Join the Ballard Institute for our twelfth Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.
On August 27 at 4 p.m. ET, join Ballard Institute director John Bell and Dassia Posner as they discuss the nature of “The Puppet and the Director.” She will speak first about early 20th-century Russian puppeteer Nina Efimova, as an early director of puppet theatre whose work is particularly responsive to materials. The discussion will then focus on later puppet directors, and productions into the contemporary era.
Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian at Northwestern University specializing in Russian avant-garde theatre, the history of directing, production dramaturgy, and world puppetry history and performance. She teaches undergraduate courses in Theatre and in Slavic Languages and Literatures and graduate courses in the MFA in Directing and the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD). She is currently Director of IPTD and Vice President for Awards of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Posner’s award-winning books include The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde; The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (co-edited with Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, 2014); and Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (co-edited with Kevin Bartig and associate editor Maria De Simone; under contract with Indiana University Press). Her web-based archive companion to The Director’s Prism features over a hundred multimedia Russian theatre sources: www.fulcrum.org/northwestern. Her current book-in-progress, The Moscow Kamerny Theatre: An Artistic History in Political Times, examines the Kamerny Theatre’s innovations and international influence in the artistic and political context of the Soviet 1920s and 30s.
Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.