For Jerusalem-based artist Li Lorian, puppet shows are not just for kids
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“When I say to people that I do puppetry, I know what they’re thinking,” she said, demonstrating her suddenly animated right hand. “But for me,” she continued, “puppetry and object theater are really about the materials telling a story. If I have a wooden puppet, its story is entirely different from a puppet made of paper, or of stone. There is drama in the material, a story that we can feel immediately, as soon as we look at it.”
It’s that kind of dramatic potential that comes to the fore in Lorian’s latest work, “South Hebron Hills: Projection,” a puppet show using everyday objects that is perceived as a one-woman performance. Lorian begins with a self-made map of the South Hebron Hills region of the West Bank, complete with a color-coded legend that charts a familiar geography: Israeli settlements, Palestinian villages, access roads and military firing zones. However, Lorian’s map is also inhabited by photographs, playing cards, stamps, matchbooks and other objects as fantastic as the dragons in any medieval atlas… or puppet show.
Read the full story from 2012 in the Times of Israel.
Samuel Thrope 
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