Love, Projection, and Puppets
An eight-week live artistic inquiry and Deep Puppetry™ certificate program
What is the difference between loving someone and loving our experience of them?
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.
What would it take to stay in relationship with someone who exceeds our understanding of them?
Love, Projection, and Puppets is an eight-week live artistic inquiry into these questions.
We investigate them 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.
Over eight weeks, you practice staying in relationship when what you encounter exceeds what you thought you knew.
You don’t try to stop interpreting, projecting, recognizing, or making meaning. Those things are part of how we relate.
Instead, you learn to notice what your understanding makes possible, what it makes harder to perceive, and what happens when the encounter gives you something you didn't account for.
This is a practice for developing your capacity to:
stay with an encounter after your first interpretation appears, rather than immediately acting from it
notice when your understanding starts substituting for encounter and begins determining what someone or something can be
perceive how your participation reinforces or changes what becomes possible
remain alterable when what you encounter exceeds what you expected
return to a relationship without assuming the next encounter will be the same as the last and remain willing to discover that you have changed, too
8 weeks · Live online · Maximum 10 participants
Deep Puppetry™ Certificate of Completion
Sundays, November 1 - December 20
17:30-20:00 Central European Time
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.
What I perceive changes what I notice, which changes how I respond. Then my response changes the encounter.
What happens when we can perceive our experience of another without mistaking that experience for the other?
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
The same thing can happen beyond individual relationships. 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.
We've learned these ways of participating so well that they can stop feeling like choices. And sometimes what feels like care, competence, or responsibility is also carrying something forward that we don't intend.
You can't interrupt what you can't perceive.
We don't only participate in relationships, conversations, organizations, classrooms, and communities. Through participation, we help shape what becomes possible within them. The way I enter an encounter changes what can happen there. What I assume, what I notice, what I take responsibility for, what I make room for? All of it becomes part of the relationship.
A different world cannot be made entirely from the ways of seeing and participating that produced the present one.
So the question is not only: What do I intend? It is also: What does my participation make possible?
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.
None of what we see is simply contained inside the object, but it isn't quite right to say we're only making it up, either.
Something happens between the object and the person encountering it.
The material has weight. It has balance and resistance. It falls differently than you intended. Another person encounters the same figure and sees something you didn't.
You project, recognize, imagine, care, and then the thing you encounter does something you didn't expect.
The puppet gives us a strange place to practice something that is much harder with people:
How do we stay in relationship when what we're encountering exceeds what we thought we knew?
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
This is not eight weeks of talking about ideas. The ideas emerge through practice.
The practice isn't about arriving at the right interpretation. It's about making enough room for an encounter to continue after an interpretation has appeared.
Through repeated return, you practice remaining responsive when what you encounter asks you to revise what you thought you knew.
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
What People Have Noticed
These reflections come from participants in previous Deep Puppetry programs, discovered through participation itself.
“This work helped stitch my theoretical thinking into lived participation. It changed how I understand inquiry itself - not as something to solve, but something to stay with and allow to take form through attention and interaction.” -Karalyn Riepert
“Without the name, it became Other.”
“I found myself not wanting to be in charge.”
“Relation shifted when I looked for surprise.”
Who This Is For
This is for you if you've ever noticed yourself deciding what someone means before you've really encountered them.
If you've experienced the strange intimacy of thinking you know someone, and then discovered something you didn't expect. If you've wondered what it would take to stay in relationship when someone exceeds what you thought you knew 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.
THE DEEP PUPPETRY CERTIFICATE
Completing all eight weeks of 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 participate in the between-session practice.
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
Maximum 10 participants, small enough 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 October 18
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, November 1 - December 20
17:30-20:00 Central European Time
11:30am Eastern US, 8:30am Pacific US
4:30pm UK, 10pm India
10 places only.
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?