Where Puppetry Conversations Happen
/by Claudia Orienstein
Nothing is more fun than making friends with puppets, even a mischievous one like this Punch who was a rare win for me from the Puppeteers of America traffle. He ended up going home with someone else better able to accommodate him and his large display set.
Stepping away from the consuming issues of our times, I allow myself a few moments to consider how, after three months under lockdown, I can look good and seem interesting on Zoom. I am preparing for July 2, when I will be interviewed by John Bell for the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry’s Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series. I am honored, if somewhat intimidated, to be included in a roster of impressive presenters that kicked off with Paulette Richards speaking on performing objects within African-American Theatre History and Theodora Skipitares discussing New York’s 1970s avant-garde performance scene as well as her last pre-Covid production, The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker, about the 18th century African- American astronomer-mathematician. Other upcoming presenters include Scott Cutler-Shershow, Peter Schumann, Frank Proschan, Matthew Cohen, Dassia Posner, Jennifer Goodlander, and Teri Silvio. I am already an avid listener, tuning in to the Ballard’s Facebook page every Thursday afternoon, and have marked the series in my calendar, one of few schedule anchoring points in this mostly unstructured Covid summer. This series is one important way I hope to keep engaging in the thoughtful discussions of puppetry that are so critical to the art.
Devil puppet for 8 puppeteers for the 9th Circle of Dante’s Inferno, built and performed by Hunter College students and friends as part of Drama of Works’ Punch Kamikaze at Dixon Place.
With other dedicated colleagues, I work in several forums devoted to conversations on puppetry. Most familiar to puppeteers is probably the Critical Exchange, which John Bell and I organize for the Puppeteers of America’s National Puppetry Festivals. These programs include panels and presentations intended to explore scholarship, theoretical discussions, and general hot topics in puppetry for and with puppetry practitioners. Each year more and more festival participants have been taking part. The 2019 edition included panels on “Identity and Representation On and Off Puppet Stages,” “Stem and Steam: Puppets and Technology,” and “Puppetry and Climate Action,” among others.
Sharing puppetry readings with my friend Nemo from Peace Arts Change Network in Vietnam. Check out the recent issue of Puppetry International for more about his puppet projects.
In a more scholarly arena, Dassia Posner, Alissa Mello, Lawrence Switzky, and I organize Puppetry and Material Performance Working Sessions for the American Society for Theatre Research’s annual conference. Each year we accept over 20 papers; authors read each other’s writings before the gathering and use our conference session to discuss each other’s work. The papers cover a truly diverse range of topics that can stretch from neurological studies on how we perceive puppetry to performing objects in 19th-century séances, to analyses of female characters in traditional Korean puppetry. Some scholars bring theories from other academic disciplines to thinking about puppets, while others take theoretical ideas born from puppetry and apply them to other forms of performance. More practitioners, flexing their scholarly muscles, have recently joined the group. These sessions not only help develop interesting writing on puppetry for future publication, but continue to cultivate an awareness of puppetry generally within theatre studies. The 2017 gathering in Atlanta even included a field trip to introduce performance scholars to the Center for Puppetry Arts.
Puppetry has generally had a low profile within the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, another major academic organization with an annual conference. Puppetry researchers had planned to turn that around this summer, with several puppetry panels on the program and a visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts’ puppet collection. For a modified version of the conference online, Dawn Brandes, Dassia Posner, Colette Searls, Lawrence Switzky, Jane Stewart Barnett, and I will still offer our panel, Learning With/Through Objects – Puppetry in the University Classroom. In anticipation of the event, we have been having exchanges on Zoom where we also explore ideas for teaching our university puppetry classes online, something most of us will face in the Fall. The six of us have not been the only ones brainstorming on this topic. Cariad Astles, Chair of UNIMA’s Research Commission, recently organized two online conversations with professors/teachers from across the globe to share ideas directed specifically toward teaching performance aspects of puppetry remotely. The session I attended included participants from Brazil, Italy, Argentina, France, the UK, and the US. Across time zones, we sought how to cease mourning for all we can’t do with our students and, instead, embrace what we can: maybe more toy theatre projects or object performance, students using what they have at home, rather than collaborative, bunraku-style work… maybe take advantage of international guest speakers… maybe have students play with the performance frames set up by our video screens.
Puppetry scholarship has always had a strong presence within The Association for Asian Performance’s annual conference and been covered extensively in its scholarly publication, Asian Theatre Journal, for which I serve as an Associate Editor. This summer’s conference, taking place from July 27-29, online of course, has a particularly strong showing of puppetry topics, with four panels, most organized by the indefatigable Kathy Foley: Ritual to Secular in Puppet Performance; Contemporary Innovations in Puppetry: Forefathers, Festivals, and Current Reformulations in Puppet and Mask Performance, (two sessions), and Contemporary Puppetry Audiences and Performers. For my own presentation, “What Now? Responses to Covid-19 by Puppet Artists in India,” I am spending time reconnecting with the many puppeteers I have met and written about over my years of researching Indian puppetry. While the concerns of Indian puppeteers under Covid echo those of artists around the globe, issues surrounding traditional form and Indian cultural heritage propose some unique situations, that I am just beginning to explore.
During this unusual moment, it is enlivening to be involved in keeping critical conversations on puppetry active.
