This thesis concerns how everyday objects produce meaning in the apparatus of performance. The arrangement of the apparatus—including the performer, space, time, objects, audience, and the choreography of these elements—acts to shift the meaning of objects and materials from the everyday. Meaning is determined by an object’s material properties—its flexibility and weight, the sound it makes—but these properties take on significance depending on what happens around and in relation to the object. This is a lesson that is familiar to observers and practitioners of puppet theatre. Puppets do not acquire meaning solely based on their outside characteristics. They also signify based on the material properties (such as malleability) that emerge when they are manipulated. My practice-based research, grounded in both puppetry and live art practices, displaces objects from the places they are customarily used in order to highlight or subvert the ways that objects are used in everyday life. I focus attention on the flux of objects in action. Animation emerges from my manipulation of such simple objects as paper, balloons, biscuits, glasses, thread and pencils. Animation in puppetry and object theatre is sometimes conceived as a means to give the appearance of life to dead objects, often by anthropomorphizing them. My understanding of animation is not mimetic, but involves a focus on emergent phenomena. I thereby interrogate the binary opposition of life and death. I also challenge the tendency to read objects and phenomena such as rainbows symbolically by dissociating them from their normal contexts and associated sentiments. Stripping objects of their accreted layers of meaning, I attend to the emergence of the here and now. Bridging concerns with the body and an object oriented ontology, I bring new theoretical understandings of the vibrancy of matter to live art and object performance.