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My answer to a question: Do puppets have souls?

The puppeteer supplies "soul" and "heart" to a puppet with his charactarization & performance. It is the very quality I look for in good puppetry.

The puppet is indeed a prop or even more specific - a tool. It is created with a certain look & abitlity to achieve movement. Those two qualities, by themselves, don't mean much. A beautifully made puppet can still be manipulated with simple mechanical moves & complete a performance. Such a performance does little to capture or move an audience. They cannot empathize with a mechanical character & artificial actions. The audience may laugh & be charmed by the "cuteness", but all of this is a type of superficial relationship. It is a hollow example of the ability of puppetry.

A good puppeteer, using the puppet as an extension of his own body & mind, can produce a performance that transends the mechanical. He achieves a puppet that "breathes" and "feels". It reacts to stimuli in the moment. The puppeteer is totally absorbed into the character of the puppet & lives its performance. This is the "soul" or "heart" of the puppet. Audiences frequently discribe this puppet performance as "spooky". This is because they have been pulled into a deeper relationship with a clearly artificial character. They forgot the puppeteer & the mechanics of the puppet & experienced it's soul. This is the type of magic that good puppetry creates.

Without the puppeteer present, the puppet becomes the simple prop or tool, once again, except for the memories of performance that people may project onto a famous puppet displayed in an exhibit.

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Comment by Toby van Eck on May 19, 2012 at 2:08pm: Hi Philip, Thanks for this, I could not have said it any better. Greetings - TOBY

Comment by Joseph Emory on May 20, 2012 at 12:56am: So beautifully articulated. "Thanks Phillip"

Comment by Fan of Marionettes on August 13, 2012 at 10:32am: I haven´t logged into this site for ages and one of the first thing I´m happy to read is your nice article here. Thank you Mr. Huber for sharing this with us here. I also discovered parts of the "heart and soul"-idea when I wanted to show puppest though pictures. It´s not the same when seeing them in action indeed. A motionless picture simply can´t capture that special magic.

Comment by Robert Kenneth Gluckson on October 16, 2012 at 1:04am: I agree that the soul comes through the puppeteer, but I can't help but feel the puppets themselves have a soul. I don't like to see them hanging upside down backstage, and I know my companion Arnold (shown, photo) was very upset when he got put away in a trunk for almost a year. Finally his cries were so loud I had to go through all my boxes until I found him. I'll never forget when my first puppet came "alive," I was carrying it around hoping to tune into puppet reality when I started playing with him and a real character came out. So, yes, I think puppets have souls.