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.
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.
UConn’s famed puppetry programs are once more having a global impact, this time in Chengdu, China at the 21st UNIMA (Union International de la Marionnette) Congress and World Puppetry Festival.
Four of the Eight Immortals by Bart Roccoberton at Chengdu’s National Shadow Puppetry Museum.
— Eight rod puppets designed and built by Puppet Arts Program director Bart Roccoberton are on display in the Puppet Shadow Theatre exhibition of the National Shadow Puppetry Museum in Chengdu. The puppets represent the legendary Eight Immortals, revered in Taoist beliefs dating back to the Han Dynasty. Professor Roccoberton built them especially for the National Shadow Puppetry Museum, and they will become part of that institution’s permanent collection.
— Current students and alumni of the Puppet Arts Program, led by Bart Roccoberton, are performing Butterfly Dreams, a mask and life-size puppet spectacle created in 2001 by Hua Hua Zhang, David Regan and Professor Roccoberton, which uses dreams as a vehicle to explore humanity and its multiple levels of meaning and purpose. The production is inspired by a tale from Taoist philosophy about a sage, Zhuang Zi, who after dreaming he had become a butterfly, awakes to wonder if he is a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man.
— UConn Puppet Arts alumnus Stephen Kaplin, the Co-Artistic Director of Chinese Theatre Works, is performing Songs from the Yellow Earth, a collaboration with the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater, and the first shadow theater production directed by the theater’s founder, Peter Schumann. The show incorporates literary and operatic ruminations on war and peace drawn from classic Chinese opera and poems referring to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China.
Dr. John Bell with Iranian UNIMA members Dr. Hamidreza Ardelan and Poupak Azimpour Tabrizi.
— Ballard Institute Director John Bell is representing the U.S. branch of UNIMA as a counselor in that organization’s world Congress, participating in congress sessions and as a member of the UNIMA Publication and Communication Commission, currently charged with creating the English-language World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts, an on-line global resource.
Burns School students make frog masks at Billings Forge Community Works.
The Ballard Institute’s “World of Puppetry in Hartford” project concluded in May with an exciting video project at Billings Forge Community Works in Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood with 8th-grade students from the Burns School and the Compass Youth Collaborative program. The students worked with puppeteer Sara Peattie, Billings Forge resident artists James Holland and Alycia Bright Holland, and Ballard Institute director John Bell in weekly afternoon sessions in April and May.
The Billings Forge project began with paper-mache mask and puppet building workshops led by Peattie, the director of the Boston-based Puppeteers Cooperative. Drawing on the theme “El Coqui meets Frog Hollow”–referencing both the official frog mascot of Puerto Rico and the history of the once-marshy lowland neighborhood of Frog Hollow–the students built frog masks and puppets. In the following weeks the students developed frog-centric scenarios and storyboards for videos about Frog Hollow, the Burns School, and teen-age life in general, which were then filmed, editing in-camera.
James Holland and Sara Peattie edited the films, which can be viewed online at this site.
“The World of Puppetry in Hartford” was a year-long effort to bring different aspects of world puppetry to the Hartford area through exhibitions, workshops and performances at the UConn Health Center, the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Billings Forge. The project was sponsored by grants from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation and Judith Zachs.
Alycia Bright Holland and James Holland make frog masks with Burns School students.
Puppetry Arts grad student (class of 2013) and Ballard Institute digital archivist Seth Shaffer will present a workshop/performance at the William Benton Museum of Art on UConn’s Main Campus on Saturday, June 2, from 1:45 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.!
Seth writes: “I am very excited to be a part of the Alumni Weekend! My plan is to do both an interactive demonstration on basic puppet manipulation and a series of short vinettes. I am planning on building some student puppets in the next two weeks that members of the audience can use to explore manipulation techniques with me. Then with these simple “student” puppets, I will perform a short story to demonstrate how to practically use a puppet.”
Check it out, and then come visit our museum!Puppet Show with Seth Shaffer, Saturday June 2, 1:45 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. at William Benton Museum of Art.
Join us this Saturday and Sunday, May 12 and 13 in the Studio Theater on the UConn’s Main Campus for rare performances of Butterfly Dreams, the remounting of an extraordinary 2001 puppet production created by UConn Puppet Arts students. The performances will feature an all-star cast of UConn Puppet Arts alumni–Ceili Clemens, David Regan, Bart Roccoberton, Joe Therrien and Hua Hua Zhang–and current Puppet Arts students–Penny Benson and Xing Xin Liu. These special performances will precede the presentation of Butterfly Dreams at the 21st UNIMA Congress & World Puppetry Festival in Chengdu, China later in May.
Butterfly Dreams will be performed Saturday, May 12 at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sunday, May 13 at 2 p.m., at the UConn Dramatic Arts Department’s Studio Theater (click here for directions). There is no admission charge for these performances, but donations will be gratefully accepted, and used to help defray the costs of the trip to China.
Butterfly Dreams was created in 2001 by Puppet Arts students Hua Hua Zhang, David Regan and Puppet Arts director Bart Roccoberton, and uses dreams as a vehicle to explore humanity and its multiple levels of meaning and purpose. The production is inspired by a tale from Taoist philosophy about a sage, Zhuang Zi, who dreamed that he had become a butterfly and derived immense pleasure from flying. After awakening, he wondered whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. Bart Roccoberton writes of the show, “We are living in a dream of dreams. If you don’t dream, life has no interest and no meaning. Everybody has dreams at different levels – both waking and sleeping. Do we dream that we dream?”
UNIMA, the French-based Union Internationale de la Marionnette, is the world’s oldest international arts organization. It was founded in Prague in 1929 and is now chartered under UNESCO. The performances of Butterfly Dreams at the UNIMA Congress and Festival in Chengdu will mark an unusual opportunity for UConn Puppet Arts work to appear in a prestigious international stage.
Admission is free to the performances on Saturday, May 12 at 4 & 8 pm and Sunday, May 13 at 2 pm. Donations to help defray the costs of the China trip will be gratefully accepted. Checks can be made out to VISUAL EXPRESSIONS.
Still from I'll Forget you, directed by Natasha Pincus of Melbourne, Australia
Our Spring Puppet Forum Series will end on Wednesday, May 9th at 7:30, with a rare showing of Handmade Puppet Dreams, Volume 5, at the Ballard Institute on UConn’s Depot Campus. In Heather Henson’s new collection of fourteen (count’em!) independent puppet shorts by an international array of young filmmakers and puppeteers, you will see an astounding range of expression and a variety of fascinating and innovative stories and puppet techniques. This will be the first showing of Handmade Puppet Dreams, Volume 5 in northern Connecticut!
Still from Rocket Monkey Directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage of New York
The film runs a little over an hour and a half, it is free and open to all. Refreshments will be served.
The museum’s new exhibitions, Red Gate: Pauline Benton and Chinese Shadow Theater, and Frank Ballard: Roots and Branches, will also be open for your viewing pleasure before and after the film.
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and The UConn Puppet Arts Program present new works in puppet films by Puppet Arts MFA Candidates Maya Ahuja, Ki Hong Kim, Travis Lope, Caitlin Shirts, and Fergus Walsh.
There are 4 showings on Tuesday April 24th and Wednesday April 25th at 7:30 pm and 10:30 pm. The event is free and open to all. **This event will be at the Nafe Katter Theater in the Dramatic Arts Building on UConn’s Main Campus. Click for directions.**
This will be the third event in our Spring Forum Series, with the final event, a showing of Handmade Puppet Dreams, Vol. 5 on Wednesday May 9th at The Ballard Institute.
Join Carol Sterling and students and teachers from UConn’s Puppet Arts Program this Wednesday, April 18 at 7:30 at the Ballard Institute for a fascinating discussion of the opportunities and challenges of puppetry in education. Carol Sterling is a celebrated puppeteer, art educator, and longtime Director of Arts in Education for the Brooklyn Arts Council, as well as a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award for Arts Education from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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