10th Annual Curating Performance Symposium
The Department of Performance Studies is delighted to host the 10th Annual Curating Performance Symposium “Curating Puppet, Marionette, and Object Theater”. The symposium is organized by the Department of Performance Studies and cosponsored by the Tisch Center for Research & Study. Special thanks to Ann Pellegrini, André Lepecki, Jeannine Tang, Laura Fortes, Nicole Cusick, Alysha Casnellie, and Alejandra Rodriguez. Learn about previous Curating Initiatives & Symposium here.
SCHEDULE:
12:30 – 2:30: Panel 1
Allen S. Weiss / Introduction and short film, The Atelier of Michel Nedjar
Mark Sussman, “Keeping Form, Stewarding Community: Curating Puppet Festivals and Cabarets, Towards an Ecology of Practice”
Roman Paska, “Fear of Puppetry”
Respondent: Kenneth Gross
2:30 – 3:00 Recess
3:00 – 5:00 Panel 2
Claudia Orenstein, “The Many Faces of Japanese Puppetry”
Paulette Richards, “’Where is the Story?’ How the Chicago International Theater Festival Curatorial Committee Defines the Aesthetics of Object Performance.”
John Bell, "Redefining Puppet Traditions: Exhibitions of African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican Puppetry"
Respondent: Kenneth Gross
5:00 – 6:00 Reception
BIOS:
John Bell is a puppeteer and theater historian who began working in puppetry with Bread and Puppet Theater in the 1970s, and continued as a company member for over a decade. He studied theater history at Columbia University, and has since taught at New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, Emerson College and other institutions. He is a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater company Great Small Works, and the author of many books and articles about puppetry, including Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects; Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History; and American Puppet Modernism.” He is Associate Professor of Puppetry and Director of the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Connecticut.
Kenneth Gross is a scholar and critic who writes on theater, poetry, and the intersections of literature and the visual arts. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His books include Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic; The Dream of the Moving Statue; Shakespeare’s Noise; Shylock is Shakespeare; and Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story. He is the editor of a collection of essays, On Dolls, and of John Hollander’s posthumously published Clark Lectures, The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History. Gross’s far-ranging study of the poetics of puppet theater, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, was the winner of the 2011-12 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
Claudia Orenstein, Theatre Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, has spent nearly two decades writing on contemporary and traditional puppetry in the US and Asia. Recent publications include Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects and the co-edited books Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception; Puppet and Spirit: Ritual Religion and Performing Objects (in two volume); Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations; and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance. She worked as dramaturg on Tom Lee and kuruma ningyō master Nishikawa Koryū V’s Shank’s Mare and on Stephen Earnhart’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle. She is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal, a past Board Member of UNIMA-USA, and Editor of the online, peer review journal, Puppetry International Research, published on the CUNY Academic Commons in collaboration with UNIMA-USA. She received a 2021-22 Fulbright Research Fellowship for research on ritual puppetry in Japan.
Roman Paska is a theatre artist, writer, and director living in New York City, where he first created a series of solo performances, or Theatre for the Birds, known for their complex poetic imagery, that established his renown in the world of puppetry as an exceptional puppet designer and performer. As a director, his work has been characterized by the integration of puppets or puppet technique into productions created for casts of actors, dancers and musicians that include original adaptations of Yeats’ The Shadowy Waters (Dublin), Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata (Stockholm), Lorca’s Yerma (Seville), God Mother Radio (Paris, based on Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris), arden/Ardennes (Avignon Festival, based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It), Strindberg’s Dreamplay (Stockholm, for the centennial of the play’s premiere), and Souls of Naples (Naples, Italy, based on De Filippo’s Questi Fantasmi!). Original ensemble works for his company, Dead Puppet, include Dead Puppet Talk at The Kitchen (NY), Schoolboy Play for Linz ‘09 and the National Theatre of Lisbon, and Echo in Camera, developed at the Schauspielhaus Vienna and premiered at La MaMa (NY). Fragments of his solo work were featured in John Turturro’s Illuminata, premiered in Cannes, and his own documentary essay film, Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, with Turturro and Sicilian puppetmaster Mimmo Cuticchio, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. For several years he was director of the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France, the original UNESCO-affiliate center for the study and development of puppetry arts, and he has lectured and taught extensively throughout Europe and the Americas.
Paulette Richards is an independent researcher, has taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University, and Georgia Tech. During her time as a 2013/ 2014 Fulbright Scholar in Senegal, she began to focus her multi-disciplinary interest in African Diasporan cultural studies on puppets, masks, and performing objects. Richards co-curated the Living Objects: African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry with Dr. John Bell. Since 2019 she has co-curated the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series with Blair Thomas. Her traveling exhibit on The Wonderland Puppet Theater ran at the Ballard from August to December 2024. As a 2025 Transformative Truth Telling Fellow at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Richards developed “Men and Mules,” a video installation on convict leasing in Atlanta area quarries now on permanent display at the Hapeville Depot Museum. Richards’ book, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States won a 2024 Nancy Staub Award for excellence in writing on the art of puppetry from UNIMA-USA. She is a co-editor of Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance forthcoming from Routledge in 2026.
Mark Sussman is Professor in the School of Performance and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is also a Co-Artistic Director of Great Small Works, which, since its founding in New York City in 1995, has been producing original performances on a variety of scales, from miniature toy theatre pieces using two-dimensional cutouts and live montage, to giant parades, community processions, and circuses. Collectively, they have produced ten international festivals of Toy Theater (1993-2013) and maintain the tradition of Spaghetti Dinner cabarets various New York venues. In Montreal, he founded the puppetry and mixed-media cabaret Café Concret in 2006 and serves on the Artistic Committee of the Casteliers Festival. A graduate of NYU’s Department of Performance Studies, Sussman has contributed writing to TDR, Connect, Cabinet, Performance Research, Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1999), and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT, 2001). His article "Notes on New Model Theaters" can be found in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014) and an updated essay on New York’s Circus Amok can be found in The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016).
Allen S. Weiss is the author and editor of over forty books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theater. His work in marionette theater began with Theater of the Ears / Théâtre des orielles (a play for electronic marionette and taped voice based on the writings of Valère Novarina), created at CalArts (1999) and followed by a tour ending with a one-month run at the Avignon Off Festival (2001); this was followed by Danse Macabre (a marionette theater for the dolls of Michel Nedjar), created in Paris in conjunction with the exhibition Poupées that he curated at the Halle Saint Pierre (2004); the Danse macabre subsequently appeared in three forms (theater, installation, performance) at the In Transit Festival of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2009), and most recently at the Centre Pompidou Metz (2022). He also co-produced a documentary film on the dolls of Michel Nedjar, Poupées des ténèbres / Dolls of Darkness (2016). He was the ghostwriter of Unpacking my Library, or, The Autobiography of Teddy (2020), the tale of his Teddy bear. He is Distinguished Teacher in Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.