As part of its 2026 Spring Puppet Forum Series the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut is pleased to host “Becoming Modern: U.S. Puppetry in the Twentieth Century,” a discussion with Dr. Claudia Orenstein, Bart Roccoberton, and John Bell on April 22 at 7 p.m. in the Ballard Institute Theater, located at 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, CT. This forum will also be broadcast via Ballard Institute Facebook Live.
This forum will celebrate the Ballard Institute’s new exhibition of the same name, with acclaimed puppet scholar Dr. Claudia Orenstein of the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, UConn Puppet Arts Program Head Bart Roccoberton, and John Bell, Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry. The speakers will explore the ways that puppetry in the United States transformed during the twentieth century from a popular low-culture entertainment to an accepted form of legitimate theater and a massively influential mass-media phenomenon.
The Becoming Modern exhibition, curated by Professor Bell, includes examples of early 20th-century work by Yiddish puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, and Russian émigré Basil Milovsoroff; but focuses specifically on innovations in puppetry beginning in the 1960s by such puppeteers as Bob Baker, Robert Anton, Charles Ludlam, Brad Brewer, Dan Hurlin, Stephen Kaplin, Janie Geiser, Larry Reed, Theodora Skipitares, Sandy Spieler, Amy Trompetter, and Charles Ludlam. What made U.S. puppetry “modern,” and how has twentieth-century U.S. puppetry affected what we see today in person and on our screens?
Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served. For more information or if you require accommodation to attend a forum, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860.486.8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.
About the Speakers
Claudia Orenstein is an acclaimed scholar of puppetry, performing objects, and material performance, both in regard to contemporary practices globally and to traditional forms in India and Japan. She is the Founding Editor of Puppetry International Research, an online, peer-review, scholarly journal devoted to puppets, masks, and related arts, and author of Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects. Dr. Orenstein has co-edited several scholarly anthologies devoted to puppetry: Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, with Tim Cusack, Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations, with Alissa Mello and Cariad Astles, The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, with Dassia Posner and John Bell. She has also worked as dramaturg on Stephen Earnhart’s multimedia production Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and on Tom Lee and kuruma ningyō master Nishikawa Koryū V’s Shank’s Mare.
Bart Roccoberton is Program Head of UConn’s internationally renowned Puppet Arts Program and has been a professional puppet artist for nearly fifty years. He studied puppetry at UConn under Professors Frank Ballard and Albrecht Roser, and has toured popular puppet performances to schools, libraries, colleges, theaters and museums with his troupe The Pandemonium Puppet Company and with the students of The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Institute of Professional Puppetry Arts and The University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts Program. Bart has created and performed characters for television programs, Broadway productions and special commissions, and conducted workshops for elementary, secondary and college students and teachers across the United States.
John Bell is the director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, teaches at UConn’s Puppet Arts Program, and is a puppeteer and theater historian. He is the author of American Puppet Modernism and other books and articles about puppetry. A member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1976 to 1986, and a founding member of the Great Small Works theater collective in New York City, he is also a founder of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts.