The puppeteer and director Basil Twist is a silk whisperer.

“It’s sort of odd, because I still am kind of baffled by silk,” he said in an interview near his Greenwich Village studio. “I think it’s mostly that I have a respect for it. The great thing about silk is you don’t want to tame it. You don’t want to flatten it and stretch it and pull it. You want to let it be wild. And you have to just create the conditions where it can do that and then stand back.”

In “The Rite of Spring,” which makes its New York debut on Wednesday as part of the White Light Festival, Mr. Twist continues his astonishing inventiveness with silk and other seemingly ordinary materials — folded paper, curling smoke — in a production that deepens his otherworldly melding of abstract puppetry and music. His revelatory “Symphonie Fantastique” (1998) was performed inside a water tank and reimagined what puppets could be: fabric and feathers kicking up a storm to Berlioz.

But in “Rite,” which he calls “a ballet without dancers,” Mr. Twist’s canvas is an entire theater. (The all-Stravinsky program, to be presented at the Rose Theater, will include new interpretations of “Fireworks” and the “Pulcinella Suite.”)

“Ever since I made ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ it seemed obvious: Why don’t you do more of this choreography from materials?” he asked. “The concept of doing something bigger had danced around my brain for a long time.”