Cantastorias and crankies are forms of sung picture story-telling that trace their origins to 6th-century India. These paintings mounted on sticks, flipped over and revealed, or unfurled on scrolls and moved by means of a crank are performing object precursors to the popular puppet traditions of many countries. Despite the prominence of new technologies in popular culture, an innovative dynamic engagement with the simple mechanical cranky and cantastoria has blossomed among young puppet theater companies, activist educators, folk musicians, visual artists, playwrights, and students who infuse this old form with diverse new content and bold variations in technique.

Frank Ballard’s Marionette Modernism: Peer Gynt and The Love for Three Oranges will be a striking exposition of Frank Ballard’s life-long passion for the artistic possibilities of string marionettes as it emerged in his spectacular versions of two modernist classics: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with music by Edvard Grieg; and Gozzi’s The Love for Three Oranges, set to music by Sergei Prokofiev.

Object, Image, Text: The Bread & Puppet Press will feature an integral element of Bread & Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann’s prodigious artistic output: the production of pamphlets, books, posters, and book-like constructions that have complemented his dynamic Bread & Puppet shows since the 1960s.

The Bureau of Small Requests includes multiple examples of the masterful small-scale puppets and objects from Laura Heit’s varied repertoire of performances, films, and installations. A West-Coast-based artist whose work has crossed many disciplines, Heit has deep roots in puppetry and animation and all things miniature. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Royal College of Art, Heit co-directed the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of Arts before moving to Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The Bureau of Small Requests features artworks and objects from puppet productions and films Heit has created over the past 15 years, involving toy-theater stages and shrines, matchbox-sized puppet shows, and the unheralded work of women paleontologists of the 19th century. As part of the exhibition, visitors will experience Two Ways Down, a multi-media installation covering the walls of the largest Ballard Institute gallery with mechanized moving shadows and figments of digital animation. The Bureau of Small Requests will be on display through October 9, 2016.

 

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.