Many of the strategies of oppression and exploitation are embedded in our consciousness as social myth, a space that is most receptive to creative metaphor and dreaming itself into a new reality of liberation, compassion, and interdependence. Spaces of self-reflection and metaxis create the capacity for collaborative action by the emergent selves for the emergent world. We practice in the aesthetic reality in order to modify the social reality.

Puppetry uses symbolic and aesthetic language, reducing reliance on verbal expression and inviting a new kind of knowing: imaginal, liminal, metaphorical, poetic, and nonlinear. In puppetry, we experience a plurality of consciousness and identity, an interdependence of self and matter, a reimagining of the relationship between subject and object, and an opportunity to create new power dynamics within the context of a creative container.

To create and ensoul an object is to experience a kind of trans-embodiment wherein the object becomes a proxy location for our own development. When I can't breathe, my puppet can breathe. When I can't orient, my puppet can orient. When I can’t respond to my environment, my puppet can. As I hold the puppet, the puppet holds the space of that which is Not Me, and by doing so, opens an avenue into my own becoming.

Play, pleasure, and the "friendship of created things" (René Char) are by nature anti-capitalist. Puppetry allows us to blur the lines of common binaries, release our intense fixation on “truth,” and challenge the pervasive lens of cause and effect. Puppet animation confronts us with difficult questions around who and what is allowed to exist, who and what is abject in our cultures and in ourselves, and where is life, death, and the threshold between them. Puppetry incites empathy and works to decenter the self, transitioning us away from isolation and into solidarity. The puppet helps us straddle the line between Self and Other, Me and Not Me, thereby creating a pathway toward our own development as people and as a culture.

Puppetry is an act of creation, of meditation, of focus, of deep listening, of embodied empathy, of divination, of surrendering to the inherent life and goodness in all things. It is going in to go through. It is an acknowledgement through action that this world resists definition. We humans used to know this. In Indonesia, puppet masters were considered priests. It was shamans the world over who were the puppeteers around fires and in ceremonies. Eurocentric modernity made us skeptical of this power inherent to puppetry, loath to embrace enchantment as reason and experience as evidence, and fearful of what cannot be contained, defined, or categorized.

But puppetry, like prayer, refuses to be sidelined forever, to stay relegated to the status of unsophisticated and obsolete.

No, puppetry is returning. We need palpable invitations into poetic imagination if we are to imagine a world better than this one. To learn that we are agents of change, we must create environments where we can affect each other and perform ourselves in new ways. We long to enter a gateway of connection that is symbolic and playful, that challenges the separation not only between spiritual realms and material reality but between you and me. We long to live and give life, even the illusion of life, to someone else with little more than a touch of our fingers and the breath in our bodies.