Papers by Claudia Orenstein
Routledge eBooks, May 13, 2019
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In ... more there are bound to be controversial political dimensions of a study of Mongolian performance. In my opinion, Pegg is generally fair in all she says. Her sympathies appear to lie with the Republic of Mongolia and its democratic revolution of the early 1990s. But that does not make her hostile to China, and the coverage of Chinese attitudes toward Mongolian performance is invariably f a i r . In technical and production terms this is an excellent book. The pictures and compact disc are excellent. The index is very detailed and abounds in useful subheadings. The bibliography is a tour de force, and the writing style is always clear, even at its most scholarly. Occasionally the twentieth century is referred to as “this” century, and all her research and experiences are indeed from the last century. But mostly she has taken care to update. There are weaknesses. For instance, I would have liked a summative conclusion. But overall, this is a splendid book. It covers an enormous range of material, historical and contemporary, musicological and social, and succeeds in being fair at all times. It is likely to appeal more to specialists than to the general reader, but that does not make it in the least dry. Indeed, I found it always interesting and clear, despite its high scholarship. I recommend it strongly as a major contribution to our knowledge of the Mongolian performing arts.
Theatre Journal, 2001
... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... more ... Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan is a comprehensive study of a little ... the rhythmic structure of the music and adapt the music to the skill level of the ... The book concludes with an epilogue that discusses the changes nomai is undergoing today in response ...
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
Comparative Drama, 2012
Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ... more Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 224 + 4 color plates, 24 halftones. $25.00. Toward the end of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross evokes the unusual environment in which puppetry exists: It is a space where unexpected forms of life emerge, assert a form, shift shape and then disappear, not a vast space, not a great wilderness or a grand palace, but like some rumored corner of an old house, or some neighborhood in a city that you stumble across by surprise, where people under the shadow of war or poverty engage in commerce of peculiar sorts, trading in strange goods and using odd currencies, feeding unaccountable and suspect appetites. (158-59) In Puppet, Gross attempts to articulate the essence of the creatures that inhabit this space, their special nature, and our attraction to them. Each chapter is an encounter with a few particular examples of puppetry, sometimes from traditional forms, like Japanese bunraku or Sicilian rod puppets, and sometimes from innovative contemporary artists like Janie Geiser or Germany's Ilke Schonbein, who are exploring the boundaries of this world in new ways. Each chapter also provides a meditation on aspects of puppetry that captivate and puzzle us, leading to more profound consideration of the puppet's relationship to art and life. As Gross explains, "The puppet and the idea of the puppet move together here, the actual and imagined, or unknown, puppet, the visible and the invisible puppet" (4). Puppet is at once a book of personal reflections--based on Gross's own experiences with objects in performance, with literature that draws on the metaphor of the puppet, and with individual puppeteers--as well as an exposition on the nature of puppets, in all their variety, and how they work on the imagination. Chapter 4, "The Fate of Hands" for example, begins by proposing the hand or glove puppet as the "extension and tool of our will" (51) because of the palpable presence of the human hand inside the puppet's body. The hand puppet transforms a part of the self into a separate, distinct entity even as it remains inseparable from the puppeteer. Furthermore, "The poetry of the connection between hand and puppet is so intense in part because of the range of ways in which we live in our hands, and in which our hands connect us to the world" (52). This observation brings Gross to the work of the famous Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov, who, in his Attitude to a Lady, used simple balls on the index finger of each of his otherwise bare hands to act out a scenario of courtship and seduction. Gross articulates the complexities inherent in this simplest of puppets: "What you feel is the presence of a composite or double body, animate and inanimate at once, a relation perhaps echoing some image of a soul within a body, though never simply--it may be a body within a body, or a soul within a soul" (55). Gross builds on these insights to inform his reading of Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theatre, in which the main character is an aging puppeteer. While Sabbaths hands once had a special seductive life of their own, with age their powers have withered, "[a]nd the hardening of the puppeteer's hands keep pace with the hardening of the poet's own art" (59). Gross finds that the novel "reminds us that puppets offer a refuge for fantasies otherwise exiled" (60) and ends his chapter, "What I wonder is whether any actual puppet theatre could translate what the novelist's language seems to know" (62). Gross's full circle of reflections, from the unique expressive possibilities of hands in the art of puppetry, to the way Roth's novel redeploys those realities, and the metaphors they embody, in a different artistic sphere, mines the riches buried in the reciprocal connections between the puppet as both stage object and literary metaphor. While chapter 4 explores the physical presence of the puppeteer's body, chapter 5, "Wooden Acting" focuses instead on the puppet as object and objects used as puppets. …
Asian Theatre Journal, 2007
Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of Fran... more Every three years the generally quiet town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region of France, gives itself over to an exciting festival of world puppetry. (1) Home of the Institut International de la Marionnette (International Institute of Puppetry), as well as France's own national school of puppetry, L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ESNAM), Charleville holds a special place in the hearts of puppeteers and puppet lovers across the globe, who have attended festivals there as far back as 1961, taken or offered workshops at the school, or pursued scholarly studies at the Institute's Centre de Recherches, which holds more than 6,000 books and 1,200 videos. The three-year hiatus between festivals, which some would like to shorten to two, helps build anticipation for what is perhaps the largest puppetry festival in the world. In September 2006, the festival offered more than 250 shows from more than forty countries as part of both its main program ("Programme In") and fringe ("Programme Off"), along with twelve exhibits on puppetry and an endless stream of street performers occupying every inch of open air space or perambulating around the city in striking costumes. With food stalls and puppet vendors set up along the main streets, stores and buildings throughout the town decorated with puppet figures, and nightly gatherings for beer, tartiflette (a local favorite dish), and free music at the festival's central locale, for ten days the town of Charleville fully immerses itself in its celebration of puppetry. A festival such as this gives Asian companies a chance to connect with European audiences outside of Europe's capital cities, as well as with accomplished puppeteers from around the world, contributing to the global dissemination and appreciation of puppetry techniques and traditions. While the festival was a success in many of these respects, Asian puppetry maintained a relatively low profile throughout the event. There were fairly few Asian offerings in Charleville, with most of the companies not surprisingly coming from France. However, the Asian companies that did come were mostly major troupes including both puppeteers and musicians. These performances were predominantly traditional forms, labeled "spectacle traditionnel" in the program. The Parc d'Exposition, located a ten-minute ride from the center of town, hosted consecutively the Theatre National des Marionnettes sur L'Eau (National Water Puppet Theatre) from Vietnam as well as the Joe Louis Theater from Thailand. The Vietnamese water puppets performed their usual fare, a series of vignettes about mythical animals and peasant life, to the accompaniment of live music and singing. Puppeteers hidden behind a screen, standing thigh-high in the pool of water that serves as the puppets' stage, operate the figures by means of long, submerged poles. Sliding through their watery setting, farmers plant rice, children swim, fishermen row their boats, and phoenixes and sea serpents dive and play, the latter spewing water and fire. This colorful performance was more or less identical to one at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York in 1996, and to those given regularly for tourists in Vietnam. In the large, overwhelming indoor space, with an audience of restless schoolchildren, who were given no introduction or explanation of the Vietnamese scenes, the event lacked some of the magic of the outdoor, moonlit version in New York's Damrosch Park, although the audience still oohed, aahed, and laughed at the puppets' sometimes surprising, sometimes comic feats. Since the Vietnamese water puppets were making a return visit to Charleville, many local and nearby residents, who make up the vast majority of the festival audience, had already seen the company per form. Posted far from the town's bustling center, this exquisite traditional art, so recently saved from extinction, sadly seemed submerged within the torrent of festival events. …
PAJ, May 1, 2020
E very semester I delight in showing my large Introduction to Theatre class at Hunter College a r... more E very semester I delight in showing my large Introduction to Theatre class at Hunter College a range of images drawn from innumerable productions of Sophocles' Antigone. It is a quick and relatively reliable way of bringing home to first-time theatregoers the fact that a play, though relatively fixed in its text, can continue to be adapted and readapted, constantly morphing in response to different directors' visions and to the theatre's imperative to speak to its audiences in relation to their changing cultural circumstances and interests. Even within the wide range of examples from what is surely one of the most produced plays of all time, Miyagi's staging of Antigone, which played at the Avignon Festival in July 2019, and then at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in October, where I saw it, stands out as a forceful and highly unique conception. Because of the power conflict at the center of the play-between Creon, ruler of Thebes, trying to maintain order after a brutal war, and his passionate niece Antigone, committed to seeing both her brothers buried despite her uncle's decree that the body of one, deemed a traitor, be left exposed to the elements-directors have mined the play for its political resonances. Although Antigone's cause is her commitment to following the laws of the gods, her feisty spirit and willingness to speak truth to power, no matter the consequences, cast her as a model for taking action against authoritarian rule.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 13, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
TDR, Sep 1, 2008
Americans have such a propensity to see puppetry as mere spectacle for children that many puppetr... more Americans have such a propensity to see puppetry as mere spectacle for children that many puppetry artists, striving to reach a more sophisticated audience, bemoan the fact that their work continues to be relegated to the realm of children's entertainment. This remains true in New York, even as the New York theatregoing public, educated by four years of the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre, has become increasingly aware of the exciting possibilities this theatrical medium affords. Local artists such as Theodora Skipitares, Dan Hurlin, Gretchn Van Lente, Brian Selznick, Lake Simons, and Great Small Works, to name only a few, buoyed by the more prominent successes of Julie Taymor and Basil Twist, continue to create engaging new puppet works for adults at avantgarde venues such as St. Ann's Warehouse, La Mama, and HERE Arts Center.
Theater, 2002
That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at onc... more That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at once artists and professionals who often wrote, as a Henry Fielding character so baldly put it, “to amuse the town and bring full houses.” So did Shakespeare; so did Molière. It is the fact that they did so with wit and vitality and extraordinary elegance of expression and situation that separates them from other boulevard playwrights in their era and ours. Anyone who has worked in the theater knows just what an act of virtuosity great playwriting is, and it should be celebrated as such—especially when the target audience is, as it is here, students. The book has an extremely tight critical palate. Its citations of plays and commentaries, indeed, the same passages in those texts, come up an astonishing number of times—so much so that students may be led to underestimate the variety of the era and overestimate modern critical consensus. On the other hand, if John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancaster Witches don’t enter the repertory of college theater troupes, it won’t be the Cambridge Companion’s fault. And truly, the regeneration of interest in these and other neglected texts is one of the volume’s clear victories. If only that interest could have been dramaturgically as well as academically evoked. With friends like The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, English Restoration theater needs still more friends. Claudia Orenstein
Mime journal, Feb 28, 2017
Edward Gordon Craig's 1908 essay, "The Actor and the Über-marionette," which has become foundatio... more Edward Gordon Craig's 1908 essay, "The Actor and the Über-marionette," which has become foundational to critical discussions of puppetry, as well as an important reference in the field of theater studies, famously sets up the essential qualities of the puppet in contrast to those of the human actor. In the historically small, but now growing, field of puppetry scholarship, Craig's views have helped elucidate a universal idea of the puppet and spawned a stream of writings that attempt to define the unique qualities the puppet offers to the stage. Craig's essay, however, grows out of a specific historical moment when an unprecedented number of artists, especially in Europe, were enthralled with the puppet (Posner 130). Harold B. Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny (1995), which reads like a catalogue of modernist playwrights exploring puppets and related figures-as dramatic metaphors and actual performance elements-amply attests to the excitement around the form at that time. Visual artists of the period also engaged with puppetry in their quest to invigorate artistic styles. Paul Klee, for example, crafted around fifty hand puppets for his son Felix. These have recently received critical attention as artworks in their own right and for their role in illuminating Klee's oeuvre (Hopfengart, et al.). Why were Craig and his contemporaries so engaged with and captivated by the puppet? We might further refine this question by asking how the puppet, and particular views of it, addressed the needs and concerns of that moment, searching more for historically unique uses, ideas, definitions of, and engagements with the puppet, over Craig's universals. Investigating historically specific understandings of the puppet and its prevalence in the modernist period highlights the renewed enthusiasm for puppetry in our own time. Puppets and performing objects of all types appear prolifically and prominently today in a range of performance contexts. Productions like The Lion King (1997), Avenue Q (2003), War Horse (2007), and Hand to God (2015) have been smash hits on Broadway. Avant-garde venues such as HERE Arts Center and St. Ann's Warehouse in New York and Automata in Los Angeles support the development and presentation of experimental puppetry aimed at adult audiences. "Puppet slams" have sprung up across the country, offering "contemporary short-form puppet and object theater for adult audiences, often late at night in small venues, nightclubs, and art spaces," lending puppetry a hipper social profile (Puppet Slam Network). Blockbuster movies including The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and Avatar (2009), through their use of CGI and motion capture, draw on the skills and techniques of puppeteers, intermingling the work of screen actors and the capabilities of new technologies (Searls 294). As in Craig's time, contemporary visual artists are also venturing into puppet territory with kinetic sculptures, animations, and other puppet-like forms, crossing the boundaries between arts. South African artist William Kentridge, perhaps the most prominent among them, spans the gamut of performing and visual arts, from his "drawings for projection," to black box installations, to the design and direction of operas like The Magic Flute (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2005) and The Nose (Metropolitan Opera, 2010), and mixed-media stage performances
Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
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Papers by Claudia Orenstein
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.
The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work of twenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.
The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize these relationships? The first of two volumes, this book focuses on these questions in relation to long-established, traditional practices using puppets, devotional objects, and related items with sacred aspects to them or that perform ritual roles. Looking at performance traditions and artifacts from China, Indonesia, Korea, Mali, Brazil, Iran, Germany, and elsewhere, the essays from scholars and practitioners provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing the ritual and spiritual aspects of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally.
This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.
The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections in contemporary artistic work in various mediums? How do puppets open avenues for discussion in a world that seems to be increasingly polarized around religious values? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize the present moment? What new questions do puppets address for our times, and how does the puppet’s continued entanglement with these concerns trouble or comfort us? The essays in this book, from scholars and practitioners, provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing this aspect of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally.
This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.
Women and Puppetry is the first publication dedicated to the study of women in the field of puppetry arts. It includes critical articles and personal accounts that interrogate specific historical moments, cultural contexts, and notions of "woman" on and off stage.
Part I, ‘Critical Investigations’, includes historical and contemporary analyses of women’s roles in society, gender anxiety revealed through the unmarked puppet body, and sexual expression within oppressive social contexts. Part II, ‘Local Contexts: Challenges and Transformations’, investigates work of female practitioners within specific cultural contexts to illuminate how women are intervening in traditionally male spaces. Each chapter in Part II offers brief accounts of specific social histories, barriers, and gender biases that women have faced, and the opportunities afforded female creative leaders to appropriate, revive, and transform performance traditions. And in Part III, ‘Artists Speak’, contemporary artists reflect on their experiences as female practitioners within the art of puppet theatre.
Representing female writers and practitioners from across the globe, Women and Puppetry offers students and scholars a comprehensive interrogation of the challenges and opportunities that women face in this unique art form.