07/10/2026
Can I remain in relationship with you when you exceed what I need you to be?
https://www.laurageiger.com/loveprojectionandpuppets
With a stranger, we can turn difference into a category. I know what kind of person you are.
With a beloved, we can turn familiarity into certainty. I know who you are.
And sometimes we do what looks like the opposite. We make difference desirable.
We celebrate it and admire it. We make it beautiful, exceptional, fascinating.
Even this can become a way of keeping Otherness at a safe distance, as something to appreciate without allowing it to alter us.
We can erase difference, make it absolute, or romanticize it.
These are different moves, but each can become a way of making the other person what we need them to be.
And then we stop encountering them.
This is harder to see with the people we love. We know their histories, patterns, wounds, needs, politics, ways of being. We can become very good at understanding someone while no longer actually meeting them.
I can respond to the version of you I already know. I can care for that version and even love that version.
You can surprise me, and I can remain curious about you, but I can also become very good at incorporating what surprises me into the person I already think you are.
When does recognition stop helping me encounter you and start getting in the way?
This is one of the reasons I return to puppetry. We make something. We give it a body, a voice, a history. We begin to care about what happens to it.
The puppet keeps exceeding the categories we try to give it.
Still we have to stay. We keep animating, breathing, attending. We keep caring, even while we don't, and can't, understand what we're encountering.
The puppet gives us somewhere to stay while we don't know.
The practice isn't to stop interpreting. It's to remain in relationship when interpretation can't be the end of the encounter.
Over eight weeks, we'll return to the same figures and questions through making, animation, encounter, and conversation. The same figure can become familiar and then strange again. Other people will encounter it differently. You'll notice what you assumed, what you projected, what you wanted it to become, and what becomes possible when you don't have to settle what you're encountering.
We aren't learning the "right way" to relate to Otherness.
We are practicing remaining in relationship with what can change us.
A stranger.
A beloved.
A puppet.
Love, Projection, and Puppets
8-week live online certificate program in Deep Puppetry™
November 1-December 20, 2026
Sundays, 17:30-20:00 CET, 11:30am Eastern US
9 places left
Early bird: 650 USD until October 18
Alumni: 600 USD
Payment plan available
