The Puppet And The Modern

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.

Puppetry is arguably the most widespread form of performance. The artistry of puppetry includes aspects of the visual arts, theatre, music, and dance. Puppets can be traced as far back as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and are found today in cultures worldwide, across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. John Bell shows how puppets have been used to relay myths, poke fun at political figures, comment on cultural events of the period, express moral stories, and entertain adults and children alike. This richly illustrated book gives a historical overview and looks at the wide variety of this traditional art form. From European and Asian puppets in modern and ancient times to the Puppet Modernism movements, the book explores the important innovators and innovations of puppetry. Brief biographies of key figures such as Tony Sarg (credited with creating the first over-life-size puppets used for parades), Paul McPharlin (creator of Punch’s Circus), and Jim Henson (world-reknowned creator of many puppets, including the Muppets) help describe the evolution of puppetry. Definitions and descriptions of a variety of puppet styles, including shadow puppets, marionettes, hand puppets, rod puppets, and many others, add to the understanding of this fascinating form of art. With over one hundred color illustrations, this book highlights the "lives" of such characters as Kermit the Frog, Punch and Judy, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the traditional Chinese puppet Te-Yung to reveal the ways that puppets have become an integral part of many cultures. Captivating and fun, this book offers valuable insight into the wonderful world of puppetry.

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere—in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own—from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers—and how people interact with them—in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as “playing God.” Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.

Puppeteers have enthralled audiences for millennia with their unique charm, not just telling stories but enacting history, sharing knowledge, and preserving culture. In this dazzling and immersive volume based on the 2019 exhibition Shadows, Strings and Other Things (UBC Museum of Anthropology), puppets from all corners of the globe are resplendent in striking photographs that illustrate texts from ten scholars and puppeteers. Bodies of Enchantment highlights still-vital traditional puppetry practices, as well as examples of modern adaptations of the form: translucent leather shadow puppets depict ancient Indian epics in modern-day Indonesia; Taiwan's long-running Pili glove puppetry show thrives in the digital era; and Indigenous filmmaker Amanda Strong uses stop-motion animation to create entrancing new realms. Bodies of Enchantment: Puppets from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas features over 150 full-color images, and chapters by nine additional contributors: Anthony Alan Shelton revels at the alluring uncanniness of puppets; Annie Katsura Rollins explores Chinese shadow puppetry; Sutrisno Setya Hartana introduces us to Indonesian wayang; Jo Ann Cavallo unpacks the archetypes of Sicilian opera dei pupi; Mary Jo Arnoldi encounters the Sogobò masquerade in Malí; Izabela Brochado shows the continued vibrancy of mamulengo in Brazil; Kathy Foley and Catherine Ries uncover the significance of clothing in Javanese wayang golak cepak; and Jill Baird shares the history of puppetry at the Museum of Anthropology.

Introduction to Puppetry Arts shares the history, cultures, and traditions surrounding the ancient performance art of puppetry, along with an overview of puppet construction and performance techniques used around the world. From its earliest beginnings in the ancient Middle East and Asia, through its representations in Medieval/Renaissance Europe, up until its modern-day appearances in theatre, television, and film, this book offers a thorough overview of how this fascinating art form originated and evolved. It also includes easy-to-follow instructions on how to create puppets for performance and display and an in-depth resource list and bibliography for further research and information. Written for students in puppetry arts and stagecraft courses, Introduction to Puppetry Arts offers a comprehensive look at this enduring craft and provides a starting point for creating a wide range of puppets, from marionettes and hand puppets to mascots and character costumes.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.