1st Edition
Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects Volume II Contemporary Branchings: Secular Benedictions, Activated Energies, Uncanny Faiths
This anthology of essays, a companion to Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, Volume I, aims to explore the many types of relationships that exist between puppets, broadly speaking, and the immaterial world.
The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections in contemporary artistic work in various mediums? How do puppets open avenues for discussion in a world that seems to be increasingly polarized around religious values? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize the present moment? What new questions do puppets address for our times, and how does the puppet’s continued entanglement with these concerns trouble or comfort us? The essays in this book, from scholars and practitioners, provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing this aspect of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally.
This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.
List of figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Teri Silvio
Introduction
Tim Cusack and Claudia Orenstein
Part I: Assuming Shamanic Roles
1. Consoling the Dead: Sim U-sŏng’s Puppet Rituals for Modern Korea
Jungmin Song
2. Spiritualist Material Performance, Whiteness, and the Animist Other
Hazel Rickard
3. Worth Her Salt: Zombification and Liberation Theology in a Puppet Film
Paulette Richards
4. The Spirituality of Ordinary Things
Frank Maugueri
Part II: Communitas Reclaimed
5. The Thing You Can’t See: Bread and Puppet Approaches Spirituality
John Bell
6. Queer Puppet Saint: Nested Intuitions
Erik Ehn
with contributions from Susan Simpson
7. Talking about Lunch with Sonia: A Ritual for Departing by Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company
Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber
Part III: Faith in Secular Performance
8. “When the House Is in Ruins”: Tadeusz Kantor’s Archive as Reliquary and Tabernacle for Cross- Temporal Performing Objects
Jacob Juntunen
9. Children, Birds, Flowers – A Minor Musical: Performance as Prayer
Katriina Andrianov
10. Fabricating Tales of Spirit: A Conversation with Jill Joubert
Aja Marneweck and Jill Joubert
11. Puppets and The Good News
Edna M. Bland
Part IV: Staging the Other World
12. Yūrei and Puppetry in Japanese Ghost Stories: (Mis)perception and Ambiguous Bodies in Kaidan
Laura Purcell-Gates
13. Bardo! By Performers semFronteiras: A Reflection on the Immateriality in Shadow Theatre
Gilson Moraes Motta
Part V: Complex Sacrality in the Contemporary World
14. Relics, Artifacts, and Bones: Activating Migrancy's Traces Through Performance
Ana Martínez
15. Restitution and Resurrection: The Return of Objects to Benin from the Quai Branly Museum
Heather Jeanne Denyer
16. Meat Puppets: The Body and the Museum
Margaret Werry
Index
Biography
Claudia Orenstein is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has spent over a decade writing on contemporary and traditional puppetry in the US and Asia.
Tim Cusack is an Adjunct Lecturer in Theatre at Hunter College. He was the co-founder and artistic director of Theatre Askew, an independent theatre company dedicated to the exploration of representations of queerness onstage.
