Back in February our UConn Winter Puppet Slam was thwarted by snow. Thankfully, Spring is here and the event–now the UConn Spring Puppet Slam is back on for Friday May 3rd at 8pm.

The show will take place at a new location: the Palace Theater in Stafford, Connecticut, a few miles from the UConn Main Campus. Tickets are $5. You can buy them in advance here.

Our UConn Spring Puppet Slam performers will include Great Small Works, performing their toy theater spectacle Living Newspaper; Jana Zeller, performing a hand-puppet excerpt from her Spybird Theater production Eye of the Storm;  Jim Napolitano presenting a dynamic shadow theater show; and Puppet Arts students  Anna Fitzgerald, Carianne Hoff, Seth Shaffer, Dana Samborski, and Sarah Nolen all presenting new works for puppet and mask theater.  Join us for this exciting event!

Tony De Nonno and a Sicilian marionette. Photo courtesy Tony De Nonno.

Join us Wednesday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Ballard Institute to welcome producer-writer-director Tony De Nonno in a celebration of the Manteo Family Sicilian marionette tradition, which for many decades in the early 20th century was a hallmark of New York City’s cultural life.   De Nonno’s lecture, presentation, and marionette demonstration will feature live performances of the colorful and vivid Sicilian marionette tradition, as well as a screening of De Nonno’s film about the Manteo Family, It’s One Family: Knock on Wood.

Showcasing the extraordinary power of Sicilian marionettes with puppets from the Manteo Family collection, De Nonno will take us on an enlightening journey into the life and legacy of puppeteers Mike and Aida Manteo and their children and grandchildren, a family bound together by a Sicilian folk tradition that spans a century in America, from the moment when the Manteo Marionette Theater was first established on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy in 1918.

Aida Manteo Grillo with Orlando, hero of Sicilian puppetry. Photo courtesy Tony De Nonno.

De Nonno’s presentation will engage the audience as active participants to marvel at the marionettes, resplendent in their suits of armor, who will strut, walk, talk and engage in battle-ready combat stances with chivalrous aplomb.

De Nonno will then introduce It’s One Family: Knock on Wood, his award-winning, nationally broadcast PBS Network documentary about the Manteos.

“I am looking forward to sharing this magnificent and enduring art form with everyone in attendance at the Ballard Museum of Puppetry,” Mr. De Nonno has said; “and especially revealing to them how the glorious Sicilian Marionette tradition contributed greatly to the birth of literature, history and so much more. It will be a joyous and memorable experience for all.”

This event is free, and donations are greatly appreciated.  Refreshments will be served.  For directions to the Ballard Institute see this link.

For more info about Tony De Nonno please visit: www.denonnoproductions.com.

The Ballard Institute’s popular Puppet Forum programs about contemporary issues in the world of puppetry will take place on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 (except for Sunday, March 30) through May 1.  Most will take place at the Ballard Institute on UConn’s Depot Campus, except where noted. The schedule of other Spring Puppet Forums includes the following:

The People’s Puppets of the Occupy Wall Street Puppet Guild on Times Square.

– Wednesday, February 13: “Activist Puppet Theater and the Occupy Movement”, with Joseph Therrien (UConn Puppet Arts 2012), of the Occupy Wall Street Puppet Guild.

 

 

 

 

Seth Hunter and some of his digital puppets.

– Wednesday, February 27: “Innovations in Digital Puppetry”, with Seth Hunter, MIT Media Lab.  In this forum Seth will provide insight into the best practices and guidelines for designers and artists interested in incorporating digital assets for live animation, performance, and storytelling purposes.   This forum is co-sponsored by the UConn Digital Media Center, and will take place in Room 228 of the Art Building on UConn’s Main Campus.  See this linkfor directions.**

– Wednesday, March 13: “Sicilian Marionette Theater in New York City”, Tony DeNonno and his film It’s One Family Knock on Wood, about the famed Manteo family and their storefront puppet theater and traditional Sicilian marionette shows on New York City’s Lower East Side.

 

 

– Saturday, March 30: “Exceptional and Uncommon: the Puppetry of Dick Myers”, with Allelu Kurten and Seth Shaffer, on the occasion of the opening of the Ballard Museum and its two new exhibitions: Strings, Rods, and Robots: Recent Acquisitions, and  Exceptional and Uncommon: The Puppetry of Dick Myers.

 

 

 

 

A scene from Kara Walker’s 2004 shadow puppet film “Testimony.”

– Wednesday, April 17: “Women on the Verge: Visual Artists Approaching Puppetry”, with famed New York puppeteer and performance artist Theodora Skipitares.  This talk will consider Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Cao Fei, and Janine Antoni: women visual artists who “suddenly find themselves working with puppets, even though they often won’t admit that’s what they’re doing.”  This forum is co-sponsored by the UConn Art + Art History Department, and the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program.

**Please note:  “Women on the Verge: Visual Artists Approaching Puppetry” will take place in The Pit in the Art + Art History Building on UConn’s Main Campus.  See this link for directions.**

The Spring Puppet Forum Series is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.  The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry is at 6 Bourn Place, Mansfield, Connecticut, just off Route 44, 2 miles south of Route 195. For more information see bimp.uconn.edu or contact bimp@uconn.edu.

Join us on selected Friday evenings this fall for exciting and scintillating discussions about the complex, colorful, and thought-provoking world of puppetry around the globe–from Hartford to Mexico City, from New York City to Java–as performers, playwrights, filmmakers, artists, and scholars appear in our compelling Fall Puppet Forum series.  All forum presentations begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Ballard Institute on UConn’s Depot Campus.  **The Eric Bass Forum will be in the Puppet Arts Complex on Depot Campus

— Friday, October 12, Winnie Lambrecht, Los Cueto: Four Generations of Puppeteers: The History of a Family of Mexican Artists

Filmmaker and Rhode Island School of Design Senior Lecturer Winnie Lambrecht presents her film about the Cueto family of puppeteers from Mexico City, who over four generations, from the 1930s to the present, have been inventing and performing puppet shows and training puppeteers to create the modern face of Mexican puppetry.

— Friday, October 19, Sumarsam, Cultural Encounters: Javanese Puppetry and the West

Gamelan musician, amateur dalang, and Wesleyan University Professor of Music Sumarsam will discuss the fascinating and complex relationships between traditional Javanese puppetry and the West, based on Professor Sumarsam’s extensive research and personal experience.

— Friday, November 2: Anne Cubberly, How I Became the Puppet Lady: Art Performance, and Giant Puppets

Hartford visual artist and puppeteer Anne Cubberly talks about her work in kinetic sculpture, installation art, parades, and performance.

— Friday, November 16: Eric Bass, Cross-Cultural Connections in Puppet Theater

Eric Bass, co-founder and director of Vermont’s Sandglass Theater, is an internationally renowned puppeteer whose innovations in puppet and object design, manipulation, and dramaturgy have garnered multiple awards and honors in Europe and the United States. He will talk about the influence of such global puppet traditions as Japanese bunraku on contemporary western puppet theater.

**The Eric Bass Puppet Forum will be held in the Puppet Arts Complex on Depot Campus**

— Friday, November 30: Erik Ehn, Puppets and Extreme Violence: How They Withstand and What They Teach

Brown University professor and acclaimed playwright Erik Ehn will discuss his ongoing Soulographie project, a seventeen-part series of puppet plays about the history of the U.S. in the 20^th Century, from the point of view of its genocides.  It will be produced at La MaMa Theater in New York City this November.  Ehn conducts annual trips to Rwanda/Uganda, taking students and professionals in the field to study the history of these countries, and to explore the ways art is participating in recovery from violence.   He is also the producer the annual Arts in the One World conference at Brown University, which engages themes of art and social change. 

 

— Friday, December 7: Allelu Kurten, A Life in Puppetry

One of America’s most revered puppeteers, Allelu Kurten, will talk about her 50 years at the center of the development of United States puppetry, her work with husband John Kurten in the Kurten Puppets, with Jim Henson, Dick Myers, the Puppeteers of America, Bread and Puppet Theater, UNIMA (the Union Internationale de la Marionnette) and other fascinating aspects of American puppetry in which she has played a central role.

 

 

The Fall Forum Series is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.  Our current exhibitions–Red Gate: Pauline Benton and Chinese Shadow Theater and Frank Ballard: Roots and Branches–will be open to view immediately before and after the events.

The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry is at 6 Bourn Place, Mansfield, Connecticut, just off Route 44, 2 miles south of Route 195.

For more information see bimp.uconn.edu or contact bimp@uconn.edu.

On Saturday, November 10th the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the UConn Puppet Arts Program will host the Fall UConn Puppet Slam! This evening of fascinating new works for short-form puppetry will bring together active puppeteers from across the United States, and current Puppet Arts Program students, in an amazing array of entertaining and compelling work that will expand your notions of the art of puppetry.  Please note that many of these shows are geared for mature audiences, and are not appropriate for children.

The Fall UConn Puppet Slam will include works by performance artist, sculptor, and videographer J.R. Uretsky (a UConn graduate in Visual Arts and member of the feminist collective Dirt Palace); S.B. Parks (UConn Puppet Arts graduate and currently Costume Crafter at Hartford Stage); Paul Spirito (Technical Supervisor at the Puppet Arts Program); current Puppet Arts graduate students Penny Benson, Sarah Nolen, Seth Shaffer, Carianne Hoff,  and Anna Fitzgerald; and, from Los Angeles, special guests Caitlin Lainoff and DanRae Wilson.

The Fall UConn Puppet Slam starts at 8 p.m. on UConn’s main campus in the Studio Theater in the Drama and Music Building and it is FREE!

*Again, please note that some material in these pieces is geared for mature audiences*

In conjunction with our current exhibition Red Gate: Pauline Benton and Chinese Shadow Theater, the Ballard Institute will host a two-day popular and scholarly symposium on Chinese shadow theater as a global cultural artform, on Friday and Saturday, October 26th and 27th.  This unusual and exciting event will feature the following scholars:

– Dr. Fan Pen Li Chen, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Albany.  Dr. Chen is the acclaimed author of numerous books and articles about Chinese shadow theater, including Chinese Shadow Theater: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors, and Visions for the Masses: Chinese Shadow Plays from Shaanxi and Shanxi, and will discuss three different Chinese and American shadow theater productions of the classic play Whitesnake.

 

 

– Annie Katsura Rollins, a puppeteer, scholar, and most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Chinese Shadow Puppetry.  Annie holds an MFA degree in theater design from the University of Minnesota, and has been studying traditional Chinese shadow theater in various regions of China over the past year.  She will talk about her first-hand experience with contemporary versions of these ancient puppet traditions.

 

 

 

 

– Bradford Clark, Professor of Theater and Film at Bowling Green State University, and Curator of Collections at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia.  Professor Clark will present video and photographs from his recent travels in rural China documenting regional traditions of shadow performance.

 

 

 

 

– Dr. Kathy Foley, Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Editor of Asian Theater Journal.  Dr. Foley, whose considerable experience with Asian puppetry includes training as a dalang of Balinese  wayang golek rod puppet theater, as well as directing, teaching, and curating exhibitions, will moderate a closing discussion with all of the symposium participants.

 

 

– Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin, co-directors of Queens-based company Chinese Theatre Works, and curators of Red Gate: Pauline Benton and Chinese Shadow Theater.   They will give guided tours of the exhibition, as well as a talk about Chinese Theater Works’s experience presenting traditional and non-traditional Chinese shadow performance in the United States, including a ten-minute excerpt of their new Powerpoint Whitesnake production.

 

– Mary Hirsch, independent scholar, translator of Chinese shadow theater, and former Curatorial Assistant at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.  Ms. Hirsch will discuss how and why the misidentification of puppets and misunderstanding of Chinese traditions of shadow theater has come to characterize the majority of  Chinese shadow figure collections in museums and libraries in the United States.

 

Symposium Schedule:

Friday, October 26

3:00 – Welcome; refreshments

3:30-4:15 – Guided tour of “Red Gate: Pauline Benton and Chinese Shadow Theater
in the United States,” with exhibition curators Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin of
Chinese Theatre Works

4:15 — Presentation by Puppet Arts Program graduate student Xing Xin Liu, about her work with shadow theater in rural China this past summer.

4:30 – 6:00 Presentation #1: Annie Katsura Rollins

6-7:30 – Dinner Break

7:30-9 – Presentation #2: Mary Hirsch

Saturday, October 27

9-9:30 — Coffee

9:30-11:00 – Presentation #3: Fan Pen Li Chen

11:00-11:30 – Presentation #4: Stephen Kaplin and Kuang-Yu Fong

11:30-1:00 – Lunch Break

1:00-2:30 – Presentation #5: Bradford Clark

2:30-4:00 – Roundtable Discussion: Kathy Foley, Chair

All symposium sessions will take place at the Ballard Institute on UConn’s Depot Campus.  Accommodations are available at the Nathan Hale Inn.

 This event is free.  For more information, please contact the Ballard Institute at bimp@uconn.edu, or 860 486 0806.

 

We invite you to join us Sunday, September 23 at noon in downtown Storrs, to take part in our contingent of the “Celebrate Mansfield Parade.”   We will be processing with the puppets we have made with area residents in community puppet-building workshops

Our community puppet-building workshops were led by master puppeteer Sara Peattie of the Boston-based Puppeteers Cooperative, whose innovative use of everyday materials in the creation of giant puppets has drawn acclaim across the United States.

 

If you would like to join us (no experience necessary), please arrive by 11:30 at the Storrs Post Office.  The parade steps off promptly at noon.

 

This project is presented by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the Mansfield Downtown Partnership, Inc.

For more information email bimp@uconn.edu.

We hope to see you soon!