The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance offers a wide ranging perspective on how scholars and artists are currently reevaluating the theoretical, historical, and theatrical significance of performance that embraces the agency of inanimate objects. This book proposes a collaborative, responsive model for broader artistic engagement in and with the material world. Its twenty-eight essays aim to advance the study of the puppet not only as a theatrical object, but also as a vibrant artistic and scholarly discipline. This Companion is organized into three sections: theoretical...

The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner...

The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner...