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In this article I explore the construct of the 'natural' voice within the context of the natural voice movement, before invoking perspectives on voice from the posthumanities and D/deaf studies in discussion of The Walk, a performance between a puppet, a natural voice choir, a refugee choir and a large audience that occurred in London in October 2021. Methodologically, this paper is an attempt at 'thinking with theory' (Jackson, Alecia Youngblood, and Lisa A. Mazzei. 2017. "Thinking with Theory: A New Analytic for Qualitative Inquiry." In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. Lincoln, 717–737. Sage) – specifically thinking voice alongside theoretical stimuli from the posthumanities through the doing of ethnography – in the hope of provoking useful flights of thought in relation to the practice and study of music education and community music. I conclude by considering my personal rationale for engaging with the posthumanities as a means of researching community singing within the natural voice movement. A protean version of this article was presented as a paper-presentation at the Grieg Research School in Bergen, Norway in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to improve hand performance and play behavior in children with developmental disabilities (DD) using a remodeled glove puppetry approach. Overall, 62 children with DD were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (n = 31 each). The experimental group underwent a 12-week rehabilitation program by playing with the remodeled glove puppetry, while the children in the control group played with non-remodeled glove puppetry. The Chinese puppet was remodeled using a Lego EV3® robot. Hand kinematics were analyzed through the Siliconcoach® Pro 7 software, which measured the force produced by the baseline ® hydraulic pinch gauge. Play behavior was measured using the Knox Preschool Play Scale-revised (KPPS-r). The experimental group exhibited significant improvements compared to the control group in hand kinematics (wrist range of motion [ROM], p <.05; metacarpophalangeal ROM, p <.05; proximal interphalangeal ROM, p <.05) and KPPS-r scores (space management, p <.05; material management, p <.05; pretense-symbolic, p <.05; participation, p <.05). After the 12-week rehabilitation with the remodeled glove puppetry, the experimental group exhibited significant improvement in kinematics and KPPS-r scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of social justice must include art and creativity to challenge systems of oppression and imagine a new world. Arts-based approaches, specifically puppetry, can offer social work researchers and practitioners another way of exploring complex community issues. While puppetry has been used as a therapeutic intervention with children, puppetry also has roots in community-based education and organising efforts that social work can learn from. Drawing upon empirical and theoretical literature, this paper describes how puppetry can aid in the creation of actionable knowledge that can promote social change within social work practice, research, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 'Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies' (2021), Swati Arora explores the intangible and invisible borders that function to exclude certain people and knowledges, usually indexed by race, gender, class, and geography, from the academy. As a new working group convenor, I'm interested in thinking through what hidden borders might operate through the Call for Paper and panel selection process. What are prospective panellists really being asked to demonstrate? What unofficial knowledges are privileged and who has access to these? How can we reorient this process towards questioning and away from demonstration of knowledge? In this short provocation I reflect my own experience of selecting abstracts and ask what work might be done to develop a more transparent and empowering model of panel curation. This is a short provocation that was prepared for the roundtable discussion on 'Decolonisation and Solidarity' as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puppetry is a performance where it involves manipulation of puppets and has been a part of our Indian culture since ages. There are different types of puppets prevalent in India. Kathputli is one the most famous type of string puppet of Rajasthan, where kath means wood and pulti means doll. Bhat community is the originator of this craft and they claim that their ancestors had performed for royal families and received great honor from the rulers of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab. Today, puppetry is not only seen as a medium of entertainment but also as a strong medium of education. Kathputli is an expression of culture, costumes, and lifestyle of the place where it is made, but due to lack of patronage many traditional puppeteers are forced to abandon this craft. This study is an attempt to trace the origin and history of the string puppets of Rajasthan. The Bhat community was profiled to understand traditional ways of making of the string puppets and the changes seen in terms of materials used in making of puppets, tools, staging techniques, scripts, etc. Future prospect of puppetry was also discussed from inputs received from the promoters of puppetry and the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'bodyworld' refers to the performer's entangled engagement with the material world. It revises and expands the psychophysical notion of 'bodymind' that leaves the human-nonhuman dichotomy unchallenged. 'Bodyworld' is explained via the sociomaterial perspectives of what are termed the 3As: assemblages, affordances, and actants; i.e. bodyworld as mind-body-world assemblage whose constituent components offer a number of possibilities or affordances, some of which are actualized and/or transformed into performance material and which come to function as active socio-cultural elements or actants in the resultant multisourced/assembled product. The conceptualization of the 3As is informed by outlooks like Jane Bennett's vibrant materiality that address the inter-connectedness of the social and the material in the organization of everyday life and practices. To exemplify 'bodyworld' reference is made to puppetry and material performance, which also serves to update the figure of the marionette as a metaphor for the performer's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federico García Lorca's fascination with the cristobicas, a traditional Andalusian puppet show, led him to write and stage a number of these plays from early on in his career. Scholars of Lorca's guignol often note that through the revitalization of this endangered art form, the young playwright sought to bring innovation to Spain's theater. As a result, the actual contents of these plays have received little attention, and are generally viewed as using stock characters and conventional plots. The present article argues that Los títeres de Cachiporra (1922) stages a modern version of the Spanish nation as lived in Andalucía through a farcical take on the el viejo y la niña marriage plot. Specifically, I illustrate how Rosita's three suitors have different relationships with regnant power structures and display various degrees of rootedness to the Andalusian town where the action unfolds. Particular attention is paid to Rosita's former lover, Currito, who returns after abandoning both her and the town five years earlier. I demonstrate that the anti-Semitic insults directed at Currito reveal a deeper anxiety over who should be included in the modern Spanish nation. Contextualizing these comments among broader trends in European anti-Semitism and Spanish philo-Sephardism in the early twentieth century, I argue that Jewishness is a productive analytic for understanding Currito's function in the play. A superseded Jewishness, in a final analysis, becomes the counterpoint against which Spanishness is measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the effects of the collaboration between dance and puppetry within Crystal Pite's Dark Matters (2009) and claims Pite's work challenges nonhuman-human and object-subject binaries. Functioning within a new materialist philosophical framework, specifically in conversation with theorist Jane Bennett's concept of vital materialism, this study argues that Dark Matters exposes the human body as an assemblage of vibrant multiple objects, and by positioning both the puppet and human corpse as agential matter, poses a radical rethinking of "liveliness" and "death." Ultimately, this analysis reveals dance's unique ability to evoke important posthuman reflection regarding physical matter, which always already includes the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early childhood sector supports the realisation of inclusive education through a range of recommendations, policy statements and resources. With such a clearly mandated movement for inclusive practice it is imperative that educators are equipped with the attitudes, knowledge, and skills necessary to ensure the full participation of all children. Despite this understanding, a discrepancy exists between the recommendations and the confidence or capacity of early childhood professionals to realise inclusion with authenticity. This paper highlights findings from my PhD research that showed how early childhood professionals and drama educators working with young children can apply the creative arts for inclusive practice. Drawing upon the methodology of portraiture, a series of vignettes illustrate how drama, puppetry, and movement can be applied to address barriers to authentic inclusion in early childhood contexts and create a culture that embraces all children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the multifaceted process of creating the large-scale annual public puppetry event, The Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, in the rural town of Barrydale, South Africa. It unpacks the complex layers of meaning and making arising through a co-creative puppetry project in a region of South Africa marked by poverty and the on-going everyday legacies of racial injustice and socio-economic disparity. It considers how developing puppetry arts within the Barrydale community has instigated a crucial mobilisation of individuals and the collective, as well as a trans-embodied praxis for generating new ecologies of self and community in the small town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how gestures contributed to the communicative interaction achieved during puppet performances in indigenous communities in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico. It presents the case of the Petul-Xun hand-glove puppet shows, which were performed from 1954 to 2000 as part of educational campaigns aimed at "modernising" the Tsotsil and Tseltal Mayan population in that region. The study adopts mixed methods to correlate archival documents, photographs, and ethnographic interviews with former puppeteers and witnesses. Drawing on Linguistic Anthropology, the author coined the concept of gestural participation frameworks to suggest that Petul-Xun puppeteers adapted their performances to public responses, transforming the messages, and were thus able to enhance communication with the population. The paper uses the ideas of gestural memory and emotional act to interpret interviews carried out with former participants as they commented on the photos and their own experience, shedding light on the impact that the art is said to have had in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two contrasting contemporary performance pieces which explore mental illness: Laura Jane Dean’s Head Hand Head (2013), a solo autobiographical performance about Dean’s experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Theatre Témoin’s The Fantasist (2012), which combines the techniques of puppetry and Lecoq-derived physical theatre to explore bipolar disorder. Using performance analysis and interviews with the performers, it explores different ways of communicating the experience of mental illness to an audience. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theory, and research on empathy in cognitive science, it will suggest that while the performances partake of very different aesthetic frameworks, both function by manipulating the relationship between subject and object. Neither performance straightforwardly offers ‘insight’ into the experiences they are based on, but both rather transpose these experiences, creating a space of shared subjectivity. In this way, they bear witness to the complexities of mental illness, constructing their subjects as Others whose minds the audience can perceive empathetically, but not necessarily understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two contrasting contemporary performance pieces which explore mental illness: Laura Jane Dean’s Head Hand Head (2013), a solo autobiographical performance about Dean’s experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Theatre Témoin’s The Fantasist (2012), which combines the techniques of puppetry and Lecoq-derived physical theatre to explore bipolar disorder. Using performance analysis and interviews with the performers, it explores different ways of communicating the experience of mental illness to an audience. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theory, and research on empathy in cognitive science, it will suggest that while the performances partake of very different aesthetic frameworks, both function by manipulating the relationship between subject and object. Neither performance straightforwardly offers ‘insight’ into the experiences they are based on, but both rather transpose these experiences, creating a space of shared subjectivity. In this way, they bear witness to the complexities of mental illness, constructing their subjects as Others whose minds the audience can perceive empathetically, but not necessarily understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay examines the undervaluedtechnêof vultures as they take up putrid material for their own sustenance. These broad-winged masters of the updraft glide along a dialectic between graceful and gross. Even grounded in the pragmatics of materiality and its decay, they nonetheless soar in our collective unconscious as psychopomps, guides on the bridge between the living and the dead, creatures of the uncanny and deeply symbolic. The essay uses Morton’s “dark ecology” and the intersection of rhetoric and magic to make sense of the rhetorical contributions of vultures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New media are increasingly providing spaces and opportunities for media houses and activist groups engaged in socio-political reform in Africa. In Nigeria, social media are becoming platforms for communicating messages of resistance against oppressive political and exploitative economic power structures. This study analyzed Ogas at the top (OATT), an online puppetry series by Buni TV, as a way of examining new platforms and message content in Nigeria’s rapidly changing media sphere. Relying on semiotics and critical discourse analysis perspectives, the study analyzed select episodes of the series, to gauge how producers constructed powerful visual and linguistic messages to boldly satirize social injustices perpetrated by Nigeria’s political elites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes a longitudinal multi-case study of a preparatory classroom where dramatic pedagogies were used as a key approach to the development of early literacy. Including guided drama, puppetry and dramatic play, the approach also made use of the explicit teaching of phonics (letter/sound relationships and phonemic awareness skills). Extracts from three key drama events are used to illustrate the findings from the study. The implications of these findings for current early years’ pedagogies are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing extensively on conversations with three theatre practitioners about the use of the Feldenkrais Method® in puppetry training and performance contexts, this article aims to think beyond the more obvious benefits such as enhanced movement awareness, coordination and pain-relief. It suggests that the Feldenkrais Method® and puppetry together offer a strong dyad for ecological and restorative human performance practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If to attain infinite knowledge is to relinquish the finite act of knowing, which necessarily divides and distinguishes, then pure knowing must be closer to a mode ofunknowing. This paradox animates both Kleist's “Über das Marionettentheater” and Walser'sJakob von Gunten, each of which suggests that to access the absolute requires emptying oneself of thought so as to become like a puppet, which is no different than becoming a god. Using Kleist as an intertextual source, this article reads the “riddle” ofJakob von Guntenas an instantiation of this negative knowledge, which Walser deploys as both the philosophical and narrative engine of his novel. In analyzing the novel's rhetorical and narrative experiments, the article shows how these enact its titular figure's overcoming of the paradox of absolute knowing. Ultimately, this analysis also introduces a paradigm for reading the critical features of Walser's idiosyncratic work as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many of the studies that explore the fascination audiences have with puppets have focused largely on the relationship between the operator and the object and the illusion engendered through performance. Those that attend to the issue of humour, such as Dina and Joel Sherzer's Humour and Comedy in Puppetry in 1987, tend to address generic comic components of specific puppet practices, and only minimally engage with the more fundamental concerns about how the object may be viewed humorously by audiences. This article intends to bridge this gap in scholarship by exploring the similarities between spectatorship and humour in relation to puppet practices. Drawing links between the incongruities inherent within puppet forms, particularly those revealed through the juxtaposition of object and human operator, and theories of humour, I argue that there is amusement to be found in seeing the inanimate animated, which is similar to the pleasure found in incongruous humour. While not all puppets are used for comic purposes, my argument suggests that the fundamental collaboration required for an audience to appreciate a puppet performance lends the form a particular comic specialism which may help explain why, historically, puppets appear to thrive in comic contexts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Three bodies, one soul', a central concept of Burmese puppetry, can provide a structure to understand the effort by the Mandalay Marionettes to revive this form. Instead of a single puppeteer, three bodies must be coordinated and synchronized in order to bring the soul of the Burmese puppet to life: the singer who speaks and sings for the puppet, the manipulator who moves the puppet, and the orchestra that provides music throughout. This article uses Hobsbawm's idea of 'invented tradition' to propose another sense of these three bodies in Burmese puppetry: a dynastic body from the court stage, a postcolonial body from the independent Burmese stage and a transnational body that performs on the international stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the profound influence that puppet theatre had on Federico García Lorca's poetic vision and practice at the time that he was writing the poems that would eventually make up the Romancero gitano (1928). Taking the ‘Romance sonámbulo’ as its main example and focusing on elements such as setting, stage space, lighting and décor, characterisation, movement, choreography, and the complicit relationship between puppeteer, character and audience, it shows how Lorca draws on and plays with all the machinery and conventions of puppet theatre in this collection and, to all intents and purposes, transforms each of its poems into a mini puppet play. The article ends by considering the wider consequences for our reading of the Romancero gitano of Lorca's puppet aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a series of research through practice projects that were designed to offer a preliminary evaluation of how popular theatre forms might function to 'teach and delight' audiences, as well as make them active in response to issues discussed through the discourse of performance. In doing so, the projects sought to explore a viable model for creating political grassroots theatre in twenty-first-century Britain. Through his analysis of the audience reception statistics, collected from the performances, the author is able to propose that the chosen popular theatre forms promise to engage and educate audiences about the issues of concern they explore. However, whilst there is some evidence to suggest that audiences may continue to engage with the issues explored post-performance, the statistics were unable to show audiences committing to any significant forms of political activism. The author subsequently concludes by collating what he sees as the principal benefits of each of the popular forms explored through practice and theorizes their likely impact on audiences and the political issues they try to represent at the present time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puppetry in South Africa, most probably the one country in the whole of Africa with the most diversified application of this art form, is largely a colonial heritage which dates back to the nineteenth century. Puppetry started as adult entertainment at the Cape settlement, but became predominantly children's entertainment in its pioneering phase and with the arrival of television in 1976, a position which it still retains. Puppets, however, feature in some of the most prominent multimedia stage productions in the post-apartheid era and this presence has developed a strong momentum which has changed the face of contemporary adult puppetry in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: To develop a theoretically based puppetry intervention, The McSpoon Family puppet show, and evaluate its narrative impact on families' intentions to reduce television (TV) time. Methods: Development of The McSpoons was guided by the application of theory and empirical evidence using an Intervention Mapping framework. A single group post-test design (n = 19 family dyads) assessed narrative impact and feasibility. Results: Parents (89.5%) and children (83.3%) reported intentions to reduce TV time over the next three months; and both parents (84%) and children (83%) perceived The McSpoons as a beneficial motivator for them to do so. The puppet show positively impacted knowledge, was highly rated on credibility and likability for story, props and characters, and compared favorably to other educational delivery channels. Conclusions: The narrative impact of puppetry, enhanced with the application of educational and behavioral theory, makes it a potentially efficacious way of engaging families in health behavior change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the development of formal puppetry training over the last century, commenting on the move from a technical and craft-based approach towards a sensibility focused on animation of multiple forms. The article notes the different and complementary approaches taken by European puppetry training institutions and the current emphasis on animism as an approach to animation. Within this approach, the puppet as character, previously paramount in puppet theatre, is discarded in favour of the animation of matter, objects, shadows and other forms, which are seen as ephemeral; the puppeteer is consequently required to move fluidly between different modes of performance, whilst retaining attention and focus outside the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]