Explores the amazing world of puppetry. Learn how to make 13 cool puppets, then bring your creations to life.

The Puppetry for All Times Seminar held in September of 2013 in Ubud, Bali, was one of the most enchanting of events of its kind held anywhere in recent years. Its success revolved around the fantastic locale, the overwhelming response from performers as well as the paper presenters, and the generous support of Rumah Topengthe House of Masks and Puppets Setiadarma. In Puppetry for All Times, editor Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof offers a unique collection of papers presented at this weeklong seminar by academicians as well as performers of various traditions of Asian puppetry. The papers cover a wide range of interests and perspectives in puppetry and theater including history and tradition; heritage, preservation, and conversation; tradition and modernity; and digital puppetry and media. Puppetry for All Times recaps a key international event in the realm of puppet theater, marking the beginning of such endeavors as Rumah Topengs maiden academic publication.

A practical, accessible and inspiring guide to using puppetry in theatre--the perfect entry point for anyone looking to use puppets in their productions, to explore what puppets can do, or to develop their puppetry skills. Written by an experienced theatre and puppetry director, Mervyn Millar's Puppetry: How to Do Itfocuses on the performer and the craft of bringing any puppet to life. No puppet-making is required to use this book: starting just with simple objects, it lays out the skills required to unlock a puppet's limitless potential for expression and connection with an audience. Inside you'll discover fifty practical, easy-to-follow exercises - for use in a group or on your own - to develop elements of the craft, build confidence and help you improve your puppetry through play and improvisation. Also included are sections on different types of puppet, thinking about how the puppeteer is presented on stage and how to direct and devise puppet performances. Ideal for actors and performers, for directors and designers, and for teachers and students of all ages and levels of experience, this book will demystify the art of puppetry, and help you become more confident and creative with all kinds of puppets and objects on stage.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

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.

A Show of Hands: Using Puppets with Young Children.

Puppets have existed in one form or another in almost every culture throughout the history of man. In Puppetry: A World History, Eileen Blumenthal provides a comprehensive overview of the history and technique of puppetry and examines in depth and detail the unique nature and abilities of puppets and the countless roles they have played in human societies across the globe for thousands of years. Blumenthal draws examples from an astonishing array of puppeteers and performances, as well as works of art and historical artifacts to provide readers with a comprehensive view of the world of constructed actors and the eclectic, and often eccentric, artists who created them. From bunraku to Miss Piggy, from the shadow puppets of Java to Howdy Doody, from African marionettes with outsize genitalia to sweet and loveable Lamb Chop, from Senor Wences's famous hand (literally) puppet to the minimalism of Russian puppet master Sergei Obraztsov.

A famous puppeteer gives a fascinating introduction to his art.

Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play is a comprehensive guide to the design, construction and manipulation and presentation of shadow puppets, considered by many to be the oldest puppet theatre tradition. Traditional shadow play techniques, together with modern materials and methods and recent explorations into theatre of shadows, are explained with precision and clarity, and illustrated by photographs that include the work of some of the finest shadow players in the world. Topics covered include an introduction to shadow play, its traditions and the principles of shadow puppet design; advice on materials and methods for constructing and controlling traditional shadow puppets and scenery; step-by-step instructions for adding detail and decoration and creating transculent figures in full-colour; detailed methods for constructing shadow theatres using a wide range of lighting techniques; techniques of shadow puppet performance and contemporary explorations with shadow play; and instructions for making animated, silhouette films with digital photography. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play sets out detailed instructions for making and presenting shadow puppets by traditional methods and with the latest materials and techniques. Superbly illustrated with 420 colour photographs and helpful tips and suggestions.