The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry  presents its new exhibition The Work That Follows: 50 Years of UConn Puppeteers at the Ballard Institute, located at 1 Royce Circle in Storrs, Connecticut.

For 50 years, puppeteers have passed through UConn’s unique Puppet Arts Program to study the skills and techniques of imagining, designing, building, and performing new works for puppetry. Though the basic skills of puppetry taught at UConn are perpetually consistent, the work that follows graduation is specific to the hands that created it. The Work That Follows, curated by Anna Fitzgerald (MFA ’14), highlights the work of Puppet Arts Program alumni, and how these puppet artists have incorporated their own distinctive perspective with skills learned at UConn. The exhibition features puppets and objects created for live performance, film, and video; as well as photographs and video documentation of performances. The exhibition will be on display through November 1, 2015.

The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will present the grand opening of two new exhibitions: Reed + Light: Works by Anne Cubberly, and Masters of the Marionette: Rufus and Margo Rose, on Saturday, March 7 at 2 p.m. at the Ballard Institute in Storrs Center.  The opening events will include a tour of Reed + Light by curator and artist Anne Cubberly and a demonstration of Rose marionettes by puppeteer Fred Thompson.

In Reed + Light, acclaimed Hartford visual artist and spectacle creator Anne Cubberly presents some of her trademark giant puppets and costumes representing the strong, the fragile, and the temporary. In this installation Cubberly shows how—with reed, paper, fabric, and repurposed materials—she works on life-size and giant scales to create the honesty of a sketch.

Guest curator Fred Thompson and UConn Art History student Hannah Kennedy present the work of Connecticut’s most famed puppeteers of the 20th century, Rufus and Margo Rose, in the new exhibition Masters of the Marionette. Spanning the decades between their early cross-country tours of the 1920s and the newer technologies of film and television, this exhibition traces the path of these pioneers of American puppetry.

Both exhibitions will be on display through June 28, 2015.

In conjunction with the opening celebration, both Anne Cubberly and Fred Thompson will participate in the Ballard Institute’s Spring Puppet Forum Series. On Wednesday, March 11 at 7 p.m., Cubberly will lead a presentation titled Making Art with Your Community, in which she will talk about her extensive work in the Hartford area, and its focus on creativity, process, community, and re-purposed materials. On Wednesday, April 8 at 7 p.m., celebrated puppeteer and teacher Fred Thompson will illuminate the Masters of the Marionette exhibition by describing his own work with puppeteers Rufus and Margo Rose. These events are free and open to the public.

 

Pictured: Blair Thomas performing Buster Keaton’s Stroll, by Federico García Lorca. Photograph by Kipling Swehla

The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will present the grand opening of Stages of Enchantment: The Puppet Theaters of Blair Thomas & Company on Saturday, October 25 at 4 p.m. at the Ballard Institute in Storrs Center. The opening events will include two performances of Thomas’ celebrated show The Selfish Giant, at 1 and 3 p.m. in the Ballard Institute Theater; and be preceded on Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. by Thomas’ talk at the Fall Puppet Forum Series entitled Liminal Worlds: Design in the Puppet Theater.

In this new exhibition, celebrated Chicago puppeteer, director, and designer Blair Thomas interprets the traditional puppet booth in stages featuring boldly practical designs and a unique material-based aesthetic. Incorporating poetry, folksong, religious texts, and theatrical scripts as sources, Thomas re-invents the puppet stage as a self-contained world for rod, shadow, and hand puppets, Bunraku-style dolls, and marionettes. The exhibition will be on display through February 22, 2015.

In conjunction with the opening celebration and as part of our first-ever Fall Puppet Performance Series, Thomas will perform The Selfish Giant on October 25 at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Using original puppets and music, Thomas and singer/songwriter Michael Smith tell the story of this Oscar Wilde classic about a grumpy old giant and the children of his village who rejuvenate his garden. Seating will be limited. Tickets will be sold in advance through the Connecticut Repertory Theatre Box Office located in the lobby of the Nafe Katter Theatre at 820 Bolton Rd, Storrs, CT 06269. Tickets may be purchased in person at the box office, by calling (860) 486-2113, or online at: https://itkt.choicecrm.net/templates/UCRT/index.php?prod=bimp. Tickets may also be purchased at the Ballard Institute on October 25.

Prior to the exhibition opening, Blair Thomas will lead a presentation titled Liminal Worlds: Design in the Puppet Theater, on Wednesday, October 22, 7:30 p.m. as part of the Ballard Institute’s Fall Puppet Forum Series. Thomas will discuss his aesthetic process in the development of his puppets, stages, and stories in a session that will include a question-and-answer period. This event is free and open to the public.

Our new exhibition, Opera and Giant Puppets: Amy Trompetter’s Barber of Seville, will open on June 14, 2014 at 4pm.  The opening celebration will include a free performance by Amy Trompetter’s Redwing Blackbird Theater at 5pm in the Ballard Institute Performance Space.

This spectacular display of giant, life-size, and miniature figures reveals the stunning potential of puppets and opera.  Puppeteer Amy Trompetter’s giant-puppet version of Rossini’s 19^th-century comic opera The Barber of Seville was performed to great acclaim in New York City and Vienna from 1983 into the 21^st century.  This exhibition reveals not only Trompetter’s vivid sculptural and performance style, but also her dynamic and unconventional approach to the classic opera, an interpretation that both supports and transgresses the original. Exhibition runs through October 12, 2014.

On exhibit March 1-June 1, 2014

This photographic exhibition features the revelatory work of Richard Termine, performing arts photographer for the New York Times, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and alumnus of UConn’s Puppet Arts Program.  In over 60 photographs taken over the past decade, Termine documents the amazing new energy of contemporary puppet performance, from giant spectacles on Broadway and in Las Vegas to avant-garde works of New York’s downtown scene, the set of Sesame Street, and exciting experiments from the Puppet Slam scene, the National Puppetry Conference, and other dynamic venues of the current puppet revival.

On exhibit March 1-June 1, 2014

One of the groundbreaking aspects of Frank Ballard’s teaching at UConn was his innovative use of rod puppets—of all different forms and sizes—in rich spectacles featuring scores of characters and lavish sets.

An amazing array of puppets from the Ballard Institute collections and UConn’s Puppet Arts Program will be on display September 9 through October 5 in “The World of Puppetry”, an exhibition at the Vernon Community Art Center in Vernon, Connecticut!  The Opening Reception for the event is Sunday, September 8 from 1 to 4 p.m.

The exhibition includes the following amazing workshops, performances, and talks:

– Three puppet shows created and performed by graduate students of the Puppet Arts Program on Saturday, September 14th at 2:00; Sunday, September 22nd at 2:00; and Saturday, October 5th at 7:30.

– Shadow Theatre Workshop on Saturday, September 21st

– Toy Theatre Workshop on Saturday, September 28th. These intergenerational workshops, led by UConn Puppetry faculty and students, are intended for children, parents and/or grandparents.

– “Behind the Puppet Stage”: a lecture by Puppet Arts Program Director Bart Roccoberton on Sunday, September 29th.

Gallery hours for the exhibition, from September 12th through October 5th, are Thursday through Sunday 1 – 5.

For details about the performances and to register for the workshops, please visit the Vernon Community Arts Center website or contact the VCAC by phone at: (860) 871-VCAC (8222).

This project is made possible by a grant from The Greater Hartford Arts Council and funding from The Vernon Arts Commission.

Kathpulti Marionettes from Rajasthan, India

Puppets from around the world representing several centuries worth of global traditions, as well as as cutting-edge hybrids of puppetry and digital technology, make up the rich array of performing objects on display in the Ballard Institute’s new exhibition Strings, Rods, Robots: Recent Acquisitions.

 

Jim Henson’s “Wizard of Id”

The exhibition, curated by UConn Art and Art History graduate student Lindsay Simon, showcases an exhilarating diversity of puppets from around the world recently donated to the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry.  Strings, Rods, Robots exhibition brings together ancient puppet traditions and Modernist innovations, with objects ranging from Vietnamese water puppets, Persian ritual marionettes, and Javanese shadow puppets to 1930s Alabama marionettes, department store automata by Ellen Rixford, a lifesize robotic marionette by French media artist Zaven Paré, traditional Egyptian shadow puppets, a Dada-inspired marionette by Australian artist Sally Smart, a spectacular Danish toy theater, and a stunning array of global puppet forms collected by John E. and Marilyn O’Connor Miller.

Electronic Marionette by Zaven Paré

These visually striking–and sometimes startling–juxtapositions reveal the contemporary world of puppetry as a fecund and florid network of hybrid culture, where centuries-old traditions of epic, religious, comic, and political puppetry performed with wooden, cloth, and leather figures rub shoulders with mechanical or electronic puppets made of plastic, metal, and glass.  And yet, despite these fascinating contradictions, the old and new puppets continue to reveal to us what is happening in our societies, with insight, humor, and wisdom.