sabrina recoules quang
Cross disciplinary research between puppetry and textile

I am a puppeteer and puppet maker researching new textile materials for designing puppetry performances at the Royal college of Art in London. In my research, I propose to consider puppetry as a discursive practice that "is not a human-based activities but specific material (re)configuratings of the world' (Barad 2007, 183). In this context, I entangle textile and puppetry in puppet systems through making, staging and performing technological and natural materials embedded in textile structures. The puppet systems leaves the boundaries between textile artefacts and puppet characters, in an opalescent state while staging the oscillations of the textile artefacts between materialness (Nimkulrat 2009) and textileness (Buso et al. 2022). The study evaluates how the new materials embedded in textile structures act upon the symbolic and semiotic dimensions of the puppet systems. Furthermore, it analyses the links between different puppetry forms of performance and the choice of materials and textile structures.