Stages of the Box: Corrugated Cardboard in Puppetry and Material Performance

Stages of the Box focuses on late capitalist performances of, and with, corrugated cardboard. As one of the leading packaging materials of 21st-century global capitalism, corrugated cardboard boxes circulate worldwide transporting consumer goods large and small, before accumulating in recycling bins, garbage cans, streets, and storage spaces. The paper industry hails corrugated cardboard as a sustainable packaging material as it comes from trees—ostensibly a renewable source—and because it is highly recyclable. This framing, I argue, allows the unsustainable production and consumption patterns of late capitalism to continue as usual. But the use of corrugated cardboard as boxes for global commodity circulation is one part of the story. On the flip side of this capitalist abundance, people in the margins employ waste corrugated cardboard creatively for survival, including through informal collection for the recycling industry, as a material for temporary dwelling, and for signs. At the same time, as a cheap or free, abundant, and versatile material, puppeteers, artists, and activists have been turning to cardboard for their creations and interventions.

My project considers these different realms—global trade, performing arts, galleries, online videos, and streets—as stages of corrugated cardboard performances. Situated as both puppeteer and performance studies scholar, I incorporate reflections from my creative practice and critical analysis to frame cardboard as a performing object with material and expressive propensities that guide their human collaborators. In this, I engage with new materialist, material culture, puppetry scholarship, and discard studies frameworks, and an assortment of chapter-specific methods stemming from an emergent research design.

By focusing on contemporary case studies of cardboard-based performances in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Chile (my home country), I ask: What are the stakes of performing with cardboard—an ambivalently eco-friendly, mass-produced material—amid social and environmental crises? Beyond reuse and upcycling, how do cardboard puppets, protest objects, and artworks intervene in both local and global contexts? How are cultural producers engaging with the semiotic, economic, affective charges, and material affordances of cardboard packaging? What questions, worlds, and modes of relating to matter do these performances bring forth?