night's Dream in this building over a hundred years ago is this was it in this same yeah fabulous okay we have time for we've got five minutes left so we've got time for one two more questions do you have any examples of shows where an individual object or puppet is through the production manipulated in different ways like that changes because of the plot oh yeah I mean I'm sure there are a million of them where it's the yes actually I do there's I talk about a show that Hank Borwinkel from Triangle Theater in Holland did that I was able to see many years ago which is a puppet that looks like a marionette and it it does a kind of trope that you see sometimes in puppet shows right it looks up and it sees the marionettist and the hand you know is very expressive and it starts to try and you know climb up the strings and there's this little fight and then finally it yanks down the the control and the the marionettes drops the control but the puppet then like falls down of course but then comes back to life and picks up the control and carries it over its shoulder like it's carrying a cross you know and so you suddenly become aware there's also a puppeteer somewhere underneath so that's a change in how it's I mean I don't know how if it's always manipulated that way or if it really is a marionette and they're like I don't know that all the details but yeah that would be a change of manipulation that is drama a dramaturgy that's a story yeah that's a great question okay one more quick one yes microphone will come to you just thinking about that word center and and de-centering is and I'm trying to think is there a way to define when people walk in as the audience what they think the center is you know even going back to like Shakespeare in the globe I mean what's the what's the thing that's either that we're de-doing what's the center as you would define it that people walk in thinking this is our center because you could everything you're talking about is sort of taking away some assumption that we walk in with when we read the puppet but never gonna oh no I think it's all a conversation with our horizon of expectations I think this is in theater as well as in puppetry that that that center is always changing the more people see more puppetry the more they're exposed to ideas and they come in with expectations of what that is and artists play with those expectations both fulfilling and then sometimes veering away from one of the things that I give an example of is another borewinkle piece where there's a character that pops out that comes down it's a big head on stage and this character comes down and the head has a bandage around it and the character like takes the bandage off the head with a with a stick and then it gets wrapped around the stick and then the character just holds that and then the stick start the bandage just starts to unravel on its own and you know we just watch that as a moment and that it's both fulfilling an expectation because we know what happens like with ice what happens with this bandage and gravity but it's also not what we expected necessarily to see because it's a puppet show where we're thinking about puppetry and manipulation and so I think it's a realm of that's the realm of creativity is what what do you want to say and how are you bringing people in and taking them out and like playing with their engagement expectation not expectation sometimes you fulfill it perfectly like we're waiting for that thing to explode or we're waiting you know and sometimes you don't give it to us as long as you're making the choices and you know what you're doing you know that's I think where the artistry is yeah that's a great great place to end thank you everybody for coming out today and thank you Claudia for sharing your best yeah thank you and thank you Dacia for being so generous