The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the UConn Puppet Arts Program will present the 2016 UConn Fall Puppet Slam on Saturday, September 17 at 8:00 p.m. in UConn’s Studio Theatre. The UConn Fall Puppet Slam will feature short works by professional puppeteers and performers, including CactusHead Puppets, Lone Wolf Tribe, The Innie Outie Dance Theater Company, and Bryan Papciak as well as new works for puppet and object theater by students from UConn’s School of Fine Arts.
The 2016 UConn Fall Puppet Slam will feature work by an array of renowned Northeast puppet professionals and talented UConn students. From New York City, acclaimed puppeteer Kevin Augustine, who performs as Lone Wolf Tribe, will present Body Concert, a haunting solo piece with exquisitely sculpted foam-rubber puppets influenced by Japanese Butoh dance. Also from New York, UConn Puppet Arts alumna Kali Therrien and Bread & Puppet Theater performer Tom Cunningham, working as The Innie Outie Dance Theater, will present episodes from The Judy Show, a hand-puppet extravaganza re-visiting the classic Punch and Judy tradition. They will also perform their own music as the pop band The Malicious Ones. CactusHead Puppets (UConn graduates Megan and John Regan), from Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley will perform The Dance of the Stoat, a table-top comedy, and Gorlax the Terrible, a comic shadow show about a unintentionally beneficent giant. And Boston-based experimental filmmaker and mixed-media artist Bryan Papciak will present Shadows of the Illuminati, a “paranoid infomercial” about “a mysterious shadowy society that manipulates world events and political figures from behind the scenes.” UConn student performances at the Slam will include Anatar Marmol-Gagné’s performance of a new show about Blue Laws across the United States, and Kimberly Van Aelst’s shadow show Dali’s Moustache.
The UConn Fall Puppet Slam is supported by the Puppet Slam Network. The Puppet Slam movement is a nation-wide flowering of short puppet productions for adult audiences, encouraged by the Puppet Slam Network created by Heather Henson and Marsian De Lellis. UConn Puppet Slams have been taking place since 2008, thanks to the generous support of the Network.
The UConn Fall Puppet Slam is free and open to the public; donations are greatly appreciated. The event will take place in the Studio Theatre located at 820 Bolton Rd, Storrs, CT. For directions to the Studio Theatre, visit crt.uconn.edu/directions/. These performances are recommended for mature audiences. For more information, call the Ballard Institute at (860) 486-8580 or email us at bimp@uconn.edu.