No previous work on wayang has treated in depth what is the focus of this book: the power of the theatrical medium, the actuality of the performance as a physical, emotional, and social experience and event, and the sensations and feelings involved in performing and watching an all-night wayang performance. A single puppeteer moves puppets, delicately carved and painted according to a complex iconography, in dance-like patterns integrated with continuous music, which he also directs; he speaks the voices of all characters; and he represents beings and a mythological world that reflect (on) the human world, including the specific occasion and the people present. Paying attention to the wholeness of the 'multimedia' performance as an event, as well as to the sensations, subtle movements, and particular intonations of the performance, the author of this book bases his 'thick description' on years of learning to perform wayang, attending and participating in performances, interviews and discussions with people involved with wayang, supplemented by study of texts, from old manuscripts and performance manuals to newspaper articles and reports on performances. He shows the need not to be limited to any single discipline: in wayang, the relationships and interaction, for example, between visual movements and music, or between actions on the screen and actions among the audience-participants, are no less significant than, for example, the relationships within music. The book includes the most extensive discussion of recent changes in wayang theatre, its interaction with various traditional and modern entertainments, and the ways it is affected by politics and economy. A postscript focuses on the post-Soeharto era. The book is a contribution to the study of Indonesian performing arts and culture, but it is also intended for anyone interested in theatre and performing arts generally. Book jacket.

Drawing on the author’s two decades of seeing, writing on, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this book offers a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry. Reading the Puppet Stage uses examples from a broad range of puppetry genres, from Broadway shows and the Muppets to the rich field of international contemporary performing object experimentation to the wealth of Asian puppet traditions, as it illustrates the ways performing objects can create and structure meaning and the dramaturgical interplay between puppets, performers, and language onstage. An introductory approach for students, critics, and artists, this book underlines where significant artistic concerns lie in puppetry and outlines the supportive networks and resources that shape the community of those who make, watch, and love this ever-developing art.

Henryk Jurkowski's seminal 1988 text, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, was groundbreaking in its analysis of puppetry as a performing art. This new edition of a classic brings the original text back to life, including four additional essays and a new introduction, edited and translated by leading puppetry scholar Penny Francis. Henryk Jurkowski's seminal 1988 text, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, was groundbreaking in its analysis of puppetry as a performing art. This new edition of a classic brings the original text back to life, including four additional essays and a new introduction, edited and translated by leading puppetry scholar Penny Francis.

The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance offers a wide-ranging perspective on how scholars and artists are currently re-evaluating the theoretical, historical, and theatrical significance of performance that embraces the agency of inanimate objects. This book proposes a collaborative, responsive model for broader artistic engagement in and with the material world. Its 28 chapters aim to advance the study of the puppet not only as a theatrical object but also as a vibrant artistic and scholarly discipline. This Companion looks at puppetry and material performance from six perspectives: theoretical approaches to the puppet, perspectives from practitioners, revisiting history, negotiating tradition, material performances in contemporary theatre, and hybrid forms. Its wide range of topics, which span 15 countries over five continents, encompasses: • visual dramaturgy • theatrical juxtapositions of robots and humans • contemporary transformations of Indonesian wayang kulit • Japanese ritual body substitutes • recent European productions featuring toys, clay, and food. The book features newly commissioned essays by leading scholars such as Matthew Isaac Cohen, Kathy Foley, Jane Marie Law, Eleanor Margolies, Cody Poulton, and Jane Taylor. It also celebrates the vital link between puppetry as a discipline and as a creative practice with chapters by active practitioners, including Handspring Puppet Company’s Basil Jones, Redmoon’s Jim Lasko, and Bread and Puppet’s Peter Schumann. Fully illustrated with more than 60 images, this volume comprises the most expansive English-language collection of international puppetry scholarship to date.

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.

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of movement experience and the insights of cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics, it considers how we inhabit the movements of others and how these movements inhabit us. Individual chapters explore the dynamics of movement and animation, action and intentionality, kinesthetic resonance (or mirroring), language, speech, and empathy. In one of its most important contributions to the study of theatre, performance, and spectatorship, this book foregrounds otherness, divergence, and disability in its account of movement perception. The discussions of this and other issues are accompanied by detailed analysis of theatre, puppetry, and dance performances.

Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, Wayang Kulit, richly reflects the Javanese world, and how changes and tensions in performance practice mirror those in culture and society. 0For decades, television has been as intensely part of the Javanese world as Wayang. This book explores the ways two complex media and modes of being, seeing and fantasising, with their different cultures, coexist and meet, and haunt or invade each other. It is what what a Javanese commentator calls a 'difficult marriage' - intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalised yet at the same time mercurial and shifting.0This encounter is explored on many levels including performance aesthetics, the technicalities of television production, issues of time, space, light, place, and movement, audience experience of live and televised performances, and the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Central to the book are personal perspectives and experiences, as well as Javanese discussions surrounding the interaction between Wayang and television and their cultures.0They are brought into a conversation with reflections on media and technology by writers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. Wayang's relationship with television is considered in the context of the theatre's intercourse with older and newer media, including electricity, radio, audio- and video-recording, the internet and social media.