This week I started searching for the work of Felix Mirbt (one of the founders of puppet theatre in Quebec and Canada)—but I got ambushed by Philippe Genty. He’s one of the greats, at eighty-one still working with his collaborators in France….

Peter and Elka Schumann are still active on their farm near Glover, in northern Vermont. They still receive interns every summer and create shows, which are performed both outdoors and in a converted barn, the “dirt floor theatre.” I visited them at the end of the summer in 2017.

Richard Bradshaw works alone, behind a small screen, creating shadow puppets that are wonderfully alive in short, surprising sight gags that capture kids and adults alike, all over the world.

Whether you’re a performer looking for tips on working an audience; or a hand puppeteer who wants to see the unpretentious, casual precision of an up-and-down master; or if you’re merely a student of culture who is curious about the way the tropes and gags of a three hundred year old tradition get reinvented—or then again, if you just have three quarters of an hour to spare and you’d like to see something a little different….

Today I tackle the holy of holies, Bunraku, that unique form of puppetry that only the Japanese would create and lovingly foster in the state-run National Bunraku Theatre of Osaka.

I hesitate to write about the Phantom Limb Company of New York because their work is so vast and ambitious. It makes me feel small. But today, I’m only exposing you to a single four-minute piece of weird, original and brilliant puppetry by composer, musician, puppeteer and co-director of the company, Erik Sanko, made especially for video.

The universe of puppetry is more vast than the human imagination. That’s why its images hold such power: they reach into the unconscious, the unknown and unknowable zone beyond words—the empty space before the play begins, when anything can emerge from darkness; what the ancient Greeks called the apeiron, the unbounded.

Bruno Leone was studying to become an architect when he met Pulcinella, and that encounter changed his life. It’s a love story, but not a human one, since Pulcinella is a hand puppet of the Neopolitian streets and squares. The one remaining master puppeteer of that ancient tradition was close to retirement when Leone came along—and he had no successor.

When I began this project, I thought that there were four basic types of puppet (hand, rod, string and shadow). Now I know more, and I start in a different place, with bigger categories: objects, masks and puppets. In some ways, objects are the most interesting of the three.