Love, Projection, and Puppets
An eight-week live artistic inquiry with a Deep Puppetry™ Certificate of Completion
10 places · Early bird until January 10
What is the difference between loving someone and loving our experience of them?
Love, Projection, and Puppets is a practice for staying in relationship with someone without letting what we think we know become the limit of who they can be.
We rarely encounter another person without also encountering a version of them we have already made.
We remember who they are, and we anticipate what they will say.
We recognize the pattern and interpret their gestures.
We even finish their sentences.
Our experience of someone can become more familiar than the person themselves.
This can happen with people we love, with people we don't know, and with anything we encounter long enough to think we understand.
Because if I don't allow you to exceed my understanding of you, I'm no longer relating to you. I'm relating to my idea of you.
Love, Projection, and Puppets is a live artistic inquiry into what this asks of us.
You will spend eight weeks inside an unusual artistic experiment where projection, familiarity, interpretation, care, and otherness can become visible through things you make and encounters with other people.
We investigate this through puppetry, making, animation, movement, encounter, conversation, and repeated return to the same figures.
You will make things and animate them. Other people will encounter them. You will watch what changes and return to the encounter with what you’ve noticed.
8 weeks · Sundays · 2.5 hours live online · small group · between-session practice
Deep Puppetry™ Certificate of Completion
Sundays, January 31 - March 21, 2027
17:30-20:00 Central European Time (default time zone)
11:30am Eastern US, 8:30am Pacific US
4:30pm UK, 10pm India
750 USD · 660 EUR · 570 GBP
Early bird: 650 USD
Alumni price: 600 USD
Payment plan: 3 × 250 USD
Love is not the same as knowing.
To love someone is not necessarily to understand them. And to understand someone is not necessarily to encounter them. We are constantly making people into something.
A friend becomes the funny one.
A partner becomes the person who always does that.
Or a colleague becomes the difficult one.
Someone becomes familiar, which can feel like intimacy, but familiarity can also become a way of protecting ourselves from surprise. If I already know who you are, I know how to interpret what you do. I know what you mean, what you need, and what to expect.
And if I know all of that, how much room is left for you to exceed me?
We interpret, project, and make meaning. The question isn't whether we can get rid of projection. It's what happens when we notice what we're bringing without deciding that it tells us everything about what we're meeting.
Interpretation doesn't stay inside our own heads; it enters the relationship.
If I decide too quickly what you mean, I haven't only made a mistake about you; I've shaped what kind of person you can be in relation to me.
Our understanding of someone can shape more than how we see them. It can shape what we expect of them, what we think they need, and what we allow ourselves to be surprised by.
Even care can become a way of deciding who someone is and what they need.
What happens when the version of someone we love becomes the version they have to live with?
What becomes possible when we can recognize the version of someone we've made without mistaking that version for the person?
The practice is not to understand less. It is to remain capable of being changed by what we encounter.
YOU CAN WANT A DIFFERENT WORLD AND STILL HELP TO REPRODUCE THIS ONE
What happens between two people is not separate from how we participate in larger worlds.
We can care about autonomy and still organize around someone else's experience. We can value difference and still rush to make it familiar. We can oppose hierarchy and still take responsibility before anyone asks. We can listen and still tell someone what they mean. We can help and still make ourselves necessary.
This isn't because we don't care. Sometimes care, competence, and responsibility carry ways of participating we've learned so well that they stop feeling like choices.
You can't interrupt what you can't perceive.
Through participation, we help shape what becomes possible in relationships, groups, organizations, and communities.
A different world cannot be made entirely from the ways of seeing and participating that produced the present one.
A different world asks us to remain changeable by what we encounter.
So the question is not only: What do I intend? It is also: What does my participation make possible?
“I have learned practices for building relational capacity in ways that do not colonise, extract, consume, define and reduce. Practices that are not about my personal psychology, not about self improvement. I feel I have the means now to practice the resistance, the activism of the minor gesture.”
-Mel Curtiss
THE PUPPET IS A PROBLEM
A piece of paper remains a piece of paper, yet somehow, it becomes someone.
A puppet can become a baby, a stranger, a beloved, a memory. A movement becomes expressive or meaningful. You find yourself waiting for it, worrying about it, wanting something for it.
We know we are doing this, and it happens anyway.
And then the question becomes: what do we do when we can't settle what we're encountering?
We can't simply decide that the puppet is an object and be done with it. We're already caring about it. We're already responding to it.
We can't decide that it's a person either.
So we stay.
Something happens between the object and the person encountering it. The puppet gives us somewhere to remain in relationship without having to resolve what that something is.
This is much harder to practice with people.
If I decide too quickly what you mean, I can respond to the version of you I've already made. But what if I could remain in relationship without requiring my understanding of you to be complete?
How do we let the person we encounter exceed our understanding of them?
The puppet isn't an illustration of this question. It is the material through which we investigate it.
THE PRACTICE
Over eight weeks, we return to the same questions through making, animating, watching, altering, giving, receiving, and encountering again.
You'll work with simple materials and figures that acquire a history over time. The conditions will change. Other people will enter the field. You'll return to familiar material and discover that the relationship has changed.
There may be tenderness, resistance, humor, discomfort, play, or surprise. The course doesn't prescribe what you should discover.
You will:
make and alter figures
animate objects and puppets
return to the same figure over time
let other people encounter and animate your work
change the conditions of an encounter
notice what your interpretations make possible and what they make harder to perceive
bring theory and conversation into experiences that have already happened
Through repeated return, you practice noticing what changes and changing what you do next.
Eight weeks inside the inquiry
Love, Projection, and Puppets grows out of Laura's ongoing artistic practice of Deep Puppetry™ , developed through teaching, artistic research, participatory work, and experimentation.
The questions don't stay inside the puppet. They reach into how we perceive, interpret, care, participate, and relate.
We make things into something through relationship. But what we encounter can also exceed what we make of it.
More than 500 people have worked with Deep Puppetry online and in person. Love, Projection, and Puppets brings this material and artistic inquiry into a sustained exploration of projection, recognition, otherness, love, and encounter.
A Practice of Deep Puppetry
Who This Is For
This is for you if you've noticed how quickly you can decide who someone is, and how difficult it can be to let them remain more than that.
If you've experienced the strange intimacy of knowing someone well and still finding yourself relating to the version of them you've already made. If you've wondered what it would take to stay in relationship without reducing someone to what you understand about them. If you're curious about what puppetry can reveal about perception, relationship, participation, and encounter.
You don't need previous puppetry experience. You don't need to know what you'll discover.
You do need to be willing to make something, encounter it, and stay with what happens.
What People Have Noticed
These reflections come from participants in previous Deep Puppetry programs, discovered through participation itself.
“The sessions made me show up for life. We entered a space where things didn’t need to be fully formed, where we could delay our automatic responses and stay with what was happening. There was an honesty in the attention, without judgment or praise, that moved me deeply. At times I didn’t understand what was happening. But I began to feel that not knowing didn’t mean I was lost.”
-Anita van Ast
“Through this work, I’ve become more willing to stay with difficulty rather than resolve it. I’ve learned to work with stillness, absence, and silence, and to let material and relationship lead rather than trying to control the process. It has changed how I participate in collaborative and group environments.“
-Julia Tribe
“When I think I know something, I hear everyone else’s viewpoint, and it changes my viewpoint. Every minute, we’re all co-creating together. Here I feel like there’s a space to bloom. It’s patient and beautiful.”
-Certificate participant
“After the Deep Puppetry program, the main thing I’ve seen operating in my life so far is a greater comfort with uncertainty and with allowing forces to act through me. I also seem to have more equanimity and space to hold for allowing others their autonomy.”
-Jenn Johnson
“Without the name, it became Other.”
“I found myself not wanting to be in charge.”
“Relation shifted when I looked for surprise.”
THE DEEP PUPPETRY CERTIFICATE
Participating in Love, Projection, and Puppets earns you a Deep Puppetry™ Certificate of Completion.
The certificate recognizes sustained participation in the inquiry, rather than mastery of a fixed method. Certificate requirements: Attend at least 7 of the 8 live sessions and complete approximately five hours total of between-session practice across the eight weeks.
Practical Details
Eight weeks of sustained participation in a small artistic inquiry, with the same figures, questions, relationships, and material returning and changing over time.
Live online
Small group, designed for sustained attention and genuine encounter.
Simple, accessible materials such as paper, fabric, found objects, and household materials. You'll receive guidance before the program begins.
No previous puppetry experience required.
Price: 750 USD · 660 EUR · 570 GBP
Early bird: 650 USD, available until January 10
Alumni price: 600 USD, available to both certificate program graduates and studio participants. Please email me for the discount code.
Payment plan: 3 × 250 USD
PLEASE NOTE: Your payment will be processed in Swedish kronor (SEK); the amounts above are approximate reference prices and may vary slightly with the exchange rate.
Dates and times
Sundays, January 31 - March 21, 2027
17:30-20:00 Central European Time (default time zone)
11:30am Eastern US, 8:30am Pacific US
4:30pm UK, 10pm India
**please note: the final two weeks of the program will begin one hour later for North American time zones
ENTER THE INQUIRY
You don't have to know what you'll discover or arrive with an answer. You don't even have to arrive with a question.
Make something. Let it surprise you. Encounter it again. Let someone else encounter it. Notice what changes. Notice what your participation makes possible.
Then come back.
The practice is not learning to know less. It's learning to remain in relationship with what exceeds what you know.
What might become possible if you could do that with the people, things, and relationships that matter to you?