I’m Laura Geiger.

My work grows from an inquiry into how development takes shape through relationship, as well as how new forms of perception, connection, and possibility appear when we participate with one another (and with the other-than-human world) in ways that allow something unplanned to emerge.

Deep Puppetry™ and School of the Small & Imperfect both come from this inquiry. One works through material and the other through human interaction, but each creates conditions where habitual patterns soften and the relational field becomes a site of development. What takes shape in that field is not predetermined; it unfolds through the encounter itself.

I work where relational praxis, material engagement, and embodied ecology meet. I create spaces where people can participate without self-curating, where urgency and the need for coherence loosen, and where attention can move with what is actually happening rather than with what we expect or intend.

This is developmental work and ethical work. We are practicing forms of relating that shift what becomes possible in the shared field.

Relational Ethics as Practice

When I speak about relational ethics, I’m pointing to the lived, moment-to-moment ways we participate in the shared field:

• meeting the unfamiliar without reorganizing around fear or clarity

• sensing how power moves and choosing participation that does not reproduce domination

• supporting difference without requiring resolution or legibility

• allowing agency to arise from the interaction, not from any individual

• witnessing without interpreting, consuming, or making meaning

These are not ideals to achieve. They are practices, repeatable gestures of participation that gradually reorganize how we meet the world.

Influences & Lineage

For more than twenty years, I’ve taught and facilitated in artistic, somatic, communal, and developmental settings. My work is informed by:

• applied performing arts and Theatre of the Oppressed

• social therapeutics (East Side Institute)

• somatic and neurodevelopmental inquiry

• ritual and symbolic play

• object theatre and material-based exploration

• ecological and place-based ways of sensing

These influences orient my practice, but Deep Puppetry™ and School of the Small and Imperfect are not reducible to any single lineage. The work continues to evolve as a living field co-created by the people who engage it.

If you’d like to explore this work more deeply, you can join Deep Puppetry™, School of the Small and Imperfect, or reach out about longer-term study.

If you’d like to know more about the influences behind this work, you can read about the training and lineages that shape it: here.