Kim W. on Object Theatre

This kind of thing is seen more often in Europe right now, but there's a subset of puppetry which turns various found objects into puppets. Aficionados and practitioners call this "Object Theatre" most often, but it's also been called "object puppetry".  We all sometimes do this kind of puppetry on a small scale: when trying to describe a complicated event to a friend, we spontaneously may have reached for a couple of random things on the table to help illustrate our point: "okay, let's say this salt shaker is me, and the ketchup is the car I saw -- and the pepper mill is the bike.  So if I was standing HERE, then the bike swerved out of the way of the car like THIS, and then..."

I found a blog maintained by one Richard Allen, who's pursuing a PhD in this very discipline; or, in his words, "on the practice and research of objects in performance."  He's got an exhaustive, if somewhat opinionated, definition of "object theater" on his blog:

"Object Theatre is a term that has been ghettoised as a sub-category of puppetry, often used to describe a performance style that contains the animation of tilitarian, or pre-existing 'found' objects rather than those constructed for theatrical effect (such as the puppet). As a result, practitioners of 'object theatre' commonly share what I consider to be the key principle of puppetry: the transformation of an object into a subjectified character (a box of spoons becomes a village, a sieve the head of a girl). Puppeteers often claim that it is precisely the puppet/object's lack of a programme of acting or conscious ego (it's very object-ness) that makes it such a potent tool for the theatre, yet paradoxically, the process of puppetry often imposes it's own programme of acting propelled by the will of the performer. The objects are rarely allowed to act for themselves; the subject is forcibly imposed onto them, as they become a medium for the performers and audiences subjectifcation. The object adopts the role that character performs conventionally  for the actor.  I would argue that this ghettoisation misrepresents what thinking through a theatre of 'objects' might mean."

http://richobject.wordpress.com/

There are a handful of people here in the U.S. who work with Object Theater; one company, LorenKahn, is based in New Mexico, and is a two-woman company, offering shows incorporating not just traditional puppets, but feathers, life rafts, glasses of water, and themselves.  LorenKahn's site has a collection of videos of some of their works:

http://www.lorenkahnpuppet.com/

Closer to home, New York is home to Tiny Ninja Theater, a company born when founder Dov Weinstein -- who's studied puppetry -- became fascinated with little ninja toys that started turning up in vending machines in New York in 1999.  Something prompted him to get a bunch and use them to perform a rendition of Shakespeare's MACBETH; that debuted at the Fringe Festival in 2000.  Tiny Ninja has since gone on to do adaptations of ROMEO AND JULIET as well as three original works, all
using tiny dime-store plastic toys as puppets.

http://www.tinyninjatheater.com/company/