Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Brehm, Kate

Titel

Seeing Puppetry: Winter Report from New York City

Ist Teil von

• PAJ (Baltimore, Md.), 2023-01, Vol.45 (1), p.22-33

Ort / Verlag

One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA: MIT Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Kate Brehm offers us a snapshot of puppetry in New York City over the Winter 2022 season, covering four puppetry events and a broad range of artists from the U.S. and abroad. These works include Book of Mountains and Seas, a collaboration between Basil Twist and Huang Ro at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which also hosted multiple productions in the Puppet Lab series also reviewed here; Song of the North by Hamid Rahmanian at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and Theodora Skipitares’s Grand Panorama at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.This essay covers four puppetry events across New York City in the winter months of 2022. The performances are so unique in form and style, one might wonder how each fits inside the field of puppetry. What connects them are some definitive traits of the medium. First, each featured inanimate objects as an essential component and focus of the storytelling. The objects performed with varying types of puppet liveness: be it a conscious human or floating table. Many reflected on the nature of consciousness and the human condition, natural topics for a medium that offers the opportunity to imagine an object’s interior life. Transformation, another natural ability of puppet objects, was utilized both literally and dramaturgically across these works. They also took advantage of the metaphoric power of objects and the capacity of the audience’s imagination to “fill in the blanks.” All the works required the presence of secondary performers: the puppeteers. Finally, many of the performances employed something not definitive to puppetry, but commonly taken advantage of by practitioners of the art form: non-narrative visual storytelling. Below, I offer my observations on these puppet performances.