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 went to the biggest puppet festival in the world in September, 2018, at Charleville-Mezieres, a town in the French Ardennes. The festival was overwhelming. It sprawled across the town, engulfing it, not just with its steady diet of shows, but with meetings and lectures and “colloques”.

At the beginning of my final year of high school I was chosen to spend a weekend at the University of Western Ontario with students from all over the province. It must have been a recruiting effort on the part of the University, because it cost us nothing.

There was a student from Japan named Erina at the Sandglass intensive. She created a puppet of great dignity and sadness with a life-size head made merely of newspaper: a fragile, temporary thing. He was very Japanese. His face was long and he had large uneven ears. His eyes seemed huge, all-seeing, although they were unformed, only shadows. She draped him with three lengths of cloth – purple, brown, and soft grey. His single hand was her own.

He has set up his show at the junction of two streets, both closed to traffic, in an open space at the foot of some stone steps on which people can sit to watch him perform without having to crane over the shoulders of others.

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.

There’s a wonderful moment when you’re making a puppet.

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.

I was driving home after a sculpture class. The sky was blue-black and deep, the way it is in winter, and there was a full moon. A few whisps of thin cloud; no visible stars, because of city lights. The world was frozen, cloaked in what we routinely call white, although it isn’t white, not really.