Bodies speaking: Embodiment, illness and the poetic materiality of puppetry/object practice

Abstract

The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.