Due to the power outage in Puerto Rico, “Tito Matos and Puerto Rican Culture” Online Forum has been rescheduled for May 12 at 7 PM ET on Facebook Live and Zoom. 

The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the UConn Puppet Arts Program will stream an online version of its popular UConn Spring Spring Slam on March 25, 2022 at 8 p.m. ET on Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry Facebook Live. The 2022 UConn Spring Puppet Slam: Online!, hosted by Puerto Rico’s favorite YouTube church lady, Titi Gandinga, and UConn Puppet Arts student Stoph Scheer, will feature short works by professional puppeteers and performers from around the United States and across the world and new works by UConn Puppet Arts students. 

In conjunction with its current exhibition Hecho en Puerto Rico: Four Generations of Puerto Rican Puppetry, the 2022 UConn Spring Puppet Slam: Online! will showcase the work of Puerto Rican puppeteers Agua, Sol y Sereno, Poncili Creación, Deborah Hunt, Mary Anne Hopgood Santaella, and Luis y sus muñecos, as well as Compania Olveira Salcedo from Spain, and Lormiga Títeres from Mexico. The UConn Spring Puppet Slam will also feature fascinating new works by graduate and undergraduate students from the UConn Puppet Arts Program. Funding for the UConn Spring Puppet Slam: Online! is made possible in part by the Puppet Slam Network.

The UConn Spring Puppet Slam is free, but donations are greatly appreciated. These performances are recommended for mature audiences. The UConn Spring Puppet Slam will be available through May 31, 2022 on the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry Facebook page and the Ballard Institute YouTube channel. 

For more information about these performances, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860-486-8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.

For its second installment of the 2022 Spring Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will host “Adventures in Jewish Puppet and Spectacle Performance” with panelists Jenny Romaine, Matthew Cohen and Steve Abrams on Thursday, March 24 at 7 p.m. ET. This forum will take place on Zoom (registration required) and Facebook Live and will be available afterwards on the Ballard Institute’s Facebook page and YouTube Channel. 

Global forms of puppet and object performance have their roots in religion and ritual that reflect Jewish cultural and religious practices. “Adventures in Jewish Puppet and Spectacle Performance” will look at a variety of current and historical aspects of Jewish puppetry through a conversation with three prominent puppeteers engaged in this work: activist artist Jenny Romaine, Puppetry Journal editor Steve Abrams, and University of Connecticut Dramatic Arts professor Matthew Cohen.

All three panelists will speak of their own experiences with puppet and spectacle performance: Steve Abrams will offer an overview of historical 20th-century puppet purimsphiln, and his own experiments in that form; Jenny Romaine will elaborate upon her work as a director of spectacle and puppetry with the Sukkos Mob, the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, and Great Small Works; and Matthew Cohen will focus on his current production of Wayang Esther, a purimshpil with Javanese-style shadow figures at the Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford, performed with Gamelan Son of Lion, and its accompanying Purim Puppetry exhibition. This event is co-sponsored by the the UConn Center for Judaic Studies. 

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE award-winning Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok and artist-in-residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great Small Works Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community-based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan-Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning. Her projects include the Sukkos Mob (featured in the film Punk Jews) and 25 years of community Purim Shpiln with the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee. She was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish (2014), received a Marshall Meyer Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (2015), and is featured in Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience a monograph by Ezra Berkley Nepon. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute Department of Performance Studies.

Dr. Matthew Isaac Cohen is a professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, specializing in global arts and puppetry. He has published extensively in the field of Indonesian performing arts and trained in Java, Indonesia as a dhalang wayang kulit (shadow puppeteer) starting in 1988. He was the principal puppeteer in the 2022 production of Barbara Benary’s shadow puppet musical Wayang Esther: A Javanese Purimspiel, produced as a collaboration between UConn’s Puppet Arts program and Gamelan Son of Lion. He also curated the associated exhibition “Purim Puppetry,” which is on display at the Mandell Jewish Community Center of West Hartford, CT until the end of March. He is currently working on a visual history of Indonesian puppetry and associated exhibition, based on the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets at Yale University Art Gallery.  

Steve Abrams has served as editor of Puppetry Journal since 2015 and was associate editor 2002-2014. He was the North American editor for the World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts (WEPA). He served as president of Puppeteers of America 1999-2001 and was the co-artistic director of the National Puppetry Festival in Tampa 2001. He was vice president of UNIMA-USA for several terms. For more than 40 year Steve performed his solo shows (mostly hand puppets) in hundreds of schools, libraries, and theaters. He has performed a handful of Purim shows.

For more information email bimp@uconn.edu.

Due to inclement weather, the Ballard Institute will be  closed on Friday, 2/25.

As its last 2021 Fall Puppet Performance, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will present Anansi: Story-teller by Baltimore’s String Theory Theater on Saturday, Dec. 4 at 11 a.m. ET via Zoom. 

String Theory Theater presents a fresh take on the famous trickster spider from West Africa folk tales. Anansi is charged with weaving together all of the stories of life on earth and relaying the stories to the sky gods. Daunted by what seems like a never-ending task, Anansi seeks to simplify his effort with an innovative solution, which leads to unexpected results.

String Theory Theater (STT) is a family puppet troupe based in Baltimore MD, consisting of artist Dirk Joseph and his daughters Koi and Azaria. They create and perform shows for families to enjoy together, as well as adult-themed productions. STT is also involved in community arts, using puppetry as a healing and connective cultural technology in some of Baltimore’s underserved communities. 

Ticket price: $10/household. Tickets can be purchased online at bimp.ticketleap.com/anansi-stt/. A surcharge will be added to online purchases. Attendees should purchase one ticket per household. While we ask for a minimum payment of $10/household, we greatly appreciate any additional support! A Zoom link will be emailed to households one hour before the performance. 

For more information about these performances or if you require an accommodation to attend this event, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860-486-8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.

For its last installment of the 2021 Fall Puppet Forum Series, and in conjunction with the Hecho en Puerto Rico: Four Generations of Puerto Rican Puppetry exhibition, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will host “Contemporary Puppetry in Puerto Rico” with exhibit co-curators Dr. Manuel Morán and Deborah Hunt, and puppeteers Pedro Adorno, and Tere Marichal on Thursday, Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. ET. This forum will take place on Zoom (registration required: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KmxoQCIeTmaJxfBlVgr0Ew) and Facebook Live (facebook.com/BallardInstitute/) and will be available afterwards on Facebook and the Ballard Institute YouTube Channel (youtube.com/channel/UC3VSthEDnYS6ZjOwzT1DnTg). This event is co-sponsored by the UConn Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center (PRLACC) and El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.

The “Contemporary Puppetry in Puerto Rico” forum, moderated by Ballard Institute director John Bell, will consider the history of the form in Puerto Rico, as presented in Hunt and Morán’s Hecho en Puerto Rico: Four Generations of Puerto Rican Puppetry exhibition, and the ways that puppetry in Puerto Rico has pursued educational, entertainment, cultural, and activist goals over the past fifty years. “Contemporary Puppetry in Puerto Rico” will also discuss the situation of Puerto Rican puppetry today and its possibilities for the future.

Pedro Adorno is co-founder and artistic director of Agua, Sol y Sereno. He is a theater and film director and works as an actor, visual artist, educator and stilt man. Agua, Sol y Sereno, founded by Pedro Adorno and Cathy Vigo in 1993, is a non-profit organization that promotes the development of Puerto Rican experimental theater and the democratization of art to all sectors of the population. It links artistic work to social reality through pieces that explore a broad aesthetic range, parades with stilters and big heads puppets, creative workshops, and community residences.

Deborah Hunt has lived and worked as a mask maker, mask and object theatre performance artist since 1973, creating and presenting original theatre works, performances and festivals or encounters in the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, she has been based in Borikén/Puerto Rico since 1990, where she founded Maskhunt Motions, a nomadic laboratory for experimental object theatre work. Hunt teaches mask work and puppetry in communities worldwide, in a practice exploring puppetry in public and private spaces. Her work ranges in scale from the miniature to creating giant puppets that transform into peepshows. She has created encounters and festivals to promote puppetry for adult audiences and published mask and puppetry manuals in Spanish and English. She is interested in performing in unconventional places and to very intimate audiences. Hunt characterizes her work as “theatre of the useless.” 

Tere Marichal began studying theater in 1971 in Theatron de P.R. with Victoria Espinosa. In 1974 she went to Spain and studied at Instituto de Teatro de Barcelona and began to create paper marionettes. In 1976 she began her workshop on creating puppets from solid waste and began writing for the theater in 1977. In 1985 Marichal was awarded the René Marqués Prize for her play, The Night Gods Hours. In addition to being a playwright, Marichal is also an accomplished television writer (two EMMY awards), storyteller, performer, illustrator and puppeteer. She works on her own offering workshops, writing and illustrating and narrating. Marichal works with the narration techniques Kaavad, Kamishibai, Damarkurung, Cantastoria, Blankets and Story boxes (puppets and story) and offers workshops on these techniques. For her work with environmental stories and environmental education, she received the national award from the EPA. Marichal integrates puppets and storytelling and has been developing the art of oral storytelling in Puerto Rico since 2000, and at this time, she is the only storyteller representing Puerto Rico at international festivals. Marichal has offered two intensive seminars on kamishibai technique (Japanese oral storytelling technique) sponsored by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the NEA. 

Dr. Manuel Morán (www.manuelmoran.com) was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and studied at the University of Puerto Rico and New York University, where he earned a doctorate degree in Educational Theater. He is the Founder, CEO and Artistic Director of Society of the Educational Arts, Inc. (SEA). A writer, director, and producer for theater, television, and film, he is also an actor, singer and composer, and created the International Puppet Fringe Festival of NYC in 2018. He is a former Vice-President (2012-2021) of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette). His three-part documentary film Títeres en el Caribe Hispano/Puppetry in the Caribbean premiered at the Havana Film Festival in Cuba in 2016 and has been screened in festivals around the world. Dr. Morán’s theater and literary work has been published in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States, including his books Migrant Theater for Children: A Caribbean in New York (2016), and Mantequilla/Butter; Adventures and Tribulations of a Puerto Rican Boy (2017). He is currently starring in the web series El Avión The Airplane (www.elaviontheairplane.com), and is the proud dad of Manuel Gabriel, with whom he lives in New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

For more information and to learn about other Ballard Institute online programming, visit bimp.uconn.edu or email bimp@uconn.edu.

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