What this is

Deep Puppetry is a material-based relational practice that works with simple objects to magnify the felt experience of relational fields.

Objects are not treated as characters or symbols, nor are they stand-ins for the self or Other. Animacy is distributed and appears through relation. The practice attends to what happens when contact, timing, and attention are allowed to organize movement.

The work trains sensitivity to how dominance, withdrawal, urgency, care, and responsibility appear in relation.

Participant reflection:
In Deep Puppetry, 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 means now to practice the resistance, the activism of the minor gesture. -Mel Curtiss

What this is not

Deep Puppetry is not:

• performance training

• art-making

• therapy

• a method for self-expression or healing

The practice does not use interpretation, symbolism, or psychological framing. The aim is not insight.

What is practiced

Deep Puppetry works through small, repeatable experiments using fabric and other minimal materials.

Participants practice noticing:

• when movement is taken over

• when urgency enters the hands

• when care becomes control

• when relation shifts without permission

The object is not animated into meaning. Our attention stays with the field that forms between body, material, and context.

What participation is like

Sessions are live and facilitated. Instructions are sparse, and movement is simple. Discussion is brief and non-interpretive.

Relational changes are allowed to occur without being named or resolved.

Participant reflection:
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

Who this is for

This practice attracts educators, facilitators, artists, therapists, organizers, and others working in relational or ethical contexts.

No background in puppetry or performance is required.

Current offerings

Deep Puppetry is offered as multi-week, limited-enrollment practice spaces.

The flagship offering is Deep Puppetry Level One, an eight-week live online program focused on entering relation, noticing power as it moves and staying with emergent conditions without taking over.

Advanced and invitational work may be offered periodically.

Participant reflection:
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

Boundaries and care

This work can be tender. It is not designed to replace therapeutic, medical, or community support. Participation assumes willingness to work within a defined container without expectation of outcome or resolution.

How to engage

Details about upcoming Deep Puppetry programs are shared when enrollment opens.