What is Puppetry?

I believe Puppetry is a tool to used to convey a story. Puppetry encompasses so many genres, and can be as simple as a shadow puppet made out of hand shapes to an intricate puppet that emerges from the depths of the ocean. Puppetry is used when other forms of theater, are unable to get the story across as well as puppetry can. Puppetry draws the viewer in and asks the viewers to suspend their disbelief and accept that inanimate objects can be personified and morphed into expressive and emotive characters. For example in La Jolla Playhouses' production of Sea Foam Sleep Walk, using an actor would not have had the same effect as the larger than life goddess rising from the ocean, however, the audience was aware that the goddess was not human. Puppetry allows an audience to interact on an intellectual level with the performance believing to or not believing that the puppets have morphed into the characters they portray.