THE PUPPET AS AN INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT

Olga Levitan, PhD

Department of Theatre Studies, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Israel)

Department of Arts, the David Yellin Academic College of Education (Israel)

The art practice of the European puppet theatre in the last decades of the twentieth

century up to the present time indicates the exclusive importance of the puppeteer as a

performer who is exposed to the audience. This widespread phenomenon required the

puppeteer to be an actor and allowed him to create a decidedly new artistic position

towards the puppet image. For a while, this new position became the fashion and order

of the day, though it also established a new paradigm of the puppet play. The puppeteer

stopped hiding himself behind the screen and behind the puppet. As a result, the miracle

of animation or of transforming a lifeless object into a living being stopped being the

main aesthetic effect of the show, substituted by the magic of double existence

expressed in the exposed relations between the puppeteer and the puppet. While in

traditional models of puppetry the aesthetic meaning of the events had been based on

the secret of transformation, the contemporary practice of puppet theatre highlights the

phenomenon of relations as the central issue of the play. In many cases the issue of

relationships proved to be the central subject of the play and turned out to be more

significant than the plot.1

It is important to mention that the new puppetry paradigm followed a number of

important avant-garde theatre experiences. From one point of view it may be already

banal to once again bring up the exclusive role of the puppet image in Gordon Creig’s

laboratory thoughts, in the experimental Bauhaus theatre workshops, and in the

performances of Jarry, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Kantor. At the same time an attempt to

examine the new puppetry paradigm in the context of innovative theatre allows us to

accept it as a meaningful shift in art language and not as an expression of the accidental,

ambitious desires of the puppeteers. Jarry included puppet images in Ubu Roi, viewing

1 The history of the puppet theatre in previous centuries recognizes several exclusive cases in which the

puppeteer had been exposed to the audience, as in the case of the Punch and Judy shows in England (M.

Byron. Punch and Judy. It's Origin and Evolution. Aberdeen: Waverley press, 1972).

them as an intellectual device that can free the theatre from the conventions of the

bourgeois realistic scene.2 Meyerhold used puppet images as an instrument of

stylization, developing it as a new theatre philosophy, according to which the ends of

theatre art are intellectual theatricality.3 Shlemer saw the puppet image as an instrument

of analysis. Brecht and Kantor used puppetry to form a philosophical generalization

inside theatre reality.4 It is obvious that the innovative tendencies of modern times refer

to the puppet as a distinctive device of the intellectual theatre, characterized by a fusion

of artistic action and philosophical idea.5 This can also explain the apparent

philosophical character of numerous modern puppet shows for grownups, where the

infinitesimal details of the play function as a network of ideas.

The projection of the above mentioned puppetry paradigm on the realm of children’s

theatre may bear witness to its intentions to be a theatre of thought and of intellectual

entertainment that provokes the audience not only to feel and to laugh, but also to think.

At the same time, the very split of the character into half human\ half puppet and the

meaningful ambiguity of this theatre model may be seen as a problematic situation and

a problematic device concerning issues of emotional identification, understanding, and

cognition, which are considered of primary importance for young audiences. The

sophisticated character of the new puppetry paradigm shows that there are neither

simple answers nor universal art decisions, although the examination of specific cases

2 A. Jarry. "Writings on The Theater" in R. Shattuck & S. W. Taylor (eds.). Selected Works of Alfred

Jarry. New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 76-86; J. Fell. Alfred Jarry. An Imagination in Revolt. Madison.

NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 3 В. Mейерхольд. Статьи. Письма. Речи. Беседы. Часть первая 1891-1917. Москва: Искусство,

1968, с. 207-229; M. L. Hoover. Meyerhold. The Art of Conscious Theater. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press; C. Kiebuzinska. Revolutionaries in the Theater. Meyerhold, Brecht and Witkiewicz.

Ann Arbor. London: UMI Research Press, p. 39-75. 4 S. V. Smith. Masks in Modern Drama. Berkley: University of California Press, 1985; M. Kobialka. A

Journey Through Other Spaces. Berkley: University of California Press. N. Witts. Tadeusz Kantor. London: Routledge, 2010. 5 The innovative role of the puppet image and its importance for the new theatre philosophy has been

widely discussed in contemporary theatre research discourse: J. Bell (ed.). Puppets, Masks and

Performance Objects. Cambridge, Massachuettts. London, England: The MIT Press, 2001; G. Berghaus.

Avant-garde Performance. Hampshire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 1-48;

F. Episale. "The Emerging Puppetry Renaissance". A Journal of Performance and Art. 2007: 29 (2), p.

59-65; H. Jurkowski. Aspects of Puppet Theatre. London: Puppet Centre Trust, 1988; S. Kaplin. "A

Puppet Tree. A Model for the Field of Puppet Theatre". The Drama Review, 1999: 43 (3), p. 28-35; S.

Tillis. "The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory". Theatre Topics, 1996: 6 (2), p. 109-

119.

of puppet performances for children may be of true interest for children’s puppet theatre

discourse.6

The present discussion is focused on the comparative analysis of puppet personage

activities and their significance in four Israeli puppet plays from the repertoire of the

Jerusalem Train theatre: a classical fairy tale (Rose Bud, based on Sleeping Beauty), a

political fable play (Gulliver – the Journey to Lilliput), a Holocaust play for children

(Yan’s Daughter), and a love story play (Hide and Seek).7 Though the four plays

mentioned above present different dramatic genres, all of them are based on a model of

storyteller theatre, justifying the coexistence and mutual action of the human actor and

the puppet.

The Rose Bud play, performed and directed by Naomi Yoeli, is composed as a meeting

of two different stories: one is the autobiographical story of the actress, which functions

as a framework, and the other – the story of Sleeping Beauty.8 The play starts in a very

intimate tone, as a kind of personal story that Yoeli is telling the audience. It includes

reminiscences of her childhood - a story about her sisters and her father, who used to

read fairy tales to his daughters. Yoeli explains that Rose Bud signifies her personal

return to the past, while the set – a visual image of Rose Bud that had been designed by

her elder sister - and the whole project is dedicated to the memory of their third, late

sister who, as Yoeli puts it, is watching the play from heaven. However, the authentic

personal speech of the story-teller does not correspond to her exaggerated theatre

6 The problems of child audience reception and the central role of the aesthetic component of the play and

its relations with cognition have been described in S. Schonmann. Theater as a Medium for Children and

Young People: Images and Observations. Dortrecht. Netherlands: Springer, 2006; J. Klein. "A Model of

Aesthetic Processing in Theatre". The Journal of Aesthetic Education. 2005: 39.4, p. 40-57

7 The Train Theatre was founded in Jerusalem in 1981 by four innovative Israeli artists: Alina Ashbel,

Mario Kotliar, Hadass Ofrat, and Michael Schuster. Its first performances took place in a train wagon set up in the public Bell Park in the centre of Jerusalem. In time, The Train Theatre became an important centre of puppet arts, establishing The Annual International Festival of Puppet Theatre, proposing education programs in puppet theatre, and publishing books about puppetry. (http://www.traintheater.co.il/english/about/). See M.Benisrael, R.Mosenson Nelken. The Heart of the Puppet. The New Art Of Puppetry. Jerusalem: Train Theatre. Carmel, 2009 [Hebrew]. 8 Dr. Naomi Yoeli – puppeteer, actress, director, and researcher. She is one of the central figures in

Israeli fringe and innovative storyteller theatre and an award winning artist. In 2011 her play Explosive:

War Tourism received a special prize for developing new ways of theatre thinking at the Annual Akko

Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre. She is also author of the book Puppet Theatre and Children: From

Game to Art. Tel-Aviv: Sal Tarbut Arzi. 2008 [Hebrew].

costume, which simultaneously reminds one of a Pierrot costume and the costume of a

fay, and both of them appear as a kind of theatre phantom: this storyteller is not a true

Pierrot, nor a true fay. The storyteller appears as a theatre figure, whose task is to play

with reality and eliminate the borders between reality and art. This figure is actually a

metaphor of the artist’s core - a conjunction of a very private and extremely public

existence. The artist invites the spectators into his private life and along with it into the

story of sleeping beauty, which turns out to be an inner subject story of the play. The

heart-to-heart relations of the artist-storyteller with the fairy tale of The Sleeping Beauty

bring this story closer to the target audience of four to six year old children.

The Sleeping Beauty tale is performed in a mixed technique of playbook and paper

theatre. The main puppetry image of Rose Bud is a book of plates. Every plate presents

scenes from The Sleeping Beauty in an ironic and naive way. The storyteller turns over

the pages of the book and in this way the events move forward. The book plays the role

of a magic object that represents the joy of reading and contains a picturesque story of

the poor princess. The book allows the storyteller to look inside the pages and to be both

a narrator and a spectator of the story, to reflect the events, and even to physically

contact the personages, helping them to leave the page, go for a walk, and come back to

it. These kind of relations between the puppeteer and the puppet image allow Yoeli to

present the fairy tale as a process of thinking, while paper puppets and picture plates

fulfil the role of animated thoughts. The play actually offers the spectators the

possibility of identifying with the process of thinking, not with the personages or the

events.9

The thematic motives of Rose Bud are quite serious. Noemi Yoeli is talking about the

games of fortune, where accidental and law-governed events have the same power. The

split of events into picture images and storytelling and the split of the narrator into

spectator and performer turn the play into a process of thinking that obviously has a

didactic meaning – it helps the audience to understand the sophisticated character of

human existence and to cope with it. Certain puppet features that are eminent in the

9 The ability of children to accept the world of surreal and abstract images has been discussed in C.

Orenstein. "The New Victory Danish Festival: A New Perspective on Puppetry and Family

Entertainment. Drama Review, 2008: 52 (3), p. 187-195.

appearance of Noemi Yoeli-artist-storyteller allow her to be a kind of mediator between

real-life and the fictional world of the storybook fairy tale. One can view Rose Bud as a

philosophical play for children: the storyteller presents and represents wonderful

possibilities of being both inside and outside the story, while the puppetry image of the

book appears as an instrument of the unique theatrical act of thoughts' animation.

The same position of the storyteller as a spectator of puppetry image appears in the play

Gulliver – The Journey to Lilliput (Director – Amit Drori).10

In this case the storyteller

(Jack Shvili)11

performs the role of Gulliver, who is reporting to the audience about his

adventures in the Lilliputian’s country, while the main emphasis is put on his thoughts

and impressions and not on his actions. The story is presented as a kind of memory

journey. It begins as a story-teller’s game with big cubes, reminiscent of traditional

child entertainment, and proceeds as a magic memory game. At this moment the cubes

turn out to be memory boxes, from which the storyteller, as if he were a true magician,

pulls out toy platforms decorated with mechanical, moving toy personages of the

Lilliputian world. The platforms perform the role of memory pictures, the past suddenly

appears as a possible present, and it is obvious that the most meaningful action of the

Gulliver-storyteller is to watch, to be a spectator of the Lilliputian reality.

The visual puppetry image of the play is composed of two, highly contrasting theatre

props - the totally abstract large cubes and the detailed but extremely tiny toy reality.

This abstract vs. concrete visual world has its expression in the duality of the activities

of the storyteller, whose "Homo Ludens" personality is divided into two separate

substances: a character who enjoys his existence, playing with the abstract cube objects,

and a spectator of the toy world, who is busy with the process of watching, judging, and

thinking about the details of life, of senseless wars and of the absurd policy of the

Lilliputian state. In this situation the tiny proportions of the toy Lilliputian world

represent human existence in a funny and at the same time symbolic view, acting as a

device of alienation that provokes thought and comparison. This toy world is amusing,

10 Amit Drori – a theatre designer and director, belongs to a young generation of Israeli visual theatre

artists. He works mostly for the adult audience and his theatre projects are characterized by a poetic and

surreal way of thinking. His productions have been presented at a number of international festivals. 11 Jack Shvili, an actor, storyteller, and street theatre performer; took part in several innovative Street

Theatre projects in Jerusalem.

jolly, and friable. Its similarity to the conventional human world is a kind of warning,

and its delicate portrayal the most reasonable proof of its fragility and vulnerability to

be ruined by any kind of political power struggle. In fact Gulliver – The Journey to

Lilliput is a common sense response to the absurdity of war and mutual abhorrence, and

it is an appeal to the common sense of the young audience, children of seven-eight years

old.

It is worth noting that the play Gulliver – The Journey to Lilliput represents a specific

poetic reality, whereby the laws of rational intellection are called off and the detailed

toy reality – not the abstract images (cubes) – function as the storyteller’s instrument of

thought. The ironically ambivalent story-teller’s behaviour, manifest in his desire to

play with the abstract and to think by means of concrete images, signifies the principal

difference between the conventional, summarizing thought of a grown-up person and

the imaginative thought that characterizes both the child and the artist.

As in Rose Bud, the key puppet personage in Gulliver – The Journey to Lilliput is not a

character, but a complicated image – the book, the toy world, where the concepts of

presentation and representation intersect. This image is apparently presented to the

audience by the puppeteer-storyteller, and it represents the idea of the fictional world as

a theatricalist act of the storyteller’s thinking. The situation described above definitely

contains emphasized phases of observation, reflection, and understanding, which have

their natural outcome in the child audience. Child-spectators, inclined to accept the

issues as presented by the storyteller and to some extent to identify with the storyteller’s

view, undergo the same experience, learning the pleasure of thinking and understanding.

Another example of the complicated relationships between the puppet image and the

playact of thinking exists in Ian’s Daughter by Patricia O’Donovan.12

Ian’s Daughter,

a puppet theatre play based on the "true story" Of Tortoises and Other Jews by Hannah

12 Dr. Patricia O'Dodovan –puppeteer, actress, and designer; born in Argentina and immigrated to Israel

in 1978. She teaches puppet theatre at The David Yellin Academic College of Education. Her plays for

children Father Ate a Tiger, A Touch of Light, and Hanging in the Sky conjoin the views of researcher and

poet, and they have been presented at numerous international festivals. The performances of O'Dodovan

are discussed in M.Benisrael, R.Mosenson Nelken, ibid 7, 80-81, 114-115, 166-167. See also Naomi Yoeli, ibid 8, 39-41, 45-47.

Yakin, is presented as a small girl’s confession about her personal Holocaust experience

in Holland. The play’s subject requires a search for theatrical means capable of

expressing inconceivable tragedy, while the nature of the audience requires particular

consideration of its age and employment of special means in order to allow exposure of

the horror without damaging the viewers’ mental health. This hidden polarity between

the demands of the subject matter and the audience stands at the core of the play’s

characteristic artistic language and tensions.

In the aforementioned situation, the initial occupational questions confronting the artist

concern the choice of artistic framework and concrete thematic motifs (or objects)

which will make it possible to present the Holocaust to children. Patricia O’Donovan

chooses the framework of a story with the storyteller in a dual role: she draws her

audience closer to the subject, while helping the children face its frightening aspects and

preventing them from approaching the horror too closely. The artist appears as a

character presenting personal childhood memories, and in this manner relates the events

that took place in a Dutch village during the Second World War. However, a large

portion of the story is told from the perspective of the girl, Anita, daughter of a Jewish

mother and a Dutch father and the tale’s main heroine. Anita does not talk about the fear

of death and concentration camps – rather, she describes everyday changes in her life,

which occur as a result of the German conquest, such as her friends deserting her

because of the rumours that her mother was Jewish. As a result, the child is forced to

deny and contradict her connection to the Jewish people. Anita is unable to understand

the events around her – she expresses her astonishment at the new world order,

suddenly divided into those who are “good and like us” (the Germans, or at least the

Dutch) and those who are foreign and bad, namely Jews. The child interprets the events

as loss of rhyme and reason – she emphasizes the absurd elements of this view by

playing games with the puppetry image: one of the dolls, different from the others in

some manner, is declared “Jewish” and banished. Ian’s Daughter is actually Anita’s

show which, by means of her dolls, presents sequences from her family’s life. The

double frame effect of the play, which contains two storytellers – an artist, presenting

the story of Anita, and Anita, presenting a story of her family, provides the meta-

theatrical effect and emphasizes the importance of the puppet personages as the tools of

meta-theatre language. The theatre-within-theatre distances the Holocaust events, but

does not cause any emotional alienation. The puppetry world of the play brings its non-

childish thematic closer to the child audience.

The play’s plot develops on two planes. The linear plane presents what happens to

Anita’s family at the start of the Nazi conquest, when her mother is forced to wear the

yellow star and her father pretends to serve the Nazis, while in fact saving her mother

and helping many other Jews who hide in his house. This level is important but serves

chiefly as a backdrop to the associative plane, wherein the emotional world of a child

attempting to understand events around her is revealed. The central theme of the

associative plane is the character of the “other” and the attitudes toward this character.

The associative plane of the play stresses the importance of the puppetry image: Anita’s

puppet show appears as a fusion of an extremely concrete childish game and its

symbolic meaning. One black doll is different from the other white and blond dolls,

and Anita finds it necessary to explain to her sister why she also claims the black doll as

her daughter. The German officer who appears in Anita’s dream negates all of the dolls

who appear strange or different to him, including the black doll and a giraffe with a

short neck, and throws them away. Anita’s best friend, a Dutch girl, accuses Anita’s

turtle doll of being different from her own doll. Over the course of the play Anita

discovers that being “different” means being Jewish. When she plays with her blocks, it

becomes evident that the yellow blocks, differing from the red blocks, represent the

Jews. On both levels, the emotional innocence of the child is evident, but whereas on

the linear plane Anita attempts with all her strength to deny that her mother is Jewish,

on the associative level she returns to her feelings of otherness. Her games virtually

emphasize the ridiculousness of separating people into categories of “same” and

“different”.

The fact that the artist remains seated for an extended period of time in the middle of the

space signifying Anita’s home, restricts her freedom of movement and at the same time

emphasizes the importance of every movement. The artist’s body also “speaks” in a

symbolic manner, and at times her limbs become properties whose function is to

represent places and events: at one point her legs are spread out to take on the shape of a

boat in which the dolls - Anita’s “children” - sit and her upper body represents the

boatman rowing the craft. One of the impressive climaxes of the show is a segment

without words, in which the artist paints yellow stains, representing the Jew, on one of

her legs and one of her arms. In this manner, her body is divided/deconstructed into two

elements – one hand “is Jewish” and one is not. In these moments, the weeping strains

of klezmer music are heard, and a pantomime game begins between the marked and

unmarked hand, over the course of which it becomes clear to everyone that one has

trouble existing without the other. This is an expression of total acting: through the

components of her own body, by turning the human body into a kind of puppetry image,

the artist reveals the absurd element of racism. Unlike the storytellers of the previous

two plays, Rose Bud and Gulliver, the storyteller of Ian’s Daughter is first of all a

performer and not a spectator. Puppetry language, which is one of the most important

artistic tools in her performance, serves as an instrument of symbolic generalization.

In order to play the character of a child, Patricia O’Donovan decides to make herself

shorter – rather than standing, she sits cross-legged opposite her audience, at their eye-

level. This helps to build a rapport with the audience, who see that she is like them – a

short character in a world of tall people. In addition to this, Anita, a flesh and blood

character, has a “double” – a wooden doll constructed from pieces of furniture,

reminiscent of archaic sculpture. It is interesting to note that this doll, along with the

dolls representing the rest of Anita’s family, is similar to the “atsei hayim”, or wooden

arms of torah scrolls. In essence, Anita’s story is structured upon three characters: the

adult storyteller, the child Anita, and the doll symbolizing the child. Speech passes from

the first character to the second and from the second to the third, and therein lies the

unusual intensity of the show, which captures audience members of different ages. In

this way, the effect of a play-within-a-play is also created: The artist plays the character

of Anita, who presents her story, in which the doll plays her character. These elements

help to express the play’s duality, which by means of a child’s story draws the audience

nearer to the subject of the Holocaust, while at the same time distancing it, effecting

defamiliarization from frightening events. The merging and simultaneous existence of

drawing in and defamiliarization defines the unique artistic character of this show.

Hide and Seek by Ion Popesky-Gopo, performed by Isaac Pekar,13

presents the story of

accidental love between two funny, lonely puppet personages – a little mouse and a

wooden, one-legged ballerina, who meet somewhere in an old cellar. In this play, the

puppeteer remains true to the conventional norms of the profession – he is directing a

puppet. However this conventional function becomes extremely multifarious in the play

Hide and Seek. In fact, Pekar presents the technical act of directing the puppet as a

highly artistic act: he applies only the slightest touch to the puppet yet somehow the

small mouse becomes a living personality, amusing the audience with his laughing,

crying, and fighting for love. The puppeteer simultaneously continues to direct the

mouse and to respond to the feelings and activities of the puppet personage. In a rather

paradoxical way these moments of puppeteer’s emotional involvement, his eagerness to

hear and to help the puppet personage, cause an effect of alienation, provoking

spectators five to seven years old to think about the events. The theatrical activities of

the puppeteer have an obvious symbolic meaning and represent the experience of

understanding the other.

Another mode of directing puppets appears in Pekar’s attitude to the ballerina. In this

case his contact is exposed and even flaunted. The extremely slow movement of the

artist’s hand provides a kind of close-up effect and creates a solemn turn of the

ballerina’s head and together with it – a poetical atmosphere in the play. The animation,

presented in the framework of artificially delayed action, definitely reminds one of an

act of creation, its beauty and its ingenious simplicity. At the same time there is no

pathetic mood in the play. The relatively large physical proportions of the ballerina

accentuate the dual comic\gloomy character of the situation, revealing the impossibility

of love between the two (small mouse, tall ballet dancer). The duality is also exposed in

the puppeteer’s attitude towards the puppet personages. The puppeteer admires the

ballerina and loves the mouse; he is extremely kind with both of them, exemplifying

one of the most sophisticated verities: not always does one have to choose, sometimes

to be human means to experience the same emotions towards different figures.

13 Isaac Pekar – puppeteer and actor; immigrated to Israel in 1979. His artistic experience includes work

at the Sergei Obraztsov State Puppet Theatre of Moscow. His colleagues used to call him "The Paganini

of the puppet theatre". See Benisrael, Mosenson Nelken, ibid 7, 59-61

The third mode of the puppeteer’s activities may be understood as a symbolic exercise

in experiencing similar emotions towards different figures. While using this mode, the

puppeteer creates a virtuoso effect of double existence as he plays the same role of the

same personage along with the puppet. At these moments the characters of mouse and

ballerina are presented as a duality, part human and part puppet, which emphasizes the

meaning of their emotional experience and represents the diversity of existence as well.

Usually these moments are those that arouse the most excited responses from the child

audience.

In conclusion, an attempt to discuss the function and the role of the puppet in four

different Israeli puppet plays, based on the exposed contact between the puppeteer and

the puppet, brings to light a phenomenon of intellectual, and to some extent,

philosophical theatre for children. The dramatic situations related to puppeteer\puppet

relationships, effects of duality and double existence, issues of meta-theatre, and highly

sophisticated thematic motives express the philosophical character of the plays.

The four plays discussed above reveal the variety of contactual modes with the puppet,

turning these modes into meaningful thematic motives, with the most unique one being

the mechanism of thinking and its magical character.

In the framework of puppeteer\puppet contacts, one can follow the representation of

ambivalent interaction between improvisation and order. The puppet appears here as

representing form and order, while the puppeteer, being the main source of

improvisation, determines the thematic and aesthetic structure of the play.

Bibliography:

J. Bell (ed.). Puppets, Masks and Performance Objects. Cambridge, Massachuettts.

London, England: The MIT Press, 2001.

G. Berghaus. Avant-garde Performance. Hampshire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

M. Byron. Punch and Judy. It's Origin and Evolution. Aberdeen: Waverley press, 1972.

F. Episale. "The Emerging Puppetry Renaissance". A Journal of Performance and Art. 2007: 29

(2), 59-65.

J. Fell. Alfred Jarry. An Imagination in Revolt. Madison. NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson

University Press, 2005.

M. L. Hoover. Meyerhold. The Art of Conscious Theater. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press.

A. Jarry. "Writings on The Theater" in R. Shattuck & S. W. Taylor (eds.). Selected

Works of Alfred Jarry. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

H. Jurkowski. Aspects of Puppet Theatre. London: Puppet Centre Trust, 1988.

S. Kaplin. "A Puppet Tree. A Model for the Field of Puppet Theatre". The Drama

Review, 1999: 43 (3), 28-35.

C. Kiebuzinska. Revolutionaries in the Theater. Meyerhold, Brecht and Witkiewicz. Ann

Arbor. London: UMI Research Press.

J. Klein. "A Model of Aesthetic Processing in Theatre". The Journal of Aesthetic

Education. 2005: 39.4, 40-57.

M. Kobialka. A Journey Through Other Spaces. Berkley: University of California Press.

C. Orenstein. "The New Victory Danish Festival: A New Perspective on Puppetry and

Family Entertainment. Drama Review, 2008: 52 (3), p. 187-195.

S. Schonmann. Theater as a Medium for Children and Young People: Images and

Observations. Dortrecht. Netherlands: Springer, 2006.

S. V. Smith. Masks in Modern Drama. Berkley: University of California Press, 1985.

S. Tillis. "The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory". Theatre Topics,

1996: 6 (2), 109-119.

N. Witts. Tadeusz Kantor. London: Routledge, 2010.

M.Benisrael, R.Mosenson Nelken. The Heart of the Puppet. The New Art Of Puppetry. Jerusalem: Train Theatre. Carmel, 2009 [Hebrew].

N. Yoeli. Puppet Theatre and Children: From Game to Play. Tel-Aviv: Sal Tarbut

Artzi, 2008 [Hebrew].

В. Mейерхольд. Статьи. Письма. Речи. Беседы. Часть первая 1891-1917. Москва:

Искусство, 1968, с. 207-229;

Olga Levitan (Israel)

Olga Levitan holds an MA degree in theatre theory and history from The Institute of

Theatre, Cinema, and Music (Leningrad, Russia) and a PhD from The Hebrew

University in Jerusalem. She started her professional career as a theatre critic in

Leningrad and Moscow. At the end of the 1980s she participated in a puppet theatre

critics’ working group, guided by Prof. A. Nekrilova and held a position as art expert

of the Children’s Theatre Section in the Union of Russian Theatre Artists (Leningrad).

In 1989 she immigrated to Israel and continued her activities at the Department of

Theatre Studies in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in the Department of Arts in

Education in David Yellin Academic College for Education. The fields of her research

are related to multicultural theatre phenomena and to theatre for young audiences. Her

teaching experience includes courses in Russian theatre (Russian Avant-garde

Direction, Chekhov and the Art of Direction), Israeli theatre (Canon Drama in the

Israeli Theatre, The Actor in the Israeli Theatre, Theatre and Holocaust, Theatre and

Society, Israeli Theatre: Central Artists and Plays) and children’s theatre (Children’s

Theatre, The Image of Child in Theatre and Cinema, TV Programs for Young

Audiences). She had a major part in the organization of the following conferences:

Theatre in the Multicultural Society (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008),

Theatre and Holocaust, a joint project of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the

Laboratory Theatre in Jerusalem (2009), Jewish Theatre and Jews’ Tours (The Hebrew

University of Jerusalem (2010), Modernistic Theatre: Between Utopia and Apocalypse

(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012). She publishes reviews on modern Israeli

theatre productions in Teatron, the theatre journal of the University of Tel-Aviv, and

she is a member of the Public Repertoire Committee of The Israeli Ministry of

Education.

Selected Publications:

"Habima and Russian Avangarde: In Exile", The Other Shore. Slavic Studies Journal 2

, 2011, pp. 43-88 [Russian].

"Russian Theater in Israel: One Hundred Years Together", Canadian – American Slavic

Studies 45, 2011, pp. 76-106 [Russian].

"The Holocaust Themes in Israeli Fringe Theatre", Teatron 26, Tel-Aviv, 2009, pp. 65-

73 [Hebrew].

"The Dybbuk: Documents and Evidences from The Russian Discourse" in S. Levy, D.

Yerushalmi (eds.) Do Not Chase Me away/ New Studies on The Dybbuk, Tel Aviv,

2009, pp. 39-56 [Hebrew].

"Chekhov and Ibsen: Characteristic of Dramatic Conflict", Odeskaya, M. (ed.). Ibsen,

Strindberg, Chekhov. Moscow, 2007, pp. 129-142 [Russian].

Theater in the Land of Israel: Between Hebrew and Yiddish (1904-1914) in Theatralia

7. Theater and Jewish Studies, Mirabel, 2005, pp. 139-151.

"Chekhovian Women in the Israeli Theatre", Maske und Kothurn, Vienna, 1999, pp. 93-

100.