Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2020

This article explores the connections between puppetry performance practice and the activation of empathy, considering the synergies between puppetry and medical practice where empathy is a key factor in healing. I draw on a consideration of the place of puppetry within ritual transitional and healing practices to develop an examination of contemporary modes of performance, which require deep listening, response and attention. I examine the connections between neuroscience and puppetry, which suggest that attitude-taking engenders empathy, and compare this to my puppetry training practice to suggest that training for and engaging in puppetry practice can encourage and stimulate empathy. This has significance for practitioners of puppetry working in healthcare contexts and for medical practitioners who undertake some form of puppetry, either within their training or as continuing professional development. Although the different forms of empathy are connected in practice, the article focuses especially on affective (emotional), cognitive and social empathy.

Exploring speculations about new materialism and performance, this article discusses how we (re)consider the ‘puppet other’ as a subject in community performance, focusing particularly on work with youth who have severe and complex learning difficulties. The discussion of this project explores the ethics and politics of practice in applied puppetry (Smith 2014) through reflections about the use of performing objects in relation to specific communities and identities. The method employed in this article is to explore the world of objects in practice, using the ideas of object-oriented ontology. This viewpoint explores poetic processes and speculations about the inner reality of objects, in relation to human participants. This exploration of the materiality of objects is framed in reaction to the way power operates, specifically through the Foucauldian lens of biopower.

This article engages disability puppetry as plays of transactional object relations, opening into speculative realms, articulating new alignments of embodied and enminded difference. The examples here range from hospital practices via art/life pain-related somatic explorations to experimental poetics of classroom and gallery installations, and from there to small local theatres working in collaboration with mental health service providers. In all of these sites, disability and puppetry have much to say to one another, offering connection and new forms of meaning-making, using non-realist conventions to make new worlds in which disability stays present.

This positioning article explores a reimagining within the field of applied theatre where through the medium of puppetry, the art and artist may become one as a way of healing. Building upon conceptual principles of animism, transference and embodiment, it is proposed that puppeteer training be usefully integrated into the higher education applied arts and health curriculum as an extension to existing programmes. Value is given to the metaphorical use of the puppet in both education and therapy. It is proposed that puppeteers may gain value from engaging with cross-disciplinary art-based research as a way to further understand puppetry’s uses and furthering their own practices.

The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

This article presents a case study of a child previously diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder who underwent a process of therapeutic intervention. The aim of the case study is to highlight the effectiveness of puppetry as a tool in individual and family psychotherapy. The author adopted the Embodiment, Projection and Role model developed by Sue Jennings, in order to facilitate access to symbolic transformation; this should decrease psychological symptoms and transform those facets into creative expression.

Making the invisible visible is an autobiographical essay about living with chronic illness/disability and the power of puppetry to tell the author’s story. The author reflects on the ‘Life Outside the Box’ puppet project, which she facilitated with fellow people with disabilities. As her health is in decline, she has explored more accessible puppetry formats during mentoring with Dr Emma Fisher. The resulting ‘Invisible Octopus’ project explores her reality: making the invisible visible. Even to herself.

Aiming to illustrate the potential for puppetry as a useful resource in dementia care, the authors argue unusually that play with puppets derives not particularly from drama or theatre, but fundamentally from the performative relationship people have with objects. The puppeteers of the study achieved remarkable emotional connection with care-home residents through an experience of puppetry, which dissolved the unitary autonomy of the puppet, recontextualizing it relationally as the puppeteer-with-puppet-with-spectator. It is this ‘withness’ that ignited the creative spark of presence of the residents. For a moment of trust and child-like joy kinaesthetic memories stirred in them, appearing to break down emotional barriers between the person and the world around them and indicating comparatively longer-term therapeutic benefits.

This article provides an explanation of the origins and conceptualization of the term ‘intermediary object’, based on the clinical practice developed by Jaime Rojas-Bermúdez, with chronic psychotic patients sunk into self-absorption. Its characteristics and relationship with natural communication are presented as well as its applications in other psychotherapeutic contexts; this led us to conceptualize the intra-intermediary object and allowed us to work more effectively with objects in the psychodrama clinic.

This article discusses my work as a therapeutic puppeteer in youth welfare contexts. The value of the projective material and symbols of puppetry are well known; I focus on puppetry for its dramatic content. The therapist is like a dramaturge: s/he responds to the setting, is proficient in understanding the impact of the work and is aware of empathy. I use a theatrical perspective and then return to the therapeutic effects, suggesting that to create and materialize a personal narrative has special therapeutic advantages.

Processes of artistic reparation and memory recovery are spaces created for victims of state terrorism and family members of the disappeared in the context of the military dictatorship in Chile (1973–90). Puppet therapy was utilized as a methodology by the company Puppets in Transit with participants drawn from Integrated Health Services in Chile in relation to reparation projects. This process of intervention with puppets seeks to restore social bonds, to enable an intergenerational dialogue and to transmit fragmented memory. The puppet, an expressive, symbolic and mediating object, stimulates a collective dialogue to create collective performance related to participants’ memories. All those mentioned in this article have given permission for their stories to be mentioned; we use only first names.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges of communicating digitally to the fore as people turn almost solely to their digital screens for connection and collaboration. In doing so, such as through web conferencing, we open up our living spaces to others, revealing parts of our lives heretofore we could keep hidden. In this article, I will describe ‘Interior’, a live Zoom shadow puppet performance by Australian puppet theatre collective, The Jill Collective, as an example of a deliberate response to COVID-19 pandemic isolation and social distancing restrictions. I offer the practice of traditional Wayang architecture of the shadow screen as a surface to physically work on, in, behind and through, as well as the screen as metaphorical façade or gateway as a unique theoretical and practical approach to digital performance.

Puppetry is a resilient art form, as has been evidenced by the response of puppeteers to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps this is fitting, as puppeteers have a long history of travelling to perform and adapting their performances to changing circumstances. In this report, we provide a sample of puppetry projects that are taking place around the world and some insights from puppeteers on how they are working through COVID-19; using puppetry to teach about COVID-19 and teaching puppetry in general; to entertain and to perform puppetry that is offered as ritual at a time of crisis.