Description
This volume, which in the beginning gave the impression 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 probably the most oldest world wide forms of art making and performance, in addition to probably the most newest. In the twentieth century, French symbolists, Russian futurists and constructivists, Prague School semioticians, and avant-garde artists world wide have all explored the experimental, social, and political value of performing objects. In contemporary years, puppets, masks, and objects have been the point of interest of Broadway musicals, postmodernist theory, political spectacle, performance art, and new academic programs, for instance, at the California Institute of the Arts.This volume, which in the beginning gave the impression 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 in line with 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