Watching the World Move at the La MaMa Puppet Festival

A dying wolf breathes laboriously in a shallow pool of light. Her difficulty, we learn, stems from the cellular battle raging through her bloodstream. In a fishtank at the side of the stage, red, white, and poison-green wolves—representing the wolf’s blood cells—play out a drama of affection and infection in a felted diorama of her veins. This is LOVO, a play about ecological change by the Spanish company Teatro Lafauna. LOVO focuses on the mechanics of species death by zooming in on the very cells that ravage destruction and humanizing them. LOVO makes biology into a love story.

Taking things that are often understood as empirical or objective and lending them narrative and personality is a special potential of puppetry—one that was on full display at the 2024 La MaMa Puppet Festival, which took place in New York City between 24 October and 17 November. Over the course of the three-week festival, six full-length productions, two collections of short works (the Puppet Slam and Jump Start: Presentations of Works in Progress), and two shows for young audiences demonstrated how puppetry, by moving the material world, can also move us to reconsider our own relationships to the worlds inside and around us.

Some of the plays did this by exploring relationships between people and animals. LOVO combines the dramatization of the wolf’s vascular system with stories from the people making a documentary about her death. Years ago, the documentarians explain, before the wolves started to die off, there were tensions between wolves and farmers in the Sierra Morena. Now, as the puppeteers flex their hands in the wolf’s chest to make her breath, any antagonism is gone. People and nature are much closer than we might think—and nature itself more human.

The People vs. Nature, by the one-man Lone Wolf Tribe (Kevin Augustine, New York), similarly looks at interspecies relations, specifically the limits of people’s empathy for other creatures, as well as one another. The show stages elements of the artist’s own past and interweaves them with the stories of a man on death row and a monkey suffering detrimental health effects after years of animal testing. The play is mostly a monologue, but Augustine brings the audience in, asking us to breathe with him as he makes the monkey’s chest shake with ragged breaths. At one point, volunteers join him on stage to serve as the trunks and branches of a make-shift tree. The monkey’s younger self (a smaller puppet) swings joyfully through these fleshy boughs, eventually landing in the lap of one audience member, who cradles him for the rest of the show. Audience participation makes the staging of the play possible. And if this begins to try patience over the two-hour runtime, it effectively drives home the point that ongoing abuses, as well as their solutions, are only possible through active participation.

Puppetry, by moving the material world, can also move us to reconsider our own relationships to the worlds inside and around us.

Cause and Effect by Loco7 Dance Puppet Company (New York)—part of Jump Start, the collection of short works in progress—-also implicates its audience. Rather than calling on us to perform the show, however, Cause and Effect makes the act of viewing itself participatory. The performance takes place across four spaces: a group of tropical birds guides us from the lobby to the sidewalk and into a second LaMaMa venue a couple of doors down. On the way, a tent on the sidewalk transforms, sprouting a head and limbs, fluttering to join the roving flock. Inside the building, a wire-form, human-shaped puppet emerges from the tent and floats ethereally between the puppeteers. A larger version of this puppet is suspended in the upstairs theatre—-the final location for the show—where lights shine through its translucent form, reflecting the fluidity of bodies and spaces throughout the piece. Despite being almost wordless and largely imagistic, Cause and Effect feels explicitly political: to follow the show, you have to become part of the movement.

Viewership is not always so active, however, and Hide and Seek by Spica Wobbe and Margaret Yuen (Double Image Theater Lab, New York/Taiwan)—another piece in Jump Start—highlights the apathy that can develop around the constant, and often disjointed, presence of mass media. Hide and Seek eschews plot for an onslaught of interwoven imagery. The gun is one motif: a deadpan Wobbe raises her middle and pointer fingers, thumb cocked. This overtly threatening gesture is quickly covered by a glove puppet, only to surface again when Wobbe and Yuen don finger puppets later in the show. Paper bag luminaria evoke a city skyline and also the glowing screens of phones, on which the puppeteers play out TikTok dances with shadow puppets. This is all quite funny—and also eerie. The gun, the city, the internet. These things flicker in and out of focus, registering then slipping away, as the title suggests. Hide and Seek opts for profusion over coherence, turning attention to our own complicity in both violence and distraction.

Evolve Puppets (Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil, New York) continues an exploration of popular culture and the behaviors it commands with Secrets History Remembers. This vaudeville production takes place around a large doll filled with hidden compartments that open to reveal stages, screens, and assorted gizmos. The two performers move with the exaggeration and zaniness of cartoons or advertisements. Indeed, this is the aesthetic world they are engaging: the commercial materials and imagery of twentieth-century America, from snake oil salesmen to cereal box icons. A series of low-tech tricks and vignettes—a record player turned by an eggbeater, a comedy sketch of a game show—culminate in a parody of the perfect American home: a doorbell rings and a Barbie-like doll swings wildly across the stage as a housewife character, played by one of the puppeteer-performers, starts to scream, her facade crumbling.

Other productions turn away from the exteriority of commercialism and popular culture, favoring instead the inward-facing concerns of dreams and domestic spaces. Kindred Widows by Claudine Rivest (Quebec), for example, begins with a woman disentangling herself from the clothes that contain her. This wordless production was inspired by Rivest’s aunt who did not speak for eighteen years. It unfurls in a gray living space filled with things once fine and now a bit drab. In one sequence, Rivest folds herself under a dining table only for her head to appear on a platter, from which she watches hand puppets fence with knives and forks. This quiet woman’s interior life emerges through her manipulation of the things around her, suggesting the ways that domestic spaces can shelter and entrap, be a retreat and a restraint.

OUT by UnterWasser Company (Valeria Buanchi, Aurora Buzzetti, and Giulia de Canio; Italy), also explores how we come to know ourselves in and through the outer world. Here, a small child with a birdcage body goes on a journey to find the bird who has flown out of him. Is this bird his soul—something lost that he must regain? Or maybe his curiosity—something inside him that also pulls him forward? As the child roams the world, going from the forest to the city to the sea, he finds it strange but not inhospitable. When the child eventually finds the bird, it is as a familiar face in an increasingly familiar world.

The odyssey of self-discovery is also at the heart of Human by Monica Lerch (New York), another short piece included in Jump Start. Human creates a dreamworld of interspecies love that emerges from a nightmare. Asleep in a cold, monotone room, someone dreams that they have been bioengineered with fins and webbing. They travel underwater to meet a crab and squid, with whom they float and scuttle. These three puppets eye one another and flirt, each one taking unexpected joy in their own movement. Their coy dances eventually lead to an orgy of appreciation for their own and each other’s forms.

Moving the question of self-determination from the futuristic to the mythological realm, The Spinner by Foreshadow (Rosalind Lilly and Gaby FeBland, New York)—another piece in Jump Start—casts the Greek Fates in a nineteenth-century textile factory. Shadow puppets render the story of a pregnant weaver in period-appropriate silhouette. The medium, like the factory, anonymizes the workers, who labor continuously under the strict supervision of three domineering fates: one who spins, one who measures, and one who cuts the strings with her scissor-shaped head. As accidents and surprises begin to distinguish these workers—-a blood-red cut on a hand, a glowing baby in the womb—it becomes clear that individuality comes with a steep price. Life and labor, this show demonstrates, operate with different rhythms.

The fluid shifts between interior and exterior, structure and being, abstraction and empathy resonated with shows throughout the festival.

The Puppet Slam curated by Jane Catherine Shaw brought together ten short works, including one standout by the duo Brzezinski and Schap, whose piece Say Mama picks up on the thread of motherhood. With four square boxes, the puppeteer assembles rooms, a house, and a window, using a white sheet as a scrim for shadow-play before nestling that sheet in their arms as a swaddled baby. The fluid shifts between interior and exterior, structure and being, abstraction and empathy resonated with shows throughout the festival.

There were three other productions that I was not able to take in: The Scarecrow by Kessto Kreatures and Anthony Michael Stokes (New York), as well as two pieces for children, Woods by Puzzle Theatre (Montreal) and Petit Mondrian by Edwin Salas Acosta (North Carolina). Also part of the festival was a panel discussion with Tim Cusack and Claudia Orenstein on the release of the second volume of their book, Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects. The essays collected across the two volumes explore object-based performances that use material things to engage with what is not visible or touchable.

Across the festival puppetry was on display not only as a theatrical medium or a mode of performance, but as a way of restructuring relationships between people, things, and environments. These shows called for empathy and attention; they asked about independence and interdependence; and they revealed levels of affinity and individuality that extended across dimensions, from the cellular to the oceanic. Restructuring relationships in these ways is an act of imagination. And whether performed in service of processing the past or realizing a new future, it is an act that cannot be done alone.