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.

Foreword

John Bell

Introduction: Recentering the Puppet

Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and Alissa Mello

PART 1

Materials

1 Reading the Material of Performance

Dassia N. Posner

2 Notes on a Material Dramaturgy

Laura Purcell-Gates

3 A "Paper" Leviathan: Metaphor and Materiality in the Blair Thomas & Company Moby Dick

Skye Strauss

4 Aesthetics of Precarity: The Vindicating Materiality of Silencio Blanco's Puppetry

Carlos A. Ortiz

5 Chambre Noire: Relational Puppetry and Female Embodiment in the Puppetry of Yngvild Aspeli and Plexus Polaire

Felice Amato

6 Materializing the Immaterial: Puppets and Masks of Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma)

Kathy Foley

PART 2

Practice

7 The Radicality of the Potato People

Denise Rogers Valenzuela

8 The Puppet Body as Performance Archive

Jane Catherine Shaw

9 Lost in Object Translation: Reading Meaning in Traditional Japanese Puppetry

Claudia Orenstein

10 Queer Thinking of Puppetry

Heather Jeanne Denyer

11 Puppets and Dead Kings in Brazilian Theatre: Heiner Muller, Ophelias, and Recurrent Hamletian Machines

Mayumi Ilari

12 Puppetry and Technoculture

Lawrence Switzky

PART 3

Perception

13 The Relationality of Puppet Life

Dawn Tracey Brandes

14 In Your Sight and In Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Koryu- Nishikawa V and Tom Lee's

Shank's Mare

Ana Díaz Barriga

15 Puppets, Perception, and the Uncanny: Watching Performances Through a Cognitive Lens

Pia Banzhaf

16 Puppetry as Phenomena

Kate Brehm

17 Thinking through the Hand: Understanding the Puppet through Practice, Gesture, and Touch in the Work of Handspring Puppet Company

Emma Smith Minkley

Afterword

Will Bixby