Research suggests that children can learn new information via pretense. However, a fundamental problem with existing studies is that children are passive receivers of the pretense rather than active, ...engaged participants. This preregistered study replicates previous learning from pretense findings (Sutherland & Friedman, 2012, Child Development), in which children are passive observers of pretense, and extends to two additional conditions that require children to partially (with puppets) or fully (with costumes) embody a character. Children (N = 144, 24–79 months) learned equally well, and better than those in the control condition, from all three play scenarios. At a 2‐week follow‐up, learning was equally retained across embodiment conditions for older, but not younger, preschoolers. Future research should consider embodiment’s role for more complex material.
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.
In my short, filmed puppetry performance Chang and Eng and Me (and Me) (2021), the audience witness the construction, manipulation and destruction of figures representing the Siamese-Chinese ...conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker. These processes mirror the formations and transformations of identities that Chang and Eng underwent as diasporic individuals in Siam, on tour in Europe and as naturalised U.S. citizens. In this essay, I analyse these examples from my own practice to propose a framework for critical puppetry and to assert its value as an embodied form of inquiry and resistance.
There is a type of puppet animation that appeared to suggest itself as a therapeutic medium at the London School of Puppetry. However, the repair of emotional chasm with new health, which might be ...physical, mental, or spiritual, was not what was intended. The school was offering an introduction to an artistic phenomenon from Japan called otome bunraku or maidens doll theater, but common to all participants, the result of performing this type of puppetry was an unexpected and profound sense of well-being. This feeling challenges anything the puppet alone offers to a puppeteer, and as an alternative, points to other possibilities of focusing on the puppeteer instead as a playfully disruptive, interruptive, creative, expressive and skillful presence. It argues that the nature of the puppeteers presence revealed in otome bunraku is a unified mind and body manifested in the manipulation of these puppets. A person reaches a physical and social realization of what well-being means through an experience of being other and therefore by creating other worlds in the process of puppetry.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the countries of the Middle East have experienced several episodes of revolt and revolution. Art in general has both been affected by and has influenced these ...events. With this in mind, my essay examines the art of puppet theatre as an epic narrative approach in the sense of both epic-political and epic-adventurous. To explore this phenomenon in historical context, I first trace puppetry’s past in the Middle East and then discuss in more detail its important contemporary role. My contention is that the Middle Eastern puppet becomes a narrative schema of the socio-political field, going beyond the limits imposed on the rest of society with skill, like a hero who acts to save his beloved at the end of the story.
This collectively authored position paper discusses “hybrid” Shakespeares in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on productions that offer formal experimentation and transnational perspectives. ...While their contexts remain regional, they provide an insight into how Shakspeare has been mobilised regionally. The paper consists of four distinct parts, each considering Shakespeare in a hybrid form: in opera, dance and musical theatre as well as puppetry in the transnational, regional context. The general discussions of Shakespeare’s presence/appropriation in these art forms are followed by case studies that illustrate the significance of hybridity that characterises Shakespeare in the Central and Eastern European transnational context. Our brief analyses and selected case studies suggest a need for a detailed study of Shakespeare and performative arts in Central and Eastern Europe that would concentrate on the transgressive impulse these theatrical blends realised through formal experiment and artistic innovation. The publication of the article was supported by the International Visegrad Fund, project no. 22210007, titled “Crossing Borders with Shakespeare since 1945: Central and Eastern European Roots and Routes.” The project is co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants. The mission of the Fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
This study examined microteaching using computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to assist student teachers in anticipating student voices and achieving authentic role-play. To achieve this, ...the design had two manipulatives: tangible puppets as “mediating manipulatives” that allow student teachers to elicit a variety of imaginary student voices in microteaching role-plays and three-dimensional animations as “perspective-taking manipulatives” that allow student teachers to dynamically switch viewpoints in reflection. This study aims to investigate how the combination of mediating and perspective-taking manipulatives helps student teachers foster the perspective-taking of imaginary students in their microteaching role-playing and reflection. We employed epistemic network analysis (ENA) to analyze discourse data collected both in the microteaching performances (including the tangible puppetry microteaching) and in the reflections. The results showed that the combination of the two manipulatives was effective for achieving the immediate transfer of imaginary students’ perspectives. Further qualitative analysis enabled by ENA indicated that the perspective-taking manipulatives were effective in bolstering perspective-taking due to the nonverbal aspects of students’ voices enacted in the role-play performances.
Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across work contexts, how expertise translates across contexts is less well understood. Here, we examine how ...a shift in context—which reorders the relative attention experts pay to distinct types of audiences—redefines what it means to be an expert. Our study’s setting is an established expertise in the creative industry: puppet manipulation. Through an examination of U.S. puppeteers’ move from stage to screen (i.e., film and television), we show that, although the two settings call on mostly similar techniques, puppeteers on stage ground their claims to expertise in a dialogue with spectators and view expertise as achieving believability; by contrast, puppeteers on screen invoke the need to deliver on cue when dealing with producers, directors, and co-workers and view expertise as achieving task mastery. When moving between stage and screen, puppeteers therefore prioritize the needs of certain audiences over others’ and gradually reshape their own views of expertise. Our findings embed the nature of expertise in experts’ ordering of types of audiences to attend to and provide insights for explaining how expertise can shift and become co-opted by workplaces.
On assiste, depuis une quinzaine d’années, à un accroissement notable de la visibilité des collections de marionnettes en France. Le symbole en est sans doute la mise en ligne du Portail des arts de ...la marionnette en 2011, porté par l’Institut international de la marionnette, en partenariat avec des institutions patrimoniales, des théâtres, des compagnies ou des associations professionnelles, et qui présente, conjointement, la création, les artistes contemporains et les collections patrimoniales. Au regard de ce contexte fortement incitatif, et à partir d’une enquête auprès des principales institutions détentrices de collections marionnettiques, comme de figures majeures dans le champ des arts de la marionnette, l’article envisage les stratégies de développement et de valorisation des collections mises en œuvre dans les principales institutions patrimoniales ou en dehors du champ proprement muséal. Il examine l’infléchissement des politiques d’acquisition au regard des principes qui ont prévalu pour les collections fondatrices de ces institutions et les effets qu’induit l’influence croissante des acteurs professionnels de la marionnette (syndicats, associations professionnelles, festivals et lieux de formation) en matière d’expertise et de soutien logistique, à la fois en termes de définition du champ (vers les artistes contemporains de la marionnette de création, plutôt que vers la marionnette traditionnelle, à l’échelle tant régionale que mondiale), de hiérarchisation des priorités, de choix du corpus et de finalités.
Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio‐cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to ...simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange = 3.5–4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio‐cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand‐ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.
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