Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance

The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance offers a wide ranging perspective on how scholars and artists are currently reevaluating 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 twenty-eight essays 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 fifteen 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 & Puppet's Peter Schumann. Fully illustrated with more than sixty images, this volume comprises the most expansive English-language collection of international puppetry scholarship to date.

Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University. She is author of The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde (2016), which analyzes the directing innovations of Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein, and the dramaturgical translator for Tracy Letts's version of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (2016). 

Claudia Orenstein is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY. Publications include The World of Theatre: Tradition and Innovation, and Festive Revolutions: The Politics of Popular Theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She is a board member of UNIMA-USA and Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal.

John Bell is Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. An active puppeteer with Great Small Works and Bread & Puppet Theater, as well as a theatre historian, his publications include American Puppet Modernism (2008) and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (2001).