deep puppetry™
A material-led practice of relational development
Deep Puppetry™ is a relational practice that works with simple materials to show how development happens in real time, in the space between you and something that is not you. We use cloth, paper, and found objects, not as symbols or characters, but as partners in a field we create together.
When you meet a piece of fabric this way, you start to notice the habits you bring everywhere: trying to steer, wanting to understand quickly, pulling back when something feels strange. The practice slows the moment enough that these reflexes become visible and workable.
This isn’t about puppetry as performance. It’s relational work made material.
why development is part of this work
The world needs forms of relating that don’t repeat domination or collapse around fear. But development doesn’t happen because we believe something. It happens through contact, through what we do when we meet another being or form and let that meeting shape us.
Deep Puppetry™ gives us a place where our learned relational patterns can loosen and where something unplanned can take the lead. That something is often small: a shift in the paper, the breath you didn’t know you were holding, a movement that doesn’t belong to you alone.
When we let emergence guide the interaction, new possibilities show up that we could not have designed.
how the practice works
We work with very simple materials. A sheet of paper becomes a temporary body, not a blank screen for projection but something with weight, timing, and its own way of moving. As you meet it, you can start to feel when you push, when you disappear, when you rush to name what’s happening, when you try to clean up ambiguity.
We don’t try to fix any of this. We learn to stay in the encounter long enough for a different pattern to appear.
The relationship reorganizes. You loosen. The object surprises you. Something shared starts to move.
lineage
Deep Puppetry™ draws from my backgrounds in applied performing arts, somatics, object theatre, social therapeutics, and embodied ecology but it does not belong to any one of these lineages. It has grown through twenty years of teaching, experimentation, and long-term practice with students around the world. It continues to evolve as a living, collaborative field.
what makes this possible
As the work deepens, people often discover they can:
stay with the unfamiliar without managing it
influence without taking over
follow without losing themselves
let difference remain present without reorganizing around comfort
allow meaning to arise instead of forcing it
These aren’t skills in a self-improvement sense. They are shifts in how we participate in the world socially, politically, ecologically.
why this matters
The habits that create harm (tightening around difference, rushing for coherence, holding power unconsciously) begin in tiny gestures. Deep Puppetry™ brings these gestures into view in a low-stakes, material field. Here, justice is not an idea. It’s something we practice through attention, pacing, and the way we meet what’s in front of us.
Working with the puppet becomes a way of reorganizing the relational field so that more forms of life and more ways of relating can exist.
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 explore how power and oppression shape our bodies, how autonomous beings emerge through contact, and how to meet mutual need even within constraint. 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.
