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Full-Text Articles in Africana Studies
Living Objects Essays: Prologue, John Bell
Living Objects Essays: Prologue, John Bell
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Living Objects: African American Puppetry co-curator John Bell describes the team responsible for the Living Objects exhibition, festival, symposium, and online catalogue.
Embracing Complexity In Performing The Other, Valeska Maria Populoh
Embracing Complexity In Performing The Other, Valeska Maria Populoh
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
"Embracing Complexity in Performing the Other" is a personal essay by a white, Baltimore-based cultural organizer, puppeteer and educator, reflecting on three scenarios that have catalyzed her thinking about white people performing Black puppets. The author shares her own experience of navigating the complex, and at times highly combustible, issues about representation, appropriation and racial identity in the realm of puppetry, and concludes with a few questions to stimulate further dialogue in the puppetry community about these issues.
Power Puppets In Portable Pulpits: A Personal Account Of Puppet Ministry In The African American Community, Yolanda Sampson
Power Puppets In Portable Pulpits: A Personal Account Of Puppet Ministry In The African American Community, Yolanda Sampson
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Yolanda Sampson relates the history of her path into puppet ministry and her PuppeTainment Productions company, which presents Christian stories in a “hip, entertaining way,” bringing “biblical principles to life for twenty-first century children.” She recounts her initiation in puppet ministry at the age of twelve, and her development of stories about the dangers of drug culture in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as her use of puppetry in beauty pageant competitions, and her ventures into puppet video productions such as What Time is It? and Tell It Like It Is. Sampson took a three-year hiatus to earn her …
Race And Representation: Creating A Puppet Production For The Smithsonian Institution, Brad Brewer
Race And Representation: Creating A Puppet Production For The Smithsonian Institution, Brad Brewer
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
The Brewery Puppet Troupe was commissioned by the Smithsonian Museum’s Lemelson Center to undertake new creative challenge: a show featuring African American scientist Lewis Latimer, the nineteenth-century inventor instrumental in creating the electric light bulb. Brad Brewer was committed to showing how Latimer’s life was affected by America’s struggle with slavery and racial inequality, issues he considered equally important to Latimer's scientific achievements. Staff historians read and commented on all the drafts of the script, but the production still included comedic elements typical of a Brewery Troupe production. The project allowed the author to explore some of the hard realities …
Egg Whites: A Short Puppet Film Script, Alva Rogers
Egg Whites: A Short Puppet Film Script, Alva Rogers
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Alva Rogers’ script for a short puppet film is a magical realist treatment of a mother’s efforts to help her young daughter, an unnamed African American girl, fall asleep in their New York apartment. The mother explains straightforwardly how she will make muffins for the girl’s breakfast, but the film then shifts into a surreal territory where the girl travels on a moonbeam to the sun, and then appears in a rowboat in a vast ocean, where she wants to plant a flower—all while the mother is baking in the kitchen. The sea explains that the girl’s flower will not …
An Email Interview With Alva Rogers, Paulette Richards
An Email Interview With Alva Rogers, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Actor, writer, and puppeteer Alva Rogers recounts her long-standing interests in theater, and her early performances combining dolls with texts by Zora Neale Hurston and others. Her work as a performance artist led to her role as Eula in the film Daughters of the Dust. She then studied playwriting, musical theater, and history at Brown University, NYU, and Bard College respectively. Rogers’s influences include surrealist painters, magic realism, such writers as Adrienne Kennedy, Ralph Ellison, and Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Gullah/Geechee culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. She uses both dolls and puppets in …
Servance Dancers, Paulette Richards
Servance Dancers, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
How many African American folk artists have created performing objects outside the purview of formal theater? Master woodcarver George Servance is one such 20th-century artist who used his skills to counter minstrel stereotypes and present African Americans as elegant and accomplished entertainers.
Raceless Racism: Blackface Minstrelsy In American Puppetry, Amber West
Raceless Racism: Blackface Minstrelsy In American Puppetry, Amber West
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Blackface minstrelsy has long been recognized as one of the major elements of 19th and early 20th-century popular performance in the U.S., but its central role in U.S. puppetry has not been explored. West debunks the idea that puppets are “raceless”, examining the origins of blackface minstrelsy in American puppetry, including traditional Punch and Judy performances, William John Bullock’s 19th-century puppet minstrel shows, the creation of “realistic” Black puppets by white puppeteers in the early 20th century, and contemporary examples of exaggerated Black puppet characters, for example in a music video directed by Black artist Boots Riley. West points out …
Schroeder Cherry And His Puppets: Playing With Puppets, From Childhood To Adulthood, Schroeder Cherry
Schroeder Cherry And His Puppets: Playing With Puppets, From Childhood To Adulthood, Schroeder Cherry
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Schroeder Cherry relates his path into puppetry, from childhood television shows to his exposure to European puppetry in Switzerland; and later an apprenticeship with Chicago puppeteer Gary Jones. After earning a master’s degree in museum education at George Washington University, Cherry began developing puppet performances for the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. Travels in Africa furthered his appreciation of that continent’s puppetry, and influenced his creation of such shows as How the Sun Came to the Sky. Cherry has developed an array of rod-puppet characters (including DiAndre, Ms. Lily, and Tevin) which he incorporates into museum performances and such …
Storytelling And Puppetry, Susan Fulcher
Storytelling And Puppetry, Susan Fulcher
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Librarian Susan Fulcher recounts the creation of a storytelling with puppets program she developed with puppeteer Dave Herzog, in which kids create their own puppet characters to be incorporated into existing stories such as Stone Soup.
Teeth, Tau Bennett
Teeth, Tau Bennett
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Brooklyn-based puppeteer Tau Bennett’s shooting script for a television puppet comedy employs dark humor and surreal slapstick to tell the story of a man whose offhand wish to lose his “pesky teeth” becomes unfortunately true, thanks to larger-than-life forces, two bumbling hoodlums, and a boss looking for teeth.
Living Objects: Introduction, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: Introduction, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
In her introduction to this collection of Living Objects: African American Puppetry online texts, co-curator Paulette Richards gives an overview of “the power of performing objects to disrupt dehumanizing views of blackness,” and the continuing history of African American object performance in relation to other aspects of popular culture and writing, despite the suppression of African figurative sculpture and object performance, and the persistence of racist stereotypes born of blackface minstrelsy. Relating W. E. B. DuBois’s sense of African American “double consciousness” to the inherent “double vision” of puppet and object performance, Richards proposes a “distinct lineage of African American …
Alma W. Thomas: “The Marionette Show As A Correlating Activity In The Public Schools”, Jonathan Frederick Walz
Alma W. Thomas: “The Marionette Show As A Correlating Activity In The Public Schools”, Jonathan Frederick Walz
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
The wider world primarily knows Alma W. Thomas as an African American visual artist who, despite the challenges of race, gender, and age, produced a coherent body of brightly colored nature-based abstractions that made her world famous in the late 1970s. What remains virtually unknown, however, is the artist’s involvement with puppet theater and related professional activities. During the summers of 1925, 1930, and 1934, Thomas studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she earned an M.A. in arts education; post-graduate coursework with acknowledged marionette expert Tony Sarg followed. The pedagogical theories of John Dewey, who taught at Columbia 1905–1930, …
“It’S Not Easy Bein’ Green”: Greenface And The Jazzy Frog Trope, Paulette Richards
“It’S Not Easy Bein’ Green”: Greenface And The Jazzy Frog Trope, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
One element of blackface minstrelsy was the representation of Black people as swamp characters, especially frogs. In her examination of the development of the “jazzy frog” as a transposition of greenface onto blackface, Richards traces the growth of the trope in popular film and cartoons of the early 20th century. She then considers Jim Henson’s creation of the popular puppet character Kermit as a variation on this trope, but with a different purpose: to represent Henson’s “vision of tolerance for difference and creative collaboration.” The “re-humanization” of the jazzy frog includes the 1967 hit song “I’m in Love with a …
Wear The Story Like A Jacket: Akbar Imhotep, Paulette Richards
Wear The Story Like A Jacket: Akbar Imhotep, Paulette Richards
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
This profile of Akbar Imhotep’s work as a puppeteer and storyteller in Atlanta in the late 20th century describes his connections to the Center for Puppetry Arts, the folk-art roots of his approach to puppetry, the unique puppet stage he made from old suitcases, and the process he uses to prepare for performances.
Shape-Shifter, Tarish Pipkins
Shape-Shifter, Tarish Pipkins
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Tarish Pipkins’s early experiences with the “shape-shifting beast” of racism as he grew up near Pittsburgh, and later his growing awareness of African American history, have influenced his poetry, visual art, and puppetry: a “weapon of mass destruction to fight the beast.” His work with puppets and special-needs children led him to create larger puppet productions such as Just Another Lynching and 5P1N0K10: The Android Who Wants to be Real b boy, which allow him to “[fight] back using puppets as my swords.”
Five-Star Review And Other Responses, Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, Akbar Imhotep
Five-Star Review And Other Responses, Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, Akbar Imhotep
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Living Objects Festival and Symposium attendees Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, and Akbar Imhotep offer their appreciation of the events, illustrated with photographs by Gaskins.
Black And Blackface In The Performing Object: Bullock, Chessé, Paris, The Jubilee Singers, And The Burdens Of … Everything, Ben Fisler
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
The representation of Black identity through puppetry ranges from “grotesque exaggeration to near pictorial realism,” and engagement not only with racial stereotyping, but also the possibility of positive racial representation. Fisler details the extensive degree to which puppeteers in the early 20th century depended upon Black and blackface characters for their livelihood, and points out the complexities of such representations involving Black puppeteers of Federal Theater Project puppet companies, and the work of Creole puppet artist Ralph Chessé. Fisler argues that some white puppeteers, including Frank Paris, sought to portray such Black characters as Josephine Baker in a “potentially more …
Tar Baby: The Performance Of Object, Ra Malika Imhotep
Tar Baby: The Performance Of Object, Ra Malika Imhotep
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
This essay engages the figure of the “Tar Baby” as a guide through the theoretical terrain of Afro-Diasporic storytelling culture. Thinking about the role of gesture and voice in the repertoire of global Black performance, this presentation sets out to offer a nuanced Black feminist analysis of the sticky character and the impact of her diasporic flight. Calling in both theoretical work on Black performance and personal reflections on an engagement with the Tar Baby through storyteller and puppeteer Akbar Imhotep’s rendition of the story performed at the Wren’s Nest in Atlanta Georgia, the essay explores the ways Afro-Diasporic storytelling …
The Appropriation Of Blackness, Nehprii Amenii
The Appropriation Of Blackness, Nehprii Amenii
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
The continuing appropriation of Black culture in the U.S. is closely tied to the trauma and injustice of the African diaspora and the history of slavery. Black people, Amenii argues, need to re-appropriate themselves, through the “excavating and re-articulating of our intellectual heritage and knowledge systems.” Citing Ahmad Azzahir’s description of African modes of thinking as “based on spirituality, symbol, mythos, and harmonium,” she sees her own work as “creative anthropology” that draws on storytelling and image-making to create self-study. Her production Food for the Gods, “a multi-media performance installation created in response to the killings of Black Men by …
Itsy, Dirk Joseph
Itsy, Dirk Joseph
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
The famed Itsy Bitsy Spider realizes that climbing up the spout only leads to a rain gutter, and so goes off on a sidewalk journey to find a better life. After encountering two men arguing about money, a fraudulent salesman, and a girl afraid of spiders, Itsy finds a tree in a meadow where it can build a web and catch flies.
Puppetry And Inside Change, Al Tony Simon, Tychist Baker
Puppetry And Inside Change, Al Tony Simon, Tychist Baker
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Al Tony Simon and Tychist Baker describe their experiences as formerly incarcerated individuals, and their work with puppetry through the group Inside Change. Simon became involved in theater in prison, and then with prison activism through RAPP (Release Aging People from Prison), and Milk Not Jails’ efforts to reform New York State parole boards. Great Small Works theater company introduced Simon to puppetry, which he has used in his work with young people in youth detention centers, schools, and at-risk communities through the One Foot In and One Foot Out program, and later the creation of Inside Change. During his …
African Puppetry And Brazilian Mamulengo: Possible Links Between Symbolic And Material Representations, Izabela Brochado
African Puppetry And Brazilian Mamulengo: Possible Links Between Symbolic And Material Representations, Izabela Brochado
Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays
Although Brazil’s popular Mamulengo hand-puppet tradition is often considered to have primarily European roots, Brochado argues that “the primary source of the Mamulengo lies with African slaves.” Citing sources including puppeteers and folklorists explaining the origins of Mamulengo in northeast Brazil, Brochado argues for the African roots of the form, citing the relation of Mamulengo performance to Afro-Brazilian cult rituals; the commonality of often-comic sexual content in Mamulengo and in Yoruba puppetry of Nigeria and Benin; as well as the similar mechanics of puppets from both traditions which display work activities. She concludes that “even if African puppets were not …