In Your Sight and in Your Mind: The Puppeteer as Cognitive Guide in Koryū Nishikawa V and Tom Lee’s Shank’s Mare

Abstract: Audiences and scholars of puppetry performances often suggest that a puppeteer who has mastered the art is one who manages to be forgotten or ignored. However, the notion of the ignored and neutral puppeteer leaves out nuances of the puppeteers’ guiding of the audience’s experience and their emotional understanding of the production. In this article, I examine a scene from Shank’s Mare , a collaboration between master puppeteers Koryū Nishikawa V (Japan) and Tom Lee (US), to explore how puppeteers capitalize on inherent limitations in the audience’s perception and memory. Much as magicians do, puppeteers enhance spectators’ experience while obscuring their own performance strategies. Using gaze-tracking to study how audiences of puppetry attend to the different stage elements, I examine the gaze of viewers alongside artists and spectators’ interviews and performance analysis. My pioneering exploration accounts for processes audience members might not be aware of but that influence their experience. Using this method, I shed light on the comprehensive embodied knowledge that puppeteers have developed through their praxis and offer new avenues to explore the multilayered ways in which audiences engage with fiction.