We invite you to join us this Wednesday, April 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the new Ballard Institute at Storrs Center for our next Spring Puppet Forum event with Dr. Robert S. Herr titled “Puppets at the Vanguard:  The Strident Voice and Radical Politics of Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary Teatro Guiñol.”  This forum is co-sponsored by El Instituto: UConn’s Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies.

Dr. Robert S. Herr, from Dartmouth College’s Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program, will discuss the nature of 1920s and 30s activist puppet theater in Mexico, when artists, teachers and state officials collaborated to stage educational plays in working class neighborhoods and rural communities in an effort to foster revolutionary citizens.

Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served.  Come early, and experience our three new puppet exhibitions in our new Storrs Center home, as well as the video resources in our library nook. This forum will also be live-streamed on our UStream page.  Visit bimp.uconn.edu for more information.

The Ballard Institute’s Spring 2014 Puppet Forum Series features an array of fascinating approaches to the world of puppetry from renowned scholars, puppeteers, writers, and photographers in a program of Wednesday evening events at the new Ballard Institute at Storrs Center, 1 Royce Circle in downtown Storrs.  Each puppet forum will begin at 7:30 p.m., and will also be streamed on the internet.  These events are free and open to the public; donations are gratefully accepted.  Refreshments will be served.

The Puppet Forum series includes the following presentations:

March 12: Grant Hayter-Menzies, Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton.

Co-sponsored by the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute.  Author Grant Hayter-Menzies discusses his new book about Kansas-born puppeteer Pauline Benton (1898-1974) who discovered piyingxi shadow theater in Beijing, mastered its techniques, and popularized the form across the United States during the Great Depression.  In conjunction with the UConn Co-op Bookstore at Storrs Center.

March 26: “Rod Puppets and the Human Theater: Frank Ballard Productions at  UConn.”

Join a panel discussion with student curator Sarah Nolen, Puppet Arts faculty, and alumni about Frank Ballard’s rod puppet productions at UConn, the nature of rod puppetry, and the design, construction, and performance processes of this work.

April 9: Robert Herr, “Puppets at the Vanguard:  The Strident Voice and Radical Politics of Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary Teatro Guiñol.”

Co-sponsored by El Instituto.  Dr. Robert S. Herr, from Dartmouth College’s Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program, discusses the nature of 1920s and 30s activist puppet theater in Mexico, when artists, teachers and state officials collaborated to stage educational plays in working class neighborhoods and rural communities in an effort to foster revolutionary citizens.

April 16: Richard Termine, “Puppets Through the Lens: Photography and the Performing Object.”

Acclaimed photographer and UConn Puppet Arts graduate Richard Termine discusses the dynamics of capturing puppet performance via the camera, and his photographs in the current Ballard Institute exhibition devoted to his work.

April 30: Roman Paska, “The Quintessence of Puppetry.”

Internationally acclaimed puppeteer, director, and writer Roman Paska discusses his work for live performance and film, as well as his theoretical writings about the nature of puppet performance.

How do objects and spaces perform? What role does the material world play in performance? On March 29-30, 2014, scholars and artists will gather for a symposium titled “Objects, Environments, and Actants: Intersections in Material Performance.” The symposium will take place at the new Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Storrs Center, and is hosted by the Ballard Institute and the UConn Theatre Studies program.

This symposium asks us to think across disciplinary boundaries about objects and environments and their interactions with humans in performance. Drawing on recent scholarship in thing theory, material culture studies, puppetry studies, and object-oriented ontology, we will consider how puppets, props, costumes, masks, physical environments, and human actors intersect in performance.

The symposium will include scholarly papers, performances, roundtable discussions, and a tour of Jerry Rojo’s historic Mobius Theatre environmental performance space at the University of Connecticut’s Dramatic Arts Department.

Schedule (subject to change):

Saturday, March 29

9:00-9:30                     Coffee

9:30-10:00                   Welcome and Opening Remarks

10:00-11:25                 Panel 1: Action and Automata

John Bell (Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry & Department of Dramatic Arts, University of Connecticut), “Robots and Performance: the Persistent Theatricality of Machines”

Nick Knouf (Cinema and Media Studies, Wellesley College), “Noise, Parrhesia, and the Enunciative Potentials of Performing Objects”

Thomas Meacham (Theatre Studies, University of Connecticut), “The Boxley Rood of Grace as Actant: Puppetry and Object-Oriented Ontologies of Iterative Affective Performance””

11:35-1:00                    Panel 2: The Thing Chosen: How Objects Influence Performance

Elisha Conway (Department of English, McGill University), “Living Objects: Questions for Design and Acting in the Use of Puppets”

James Mirrione  (Theatre Department, United Arab Emirates University),“Concerning the Concealed: the mask and puppetry art of Louay Assaf with United Arab Emirati Female Students in Measure for Measure”

Anna Fitzgerald (Puppet Arts Program, University of Connecticut), “A Thing Performed: Why and How to Choose an Inanimate Object on Stage”

1:00-2:00                      Lunch

2:00-3:00                     Performance and Discussion:

Adelka Polak (Artistic Director, SOVA Theater), “Environmental Entanglement”

3:05-4:35                      Panel 3: Subjects and Objects in Performance

Jane Shaw (Independent Artist), “Performing The Real Thing”

Theodora Skipitares (Pratt Institute), “Rituals of the Performing Object”

Dawn Brandes (University of King’s College), “Looking Back: The Puppet’s Gaze in Neville Tranter’s The Seven Deadly Sins”

4:35-5:00                      Free time

5:00-6:00                    Tour of the Mobius Theatre at UConn’s Dramatic Arts Department

Led by Bart Roccoberton (Puppet Arts Program, University of Connecticut) and Jerry Rojo (Dramatic Arts, University of Connecticut, emeritus)

6:10-7:30                      Dinner

8:00                               Performance of Goblin Market

Directed by Penny Benson (Puppet Arts Program, University of Connecticut)

Sunday, March 3o

9:00-9:30                    Coffee

9:30-11:00                  Panel 4: Space, Place, and Scale

Lindsay Cummings (Theatre Studies, University of Connecticut), “How to Do Things with A Tuft of Grass: Theatre, Ecology, and the Non-Human Actor”

Jemma Alix Levy (Artistic Director, Muse of Fire Theatre Company), “Achilles’ Tent—A Place Within A Place”

Beth Milles (Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University), “Occupation and Object: An Investigational Distillation—Over/taking Space and the Moment in Performance”

11:00-12:00                 Richard Schechner (Performance Studies, New York University),

“Environmental Theater and the Performance Group: A Conversation with Richard Schechner” (via Skype from Abu Dhabi)

12:00-12:30                Wrap up

12:30-1:00                  Goodbyes

DETAILS:

To register for the symposium, follow this link to our registration form: Spring 2014 Symposium Registration Form

Completed forms can be sent to bimp@uconn.edu or mailed to:

Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry

Attn: Emily Wicks

1 Royce Circle, Suite 101B

University of Connecticut

Storrs, CT 06268

Contact information for local hotels can be found here: Places to Stay Near UConn

Objects, Environments, and Actants is organized by Lindsay Cummings, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at UConn; John Bell, Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry; and Emily Wicks, Program Assistant at the Ballard Institute.  Sponsored by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, the UConn Theatre Studies program, and the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut.

This Fall, the Ballard Institute’s popular  UConn Fall Puppet Forum Series will feature puppeteers and scholars explaining the past, present, and possible future of puppetry around the world.  The Fall 2013 series will focus on current developments in world-wide puppetry and its connections to ancient texts, television dramaturgy, traditional culture, digital media, and puppet museums, as all these factors interact with each other in a global network. The UConn Fall Puppet Forums will take place on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 at the Ballard Institute’s Depot Campus Center and are free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served. The roster of Fall Puppet Forum speakers so far includes the following: 1. Wednesday, September 25: Diane Daly: “Que vivan los títeres: Community Support Among Today’s Mexican Puppeteers.”

Join us for an exciting look at how traditional puppetry thrives in Mexico, when Diane Daly, from the University of Arizona’s School of Information Resources & Library Science, will discuss her research on peer development among Mexican puppeteers, who “continually cultivat[e] a form of puppetry fed by popular international traditions but with distinctly Mexican roots.”  Daly’s research “taps into virtual and face-to-face communication within Mexico’s puppetry community to provide dynamic glimpses of this culture and to explore how new tech platforms can help it grow.”  Co-sponsored by El Instituto, UConn’s Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.   2. October 16: Dr. Robin Ruizendaal, “Asian Puppet Theatre and the Puppet Theatre Museum.”

Scholar, puppeteer, and museum director Dr. Robin Ruizendaal will present an overview of the current state of Asian puppet theater in the era of mass communication, and chart how traditional and modern companies function in contemporary Asia.  Ruizendaal, the Director of Taiwan’s Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theatre Museum, and the Managing & Artistic Director of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company, earned a Ph.D. in Chinese studies from Leiden University, Holland, and has been doing research on Asian puppet theatre for over twenty years.  His talk will focus on the history and current practices of the Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theatre Museum which he directs in Taipei.  Ruizendaal will discuss the conservation and collection policies of the museum (which according to Ruizendaal has “the most complete collection of Asian puppets in the world”), as well as its educational projects, interactive exhibitions and performances. 3. Wednesday, October 30: Dr. Marvin Carlson, “The Ibn Daniyal Trilogy: Theatre from Medieval Cairo”

Famed theater historian Dr. Marvin Carlson will speak about his and his colleagues’ current research into 13th-century Egyptian shadow theater, and the implications of those studies for puppet history. Professor Carlson, a Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is well-known throughout the world for his contributions to theater history, including 1993 book Theories of Theatre, which has been translated into seven languages.  His 2011 book Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, written in collaboration with Khalid Amine, explored the history of drama in the Arab world. At UConn Professor Carlson will further explore the history of Arabic theater by reading from his latest project, The Ibn Daniyal Trilogy: Theatre from Medieval Cairo, a series of plays translated and edited by Dr. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz and Dr. Carlson.  These “thirteenth century shadow plays of remarkable sophistication from Egypt by the author Ibn Daniyal,” Dr. Carlson recently wrote, “are going to make a major impact on medieval drama studies,” and “puppet theatre studies as well, since almost nothing is known of these important works.”   4. Wednesday, November 6: Annie Evans, “Writing for Sesame Street.”

Drawing from her experience as a principal writer for Sesame Street since 1994, Annie Evans will discuss her journey from college to Sesame Street, and the show itself.  She will explain “how we write it, how we use puppetry to its best advantage, shooting on the street or on blue screen, and how the show has changed and adapted in the past twenty years.”   Evans will discuss the ways that new technology and research methods affect Sesame Street, and her experience working with international Sesame Streets around the world, particularly in East Asia. In addition to her Sesame Street work, Evans has been a principal writer for Elmo’s World, and has written scripts and lyrics for many television puppet shows, and has also served as a consultant on Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Indian co-production of Sesame Street. All of the 2013 UConn Fall Puppet Forums will take place at the Ballard Institute’s Depot Campus Center. For more information call the Ballard Institute at 860 486 0339.