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Down the Rabbit Hole: Ballard Celebrates 150 years of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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This past Saturday and Sunday, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry offered fall community puppet-building workshops with acclaimed Boston puppeteer Sara Peattie.

This year’s free workshops held at the Ballard Institute workshop space celebrate the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Participants brought the colorful and fantastic figures that popular Carroll’s fanciful world to life, rendering the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, and the eponymous Alice into puppet form.

Workshop participants are invited to parade with their puppets as part of the Celebrate Mansfield Parade that will be held on Sunday, September 20 at noon (Line-up begins at 11am at Farrell Field near the Post Office). The parade is part of the 12th Annual Celebrate Mansfield Festival.

Sara Peattie’s dramatic puppet creations have been featured at community parades and pageants across the United States. Long a mainstay of Boston First Night festivities and the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in New York City, Sara Peattie’s work—through her Boston-based Puppeteers Cooperative company and Puppet Free Library—combines community participation, simple, cheap, and practical puppet-building techniques, and a brilliant design sense that allows community members of all ages to take part in the age-old pleasures of participatory puppet performance in public spaces. Sara recently designed and directed the community puppet parade and pageant in Storrs Center as part of the 2015 Puppeteers of America National Puppetry Festival.

For information on the 12th Annual Celebrate Mansfield Festival, visit http://www.downtownstorrsfestival.org

Sketches of Frank Ballard’s Queen of the Night

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scan-2[/one_half][/row]By Bryanna, a student and Ballard Institute volunteer

The figure sketched here is the villainous Queen of the Night from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s famous opera, The Magic Flute. First debuted in 1791, the story was originally written as an opera in the form of a “singspiel,” meaning that the play was performed containing both periods of singing and periods of speaking.Frank Ballard of the University of Connecticut presented this opera using puppets in 1986. These sketches are based upon Ballard’s design of the Queen of the Night character. With her lavish hat and dress and exaggerated facial features, the puppet brilliantly reflects the baroque time period in which the opera was first written.

The design of this puppet was one of the things that stood out most to me upon choosing a puppet on display to interpret and sketch. The Queen of the Night’s dramatically angular face with half-lidded eyes that seemed to constantly say “I am unimpressed” gave the character a unique expressive nature. She seemed so very characteristically proud, posted there on her display pedestal so I knew she’d be fun to characterize into a drawing where I could give her the different facial and body expressions that she could not change as a puppet. The Queen puppet seemed an even more perfect fit when I realized she was from The Magic Flute play that had coincidentally been involved in my life several times before. My father and I saw the opera live at Jorgensen Theater when I was a little girl where my dad bought the soundtrack to the opera and played it over and over for me. Years later, I also found myself performing a piece from the play in my school orchestra. The Queen of the Night seemed like a perfect fit for me to sketch.