Join the Ballard Institute for our sixth Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.  

On July 16 at 4 p.m. ET, in a forum entitled “A Long and Unexpected Love Affair (with Puppetry),” puppeteer and scholar Penny Francis will speak with John Bell about her work creating the Puppet Centre Trust in London, her book Puppetry, a Reader in Theatre Practice; her translation of Henryk Jurkowski’s ground-breaking History of European Puppetry; her puppetry teaching at London’s famed Central School of Speech and Drama; and her long-standing work with the international puppetry organization UNIMA.

Penny Francis is England’s pre-eminent figure in the international world of puppetry. A longtime teacher at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama puppet program, she is also the author, editor, and translator of many acclaimed books and publications about puppetry, and has played an essential role in the work of UNIMA, the world puppetry organization. Queen Elizabeth II decorated her as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.) for her services to puppetry in 1998.

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. 

Join the Ballard Institute for our sixth Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.  

On July 9 at 4 p.m. ET, in a forum entitled “Woman Behind the Shadows: My Journey with Puppets and Tradition in Bali and Beyond,” Professor Jennifer Goodlander of Indiana University will speak with John Bell about her research on traditional and contemporary puppetry in Bali, including the roles of women in the form, and how puppetry in helps define cultural and national identity in Southeast Asia.

Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature, where she teaches classes on Indonesian and global theater, literature, and other arts. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016), and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Jennifer is also the current President for the Association of Asian Performance.

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Join the Ballard Institute for our fifth Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.  

On July 2 at 4 p.m. ET, in a forum entitled “Thinking through the Puppet,” Professor Claudia Orenstein of Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center will speak with John Bell about her research on women in puppetry, puppets and spirituality, contemporary Indian puppetry, how people watch and understand puppet performance, and how puppetry studies might be taught.

Claudia Orenstein is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has spent over a decade writing on contemporary and traditional puppetry in the US and Asia, and her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Women and Puppetry (with Alissa Mello and Cariad Astles,) and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (with John Bell and Dassia Posner). With John Bell she has co-organized three editions of the Critical Exchange forum series at Puppeteers of American National Festivals; and with Dassia Posner, Alissa Mello, and Lawrence Switzky, heads up the Puppetry and Material Performance Working Group for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. 

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Join the Ballard Institute for our third Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.  

On June 25 at 4 p.m. ET, Join Ballard Institute director John Bell for a discussion with Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann about his current socially-distant performances of Insurrection-Resurrection Services at the theater’s farm in Glover, Vermont, and the challenges of making a puppet theater of “praise and denunciation” in the summer of 2020, a time of pandemic and historic change. “The important thing is the moment,” Schumann says; “how do we treat it? How do we treat other people in this moment? We need to deal with the real reality, not the fake reality.” Bell and Schumann will also discuss Bread and Puppet Theater’s approaches to collaboration, racism, and other aspects of theater making, and Schumann’s inspirations from the German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and 16th-century Silesian cobbler and mystic philosopher Jakob Böhme.

Peter Schumann is the founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater, which has been making “cheap art” and political theater since its inception in New York City in 1963. Now based on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the Bread and Puppet Theater tours locally, nationally, and internationally, and has been one of the most influential theater companies of the 20th and 21st century. Long an inspiration for activist art makers, puppeteers, and bread bakers, Bread and Puppet’s unique approach to community engagement, collective theater making, and modernist avant-garde puppetry inspires hundreds of puppeteers who have worked with the company, and thousands of volunteer performers and audience members.

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Join the Ballard Institute for our third Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.  

On June 18 at 4 p.m. ET, Professor Scott Shershow of University of California, Davis will speak with John Bell about “Object Lessons: Material Culture and Humanistic Studies,” and how puppets and performing objects have been part of literary studies, the new philosophic field of “object-oriented ontology,” and even such mundane subjects as bread and the nature of letters.

Scott Cutler Shershow is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author of Puppets and “Popular” Culture (Cornell University 1995) and of other articles and books on theater, popular culture and critical theory.  His most recent books are Bread, from Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, (2016); and The Love of Ruins: Letters on Lovecraft (SUNY 2017).  

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Join the Ballard Institute for our second Summer 2020 Online Puppet Forum Series event on Facebook Live! These forums, hosted by Ballard Institute director and puppet historian John Bell, will consist of discussions with notable scholars and practitioners around the world about the past, present, and future of puppetry and puppetry studies.

On June 11 at 4 p.m. ET, Theodora Skipitares will speak with John Bell about “Puppetry and Translation, from Autobiography to Benjamin Banneker.” Skipitares will discuss the development of her work from visual art to performance art and puppetry, and her ongoing focus on translating biography into puppet performance, most recently with The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker, which relates the surprisingly little-known story of an 18th-century free black man, independent farmer, self-taught astronomer, mathematician and civil rights advocate.

Theodora Skipitares is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and theater director based in New York. Trained as a sculptor and designer, she is the author/director of 30 performance works, each featuring documentary texts, original music, video, and as many as 300 puppet figures. She is a resident artist at La MaMa Theater. Ms. Skipitares has worked and taught master classes in Brazil, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, and Iran. She is a Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Forums will be available afterwards on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.