Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects: Volume II Contemporary Branchings: Secular Benedictions, Activated Energies, Uncanny Faiths(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

This anthology of essays, a companion to Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, Volume I, aims to explore the many types of relationships that exist between puppets, broadly speaking, and the immaterial world. 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.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Assuming Shamanic Roles 1. Consoling the Dead: Sim U‑sŏng’s Puppet Rituals for a Modern Korea 2. Spiritualist Material Performance, Whiteness, and the Animist Other 3. Worth Her Salt: Zombification and Liberation Theology in a Puppet Film 4. The Spirituality of the Mundane Part 2 Communitas Reclaimed 5. The Thing You Can’t See: Bread and Puppet Approaches Spirituality 6. Queer Puppet Saint: Nested Intuitions 7. Talking about Lunch with Sonia: A Ritual for Departing by Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company Part 3 Faith in Secular Performance 8. "When the House Is in Ruins": Tadeusz Kantor’s Archive as Reliquary and Tabernacle for Cross‑Temporal Performing Objects 9. Children, Birds, Flowers—A Minor Musical: Performance as Prayer 10. Fabricating Tales of Spirit: A Conversation with Jill Joubert 11. Puppets and the Good News Part 4 Staging the Other World 12. Yūrei and Puppetry in Japanese Ghost Stories: (Mis)perception and Ambiguous Bodies in Kaidan 13. Bardo! by Performers sem Fronteiras: A Reflection on Immateriality in Shadow Theatre Part 5 Complex Sacrality in the Contemporary World 14. Relics, Artifacts, and Bones: Activating Migrancy’s Traces Through Performance 15. Restitution and Reawakening or Resurrection: The Return of 26 Royal Objects to Benin 16. Meat Puppets: Death, the Body, and the Museum

About the Author :
Claudia Orenstein is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has spent over a decade writing on contemporary and traditional puppetry in the US and Asia. Tim Cusack is an Adjunct Lecturer in Theatre at Hunter College. He was the co-founder and artistic director of Theatre Askew, an independent theatre company dedicated to the exploration of representations of queerness onstage.