Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception

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.

Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian, translator, dramaturg, and puppeteer. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, USA. Her books include The Director’s Prism: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (coedited), and Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (co-edited).

Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, is co-editor of four books on puppetry from Routledge, author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, and Editor of the online journal Puppetry International Research.

Alissa Mello is a writer, editor, theatre artist and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Their interests include women and performance, gender, identity and practice. Their co-edited books include Sandglass Theater: The Time Before the Glass Turns Over and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations.