laura geiger
Relational Ethics Practitioner and Creator of Deep Puppetry™
I work at the intersection of relational praxis, material engagement, and embodied ecology. My work creates conditions where people can participate in relationship without reproducing the habits that narrow what is possible between us.
Deep Puppetry™ works with material to reveal how aliveness and direction emerge through contact.
School of the Small & Imperfect works with people to reveal how development happens through relationship.
Both practices offer spaces where interdependence, distributed agency, non-colonizing witnessing, and post-binary perception become embodied experiences rather than philosophical ideas. Working with material or with one another, we learn to stay with uncertainty, loosen dominance-trained reflexes, and respond to what is alive in the field rather than to what we expect or intend.
This is where our sensing selves discover forms of agency, collaboration, and care that thought alone cannot produce.
what happens here
Deep Puppetry™
Deep Puppetry™ is a material-led relational practice.
We work with simple objects and learn to collaborate with their emergent life. Here, the puppet isn’t a symbol or an extension of the self; it becomes a partner in a shared field. The material reveals the relational habits we bring into every interaction (guiding, fixing, interpreting) and gives us a place to practice something else.
Deep Puppetry™ slows the moment down. By staying with the encounter without managing it, we practice non-dominating contact, distributed agency, and the possibility of being shaped by what exceeds us.
This is relational ethics made tangible through material.
Deep Puppetry™ is offered through a two-level certificate program, online workshops, and in-person intensives.
The Deep Puppetry™ Certificate Program’s final cohort in the current format begins January 7. Enrollment now open.
School of the Small & Imperfect
School of the Small and Imperfect is a weekly practice space for exploring how development happens through relationship. It is horizontal in spirit, a school of fish, where collaboration replaces hierarchy.
We work with conversation, shared activity, and relational experiments that help us notice how we listen, where we contract, and how we organize ourselves when uncertainty appears. It’s a place to interrupt familiar patterns, take risks, and stay with the moment before configuring it into coherence.
People often discover capacities that daily life rarely allows: being present without self-curating, letting difference remain in the field, allowing something new to form without shaping it too quickly.
The School meets weekly on Zoom in three-month cycles.
orientation
I work within a frame where relational capacity is world-building capacity. How we meet one another, human and other-than-human, shapes the social, ecological, and political worlds we make and inhabit.
My work cultivates ways of participating in relationship that step outside the domination patterns we’ve been shaped by, that let emergence lead, and that make room for more relational life to become possible.
The small is not preparation; it is the site of development itself.
Every gesture of attention, every moment of contact, participates in world-making.
This practice is grounded and experiential. It comes out of years in applied performing arts, somatic inquiry, social therapeutics, object work, and long-term collaborative experimentation. My teaching moves slowly and responsively, staying close to what is happening and letting the work unfold from there.