A piece of cloth becomes a body, and a face appears where there wasn't one. A puppet looks back at us. We know it isn't looking and still we respond.

We project; we recognize. We imagine, we care, and we become attached. We make stories about things that cannot tell us who they are.

Deep Puppetry is an artistic practice concerned with what happens between us and the things we encounter.

I work with puppets, ordinary objects, movement, handmade figures, and situations to explore projection, attachment, recognition, imagination, love, and what happens when something remains more than what we have understood it to be.

What happens when what we see in something isn't simply there?

Something happens between us

A puppet can become almost anything: a baby, a stranger, a beloved, a memory, a joke, a companion. It can be someone we recognize immediately, and it can be someone we don't know how to meet.

None of these things is simply contained inside the object, but it isn't quite right to say that we're only making them up, either.

Something happens between the object and the person encountering it. We bring something; the object gives us something to respond to.

The situation changes. Our attention changes. The relationship changes. Sometimes we notice that what we thought we were seeing was partly a projection.

Sometimes the projection is where the encounter begins.

Deep Puppetry stays with that space between projection and encounter.

What does projection make possible?

We often talk about projection as something to get past, as though there were a real thing underneath it, waiting to be seen correctly.

But we don't encounter anything without bringing something with us: memory, desire, recognition, fear, expectation, imagination, love.

The question isn't whether we can get rid of projection. It's what happens when we notice what we're bringing without deciding that it tells us everything about what we're meeting.

Can something remain more than what we've made of it? Can we be changed by something we have partly imagined?

What happens when our understanding becomes part of an encounter without becoming the limit of it?

When something becomes someone

There is a moment in puppetry that is difficult to explain. It’s when the object hasn't changed, but somehow it isn't only an object anymore.

A piece of fabric now has a history. A puppet seems lonely. A strange figure becomes someone you want to protect.

You find yourself waiting for it, you don't want to put it away, you start to worry about what happens to it, and then you notice yourself caring.

What happened?

Was the feeling in the puppet? Was it in you? Was it between you?

I don't think the question has to be answered before the encounter can continue.

The puppet can become an Other: something we encounter without being able to settle exactly what it is. We recognize it, imagine it, respond to it. We may feel that we know it, and then encounter something that exceeds what we thought we knew.

A practice of love

I keep coming back to the word love. We often imagine that the deeper our understanding becomes, the deeper our love becomes. We learn someone's habits, fears, stories, longings, and opinions. We become fluent in each other's lives.

The danger begins the moment I believe I finally know who you are. Once I believe I know you, I stop leaving room for the parts of you that don't fit inside my understanding: the parts that don't map onto my experience, the parts that don't make sense to me, the parts that interrupt the story I've begun telling myself about who you are.

I don't think the greatest risk in love is misunderstanding. I think it's reduction: the belief that another person's life can be reduced to my understanding of it. From that moment on, I'm no longer relating to you. I'm relating to my understanding of you.

Of course I still care. I still listen. But I may be listening for confirmation. I'm listening for evidence that I already know who you are.

Love means letting you exceed my understanding.

I don't mean we should give up on understanding. Understanding is one of our great human capacities. What I question is the temptation to believe that my understanding could ever exhaust another person. Love asks more of me. It asks me to keep making room for what exceeds my understanding.

To resist the feeling that I have finally arrived at who you are. To return to you as someone I have never finished meeting.

Because a life is irreducible.

The puppet as Other

A puppet makes this problem unusually visible. We know there is nobody inside, yet someone appears to us. We give it a face, a history, a desire. We may decide what it wants, what it needs, what it means.

When something happens that doesn't fit, the puppet doesn't correct us. It doesn't tell us who it really is. There is no final answer waiting inside it.

We have to remain in relationship without being able to settle the relationship through knowledge.

This is part of what interests me about puppetry. The puppet gives us a way to encounter alterity without reducing it to a lesson about alterity.

What becomes possible

The practice is not about arriving at the right interpretation. It's about making enough room for an encounter to continue after an interpretation has appeared.

We may notice ourselves wanting to name something, protect it, control it, explain it, or leave it alone. We may notice attachment. We may discover that imagination can be a form of attention. We may recognize something without having to reduce it. We may find ourselves changed by something we thought we already understood.

There may be tenderness, resistance, humor, grief, desire, play, or surprise. I don't prescribe any of these.

They are things that can happen when the encounter stays open.

What is being practiced?

It's one thing to agree that another person is irreducible. It's another to keep meeting them that way. I've spent the last few years building places where this can be practiced. Deep Puppetry explores it through ordinary objects, puppets, movement, and encounters.

The point isn't to stop projecting, interpreting, recognizing, or understanding. The practice is to notice what those things do to an encounter and to remain open to being changed by what exceeds them.

That capacity matters far beyond puppetry. It changes how we listen, how we parent, how we facilitate, how we disagree, how we remember. For me, it has become an ethical orientation.

The artistic practice

Deep Puppetry can take many forms. It usually begins with an ordinary object: a piece of fabric, a stick, a handmade figure, something with no agreed-upon identity. Sometimes it takes the form of an artistic laboratory or workshop. It can also become an installation or longer inquiry. The form follows the encounter.

I compose conditions in which something can become perceptible that might otherwise disappear into familiarity.

I don't know in advance exactly what those conditions will reveal. That's part of why I keep making the work.

What people say

“We keep noticing how the work slows us down and how our attention gets wider and more honest. When we stay with the puppet, more becomes visible, and we can actually feel what’s happening instead of trying to make it happen. The atmosphere is gentle and spacious. It’s a place where we can follow what is emerging, even when it is strange or quiet.”
-reflection from a Deep Puppetry cohort

“We entered a space where things didn’t need to be fully formed, where we could delay our automatic responses and stay with what was happening. There was an honesty in the attention, without judgment or praise, that moved me deeply. At times I didn’t understand what was happening. But I began to feel that not knowing didn’t mean I was lost.”
-Anita van Ast

“The general tone and pace of the program allows for time and breath, even in the way Laura explains things, like every thought is a thought in progress. This feels like a demonstration that another pace is possible.”
-Aida Calderon Garvis

“I have learned practices for building relational capacity in ways that do not colonise, extract, consume, define and reduce. Practices that are not about my personal psychology, not about self improvement. I feel I have means now to practice the resistance, the activism of the minor gesture.”
-Mel Curtiss