Deep Puppetry™
What happens when you encounter
something you don't understand?
An artistic practice of making things, meeting what exceeds us, and discovering what becomes possible together
Enrolling now:
Love, Projection, and Puppets
What is the difference between loving someone and loving our experience of them?
An eight-week live certificate program in Deep Puppetry™
An artistic inquiry into projection, attachment, recognition, imagination, love, and the trouble with thinking we know what we're looking at.
How we experience another person is never only about them.
It is also about what we bring to the encounter: the meanings we make, the stories we carry, and the versions of other people we have already constructed.
What happens when that version stops being enough?
What becomes possible when we allow someone to remain more than our experience of them?
“It was a real pleasure not to be told what I meant.”
-Mel Curtiss
Most of us understand things before we’ve been changed by them.
I’m an artist, teacher, and facilitator. My work moves between making, writing, puppetry, and participatory inquiry.
At the heart of it is a political and artistic question:
How do the ways we participate in everyday life help create the worlds we live in? And what might we make possible by participating differently?
Participation is never neutral. What we notice, what we ignore, what we assume, who gets to define what something is, and whose understanding we organize around all shape the worlds we make together.
Participation is also creative. We make things together. We respond, improvise, adapt, and discover possibilities that weren't available before we began.
Deep Puppetry grew out of my interest in practicing those things differently.
There are puppets. There is philosophy. There is usually some paper involved.
Things get unexpectedly profound.
What is Deep Puppetry™
It is an artistic practice of meeting what exceeds us.
A puppet gives us something to encounter: something we can move, attend to, respond to, and make with, without ever entirely knowing what it is.
We bring our imaginations, expectations, memories, and assumptions. The material brings its own weight, resistance, and possibilities. Something happens between them.
As we make and improvise together, we discover possibilities that none of us could have planned in advance.
Along the way, we may begin to notice how quickly we decide what something means, what it needs, or what should happen next.
What becomes possible when we don't have to decide so quickly?
This isn't just an artistic question. It's also a question about how we participate in making worlds together.
“Puppetry enabled a material witnessing where no material had been possible before. In the material, I could shape questions. Before, they had no home in which to be.”
-Deep Puppetry certificate graduate
student work, Emma Shea
student work, Alissa Di Franco
The larger inquiry
How do worlds become real through ordinary participation?
What becomes possible before another person's experience becomes something we already know?
How do everyday interactions become so familiar that they stop feeling like participation altogether?
These questions have taken me through sociology, theatre, puppetry, expressive arts, somatic practice, community work, performance, writing, and visual art.
Over time, I became less interested in finding better methods for changing how people participate and more interested in creating situations in which participation itself could be explored, questioned, and made differently.
When every encounter has to fit what we already know, we limit what we can make possible together.
“I still don’t know what happened, but something did.
-Deep Puppetry participant