Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mazer, Sharon

Titel

Puppet plays: Boxes are made to be broken

Ist Teil von

• Performance in Popular Culture, 2024, p.45-54

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Puppets are so much a part of our world they're easy to overlook. Yet there they are: performing 'live' in schools, community halls and churches, and in arts festivals; and in mediated performances on television, film and the internet. In the popular imagination, puppet shows appear in box sets. But the frame is more malleable, permeable and breakable than it seems. Puppet plays are often set onto a wider stage or screen environment, so that the non-human puppet and the human actor can be seen to perform together in ways that complicate our ideas of life and liveliness. Harpo Marx pops up next to Punch and Judy on a ship bound for America (Monkey Business); Shari Lewis shares her platform with Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse; Statler and Waldorf appear in an ornate theatre box as human-esque spectator/critics in The Muppet Show. Heinrich von Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig idealised puppet performance; Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with the medieval fairground booth. The domesticated box sets and miniature performances of 19th-century toy theatres can be seen as antecedents of the 20th-century 'idiot box' and models for 21st-century performances by Great Small Works that bridge the avant-garde and the popular.