Puppetry is an exciting, flexible, malleable art form that can engage the creative forces of children or adults. Puppets can not only tell a story, they can be used to enhance the curriculum, present an idea or a concept in a compelling way, or teach any number of necessary skills. Children and adults presenting a puppet play are given a sense of their own inventive power. This reference work offers an A to Z view of working with puppets. It covers everything from the basic strategies of advertising and marketing puppet productions, to assembling the puppets out of household materials such as paper bags, cereal boxes, or gloves, to the more elaborate sculpting of armatures. Stages, curtains and props are also discussed along with the history of puppetry. Numerous illustrations give a visual of many of the finished products. This work concludes with an annotated bibliography and index.

Drawing on thirty years of making theatre with objects, this field-defining book maps the terrain of applied puppetry. Through a range of case studies both personal and practical, Matt Smith offers a reflective and engaging study which provides makers, thinkers and students alike with a toolkit for thinking about and making puppetry in community settings. Through eight chapters, Smith muses on the nature of creativity, explores approaches to puppetry through ecology, and considers how puppets and objects affect the act of making and – in turn – how they affect those who make, use and experience them in performance. Along the way, Applied Puppetry offers practical exercises in theatre-making, demonstrates the political power of puppetry beyond borders, and interrogates the limitations and possibilities of puppetry and object theatre in local communities, volatile contexts and difficult circumstances.

Puppets of Nostalgia is the first major work in any Western language to examine the ritual origins and religious dimensions of puppetry in Japan. In a lucid and engaging style accessible to the general reader, Jane Marie Law describes the "life, death, and rebirth" of awaji ningyo shibai, the unique form of puppet theater of Awaji Island that has existed since the sixteenth century. Puppetry rites on Awaji helped to maintain rigid ritual purity codes and to keep dangerous spiritual forces properly channeled and appeased. Law conducted fieldwork on Awaji, located in Japan's Inland Sea, over a ten-year period. In addition to being a detailed history and ethnography of this ritual tradition, Law's work is, at a theoretical level, a study of the process and meaning of tradition formation, reformation, invention, and revitalization. It will interest scholars in a number of fields, including the history of religions, anthropology, cultural studies, ritual and theater studies, Japanese studies, and social history. Focusing on the puppetry tradition of Awaji Island, Puppets of Nostalgia describes the activities of the island's ritual puppeteers and includes the first English translation of their performance texts and detailed descriptions of their rites. Because the author has lived on Awaji during extended periods of research, the work includes fine attention to local detail and nuanced readings of religious currents in Japan that affect popular religious expression. Illustrated throughout with rare photographs, the book provides an in-depth view of a four-hundred-year-old tradition never so thoroughly revealed to Western readers. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.