Czech Puppet Theatre

This volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, looks at puppets, masks, and other performing objects from a broad range of perspectives. Puppets and masks are central to some of the oldest worldwide forms of art making and performance, as well as some of the newest. In the twentieth century, French symbolists, Russian futurists and constructivists, Prague School semioticians, and avant-garde artists around the world have all explored the experimental, social, and political value of performing objects. In recent years, puppets, masks, and objects have been the focus of Broadway musicals, postmodernist theory, political spectacle, performance art, and new academic programs, for example, at the California Institute of the Arts.This volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, looks at puppets, masks, and other performing objects from a broad range of perspectives. The topics include Stephen Kaplin's new theory of puppet theater based on distance and ratio, a historical overview of mechanical and electrical performing objects, a Yiddish puppet theater of the 1920s and 1930s, an account of the Bread and Puppet Theater's Domestic Resurrection Circus and a manifesto by its founder, Peter Schumann, and interviews with director Julie Taymor and Peruvian mask-maker Gustavo Boada. The book also includes the first English translation of Pyotr Bogatyrev's influential 1923 essay on Czech and Russian puppet and folk theaters. Contributors John Bell, Pyotr Bogatyrev, Stephen Kaplin, Edward Portnoy, Richard Schechner, Peter Schumann, Salil Singh, Theodora Skipitares, Mark Sussman, Steve Tilllis

Czech puppetry between 1900 and 1950 was an integral part of modernist and contemporary theatre and animation. This book examines the manufacturing of puppets, stage design and technologies, and focuses on the connections of artists from various disciplines and styles to the development of avant-garde and modernist currents in twentieth-century art. It includes 750 photographs of puppets and unique archival images of performances, sets, posters, periodicals and illustrations.

New Theatre Quarterly provides a lively international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet, and where prevailing dramatic assumptions can be subjected to vigorous critical questioning. It shows that theater history has a contemporary relevance, that theater studies need a methodology, and that theater criticism needs a language. The journal publishes news, analysis and debate within the field of theater studies.

This stimulating compilation of essays and images reveals an essential and valuable component of Czech contributions to the world of modern theatre heretofore largely unseen outside the country itself. Featuring the craft of twenty-seven of the best stage and costume designers of the twentieth century, Joe Brandesky supplies ample evidence of their consistently high quality and dynamic creativity, survival skills for a people whose national identity had been dismantled during many years of occupation and repression. Essays by Vera Ptacková, Dennis Christilles, Delbert Unruh, and, Marie Zdenková their full texts restored and reedited for this volume since their initial publication in exhibit catalogs, provide historical and linguistic insights into contemporary Czech scenography as well as comparisons to the major art movements affecting the designers. Brandesky’s informative introductory essay contextualizes the shifting tenets of Czech theatre design. Also included are biographies of the designers, a bibliography, and thirty black-and-white photographs. The accompanying CD provides access to the vibrant and sophisticated images of the Czech theatrical world: 138 richly colorful paintings and drawings of costumes, models, and set designs and in situ photos of exhibited designs plus 27 color and black-and-white photos of the designers. The CD also includes the full text of the book with links to all the art and to the designers’ biographies. Book and CD together showcase the Czech Republic as a center of international stage design.