Location: Zoom Room B
Co-Convenors: Dawn Brandes and Gabriel Levine
Participants: Kate Sloan Fiffer, Amanda Petefish-Schrag, Larry Switzky, Marilo Nunez
Puppet Theory
On the margins of theatre scholarship, often treated as a critical sideshow, puppetry continues to experience a long-running resurgence in theatre practice. Over the past decades, notable puppet companies and artists have found success on stages in Canada and around the world (including mainstream successes by Ronnie Burkett and Handspring Puppet Company, opera and theatre work by Improbable Theatre/Phelim McDermott/Julian Crouch, and musicals from The Lion King to Shrek). Meanwhile, a small community of scholars has paid increasing attention to puppetry, with new anthologies (Routledge), monographs, and encyclopedias (UNIMA). However, despite this increased artistic and scholarly attention, there have been only a few concerted attempts to theorize contemporary puppetry following the groundbreaking 20th-century work of the Prague School and subsequent efforts in the semiotic tradition (Tillis). Nevertheless, puppet practitioners, including South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, along with practitioner-scholars such as Cariad Astles, have generated keen insights into their practice, and critics have sketched evocative thoughts about puppetry’s “uncanny life” (Gross). Yet given puppetry’s unique position in the landscape of material performance, it is surprising that it has not produced a strong and coherent body of theory to date. Perhaps this is a result of puppetry’s anti-systematic bent: as a discipline, puppetry is often abjected, lumped in with children’s entertainment, or viewed as a minor curiosity in relation to major theatrical genres. In our view, however, the marginal position of puppetry—like other marginal positions—can give rise to acute theoretical insights that could help shift our understanding of key concepts of agency, materiality, embodiment, and animacy.
This panel gathers scholars and scholar-practitioners who seek to theorize the form and practice of puppetry from within. Contributions could be in dialogue with contemporary theoretical currents—including work in phenomenology, “new materialism,” or “thing theory.” They could also engage with Indigenous understandings of material and embodied being-in-relation. The panel’s aim, however, is not to import theory into a discussion of puppetry but rather to generate theory out of puppetry’s practical knowledge, historical permutations, and contemporary efflorescence. Cast aside, thrown into a heap, and left on the shores by cultural gatekeepers, puppetry persists and reinvents itself. Listening to puppeteers, scholars of puppetry, and puppets themselves, what new insights could emerge?
Topics could include (to be elaborated in the CFP):
- Theoretical explorations of themes like animacy, agency, or embodiment generated through puppet practice or spectatorship
- Puppet performance and the construction of identity, including race, gender and sexuality
- Indigenous puppet performance
- Theories of puppet spectatorship
- Investigations of puppet materiality
- Theorizing puppetry’s political, ethical, epistemological, or ontological contributions
- Relationships between puppet and puppeteer, puppet and environment, puppet and non-puppet objects
Co-Convenors:
Dawn Tracey Brandes, Dalhousie University) & Gabriel Levine, Glendon Campus of York University
Bio: Dawn Tracey Brandes is an Instructor at the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University. Her work considers the theoretical implications of contemporary puppet performance, particularly phenomenological concerns. She has contributed chapters to edited collections like The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance and Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation and articles to Canadian Theatre Review and Puppetry International.
Bio: Gabriel Levine is the author of Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (MIT Press 2020). He co-edited Practice (MIT/Whitechapel 2018), and his writing has appeared in publications including Performance Research, Liminalities, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Canadian Theatre Review. He has released numerous musical recordings on various labels, and his puppet-theatre projects have toured internationally. He is a Sessional Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Drama and Creative Arts Program at Glendon Campus, York University, co-curator of Toronto’s Concrete Cabaret and OBJECTO Festival. www.gabriellevine.net