As part of the online 2020 Fall Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry will host “Things That Act Shakespeare” with Dr. Jungmin Song on Thursday, November 12 at 7 p.m. ET. This forum will take place on Facebook Live (facebook.com/BallardInstitute/) and will be available afterwards on Facebook and the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry YouTube channel (youtube.com/channel/UC3VSthEDnYS6ZjOwzT1DnTg).

Professor Song will discuss the ideas behind her current Ballard Institute exhibition Shakespeare and Puppetry, which questions our preconceptions of character and asks what it means for objects to have stage presence. Dr. Song will consider Shakespeare productions by such puppeteers and performers as Forced Entertainment, Hogarth Puppets, and the Little Angel Theatre from England; ShadowLight Productions, Fred Curchack, Jim Rose, Bread and Puppet Theater, and Great Small Works from the U.S.; and Dov Weinstein from Israel. 

Dr. Jungmin Song completed a practice-as-research PhD titled Animating Everyday Objects in Performance at the University of Roehampton in 2014. Her writings have appeared in Performance Research, Artpress 2, Asian Theatre Journal, and Contemporary Theatre Review. In 2017 she edited a special issue of the British journal Puppet Notebook on Shakespeare and puppets, and was a researcher in residence at the Institut International de la Marionnette (IIM) in Charleville-Mézières, France to lay the ground for a book on Shakespeare and puppetry. As a puppet maker she has participated in numerous projects, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and Little Angel Theatre’s co-production of Venus and Adonis (2004).  She has taught in the fields of theater and fine arts at the University of Roehampton, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Kent. 

For more information and to learn about other online programming, email bimp@uconn.edu.

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