deep puppetry™
A material practice for engaging the relational field.
Deep Puppetry™ is a way of working with simple materials that lets us participate in relationship without the habits that rush in to organize it. If we animate something without immediately making it a character or a tool or a story, we find ourselves in a different kind of space. Movement starts to show up on its own. Agency feels shared. And the pressure to understand what’s going on stops being the point.
A piece of paper or a square of fabric becomes a place where life appears through contact. This life is neither inside the object nor generated by the animator but emerging between the two. The material makes a kind of relational activity visible that is usually too small, too quick, or too overshadowed to notice in ordinary interaction.
Deep Puppetry™ is relational, developmental, and ethical work. Its ethics are not about being good or careful; they are about supporting conditions where new relational life can take form.
Why begin with material?
The human field is loud. Identity, hierarchy, fear of getting it wrong, and self-curation tend to shape the moment before anything has even happened. Material interrupts unconscious scripts. Objects do not ask to be understood. They do not mirror us. They do not expect reciprocity or coherence.
Objects make it easier to perceive:
where urgency creeps into our hands
where we contract around uncertainty
where we rush toward meaning or control
where agency decentralizes without needing our permission
where relationship wants to move differently than we do
The puppet’s life is not pretend; it’s emergent motion. Because of this, we can see our relational habits without shaming, interpreting, or explaining them.
Working with material loosens inherited patterns that restrict the relational field. It creates space for something else to appear.
What we practice
These are not techniques or psychological exercises. They are small relational practices, things we do again and again until they start to reorganize how we meet the world:
letting movement come before meaning
staying with what’s happening instead of organizing it
allowing agency to emerge between partners
supporting aliveness without managing it
meeting difference without needing to resolve it
witnessing without interpreting or consuming
allowing multiple trajectories to coexist
participating in a way that gives the field room to develop
We start with material because the stakes are low, but the work doesn’t stay there. It returns to the human world, where it matters.
Why this matters
Most harm in relationship doesn’t come from intention. It comes from reflex, the quiet, fast habits that shape how we move, listen, see, touch, and withdraw.
Deep Puppetry™ lets us interrupt those reflexes by placing ourselves in a relational context where they don’t automatically take over. When the field behaves differently, we behave differently. And when we behave differently, new relational life becomes possible in our families, classrooms, communities, and political spaces.
Development doesn’t happen inside the self; it happens in relationship. Deep Puppetry™ gives us a place where that development is visible, tangible, and non-hypothetical. This is relational development as an emergent consequence of how we participate.
Where Deep Puppetry™ comes from
Deep Puppetry™ did not arrive as a method. It grew through years of teaching, experimenting, and paying close attention to what happened in the room. Each cohort shaped it. The practice emerged from the field itself.
It carries influences from applied performing arts, object animation, somatic inquiry, social therapeutics, ritual studies, and ecological ways of sensing. These streams shape the orientation, but the practice belongs to none of them. It continues to evolve as a living field co-created with the people who engage it.
What People Say
“We keep noticing how the work slows us down and how our attention gets wider and more honest. When we stay with the puppet, more becomes visible, and we can actually feel what’s happening instead of trying to make it happen. Witnessing is powerful, especially when we avoid deciding what it means. It feels like we don’t have to explain ourselves.
Many of us feel that thinking happens through our hands and ideas come from doing. The atmosphere is gentle and spacious. It’s a place where we can follow what is emerging, even when it is strange or quiet. A big theme was surprise - what the puppet invited and what we could find when we didn’t get in the way.”
— a collaborative testimonial from a full cohort
“Our class sessions, readings, and assignments have introduced me to new ways of feeling, honoring, and relating to living and nonliving materials. The program has challenged many of my beliefs about puppetry and has supplemented my other formal training by deepening the relational nature of this work.”
— ciara kay
“I feel as though I’ve found a new language and structure that weaves together overarching themes in my creative practice. Deep Puppetry offers a fresh lens through which to engage complex questions that emerge in both artmaking and life.
I see Deep Puppetry as providing a tangible container for exploring vast and liminal questions, encouraging them to be felt and integrated rather than achieved or overcome. This in itself is a radical act, as it slips outside rigid and categorized structures of dominant cultural narratives.
In the process of enlivening puppets, I find myself transformed, and it becomes unclear who is inhabiting whom, dissolving notions of hierarchy and control. By caring for them, we become attuned to their strengths and vulnerabilities, perhaps gaining important lessons that extend to our broader surroundings.”
— Karina Hashim Faulstich
“This program has opened so much for me in the way I live my life and in my creative practice. It has connected me with the experimental part of myself, where there is no way to do wrong, and it has cracked the perfectionist mask I built for years.
Witnessing others do the same exercises has opened my perspective to new questions, explorations, and possibilities. The general tone and pace of the program allow for time and breath. Every thought feels like a thought in progress, and that shows that another pace is possible.”
— aida calderon galvis
“This time together has offered so much to my academic work, helping stitch all the thinking I’ve been doing into substance - making it earthly. I’m excited about rethinking what a research question does: what it looks like to breathe life into a question through our hands and attention, to attend to what appears without having to interpret it or make it intelligible. It has felt to me that a Zoom room is a real place where things are happening, where relating is taking place. That is such a feat.”
— karalyn riepert
three ways to study online
certificate program
The flagship eight-week program and the final time it will run in this format.
Future iterations will be longer, larger, and priced accordingly.
We work in a relational field created with material, a zone where our usual relational scripts loosen and new forms of participation become possible. Movement emerges from the interaction itself, not from control, and participants learn to follow that emergence with care, precision, and curiosity. No performance or art experience required.
level two certificate
An eight-week program for graduates of the certificate offering. Students select a particular focus for deeper inquiry and co-create practices to support and cross-pollinate what emerges in the shared field. Decidedly weirder, deeper, and more trippy than level one.
online WORKSHOP
Witnessing Without Colonizing: a two-hour experiential puppetry workshop to practice witnessing as an embodied ethical act. Can we stay in contact with what we see and not manage, consume, or interpret it? Can we perceive without possession? Where do we reach for meaning, and what do we miss when we do? Can we learn to see and accompany with more care and curiosity? Open to everyone. No experience needed. December 14th.
