In the opening chapter of The Necessity of Sculpture: Selected Essays and Criticism, 1985-2019, the noted editor and scholar Eric Gibson makes huge claims for the utilitarian Mesopotamian cylinder seal as a medium for “epics in miniature,” possessed of “a power and sophistication out of all proportion to their size.” Similarly, the vision of the master puppeteer and MacArthur Fellow Basil Twist transcends the chamber scale of his creations by orders of magnitude, whether we’re talking his nominally “abstract” Symphonie Fantastique in a thousand-gallon water tank (measuring a compact a 12’x3’x4’) or his delirious high Baroque staging of Mondonville’s mythological rarity Titon et l’Aurore for the Opéra Comique, in Paris. But even within the yet-to-be-assembled Twist catalogue raisoné, Dogugaeshi represents a ne plus ultra. Commissioned 20 years ago by the Japan Society, Twist’s tribute to vanishing Eastern traditions showcases, among other things, a wily hand-made white fox of preternatural flexibility and a blizzard of hand-painted backdrops that bedazzle the eye like playing cards flying through the fingers of a magician. An intermittent worldwide odyssey including two passes through the Panama Canal brings Dogugaeshi back to the stage for which it was created, as before with live shamisen accompaniment by Yumiko Tanaka. —Matthew Gurewitsch