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.

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.

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.

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.

An eye-opening exhibition of a ground-breaking 20th-century American puppeteer, Dick Myers, is now on display at the Ballard Museum.  “Exceptional and Uncommon: The Puppetry of Dick Myers” is a fascinating in-depth look at a puppeteer’s puppeteer—an innovative and ingenious designer, builder, and performer whose work, while highly respected in the international world of puppetry, never brought him fame.

Curated by Puppet Arts Program graduate student Seth Shaffer, “Exceptional and Uncommon” brings together scores of rod puppets, marionettes, and hand puppets designed and performed by Myers; innovative sound, lighting, and stage equipment he designed; photographs of Myers at work and in performance; and a documentary video filmed and edited by Shaffer in which Myers’s friends and colleagues describe his work and his life.

Dick Myers was one of the leading American puppeteers of the later 20^th century.  Although his work is now relatively unknown, in its time his puppet shows were highly respected by puppeteers around the world for the compelling and original design of the puppets, Myers’ skillful manipulation, and the challenging tasks he set out and achieved with his creations.

In the early years of his career Dick Myers worked with many well-known puppeteers including Connecticut’s Rufus and Margo Rose, and Martin and Olga Stevens of Indiana.  He was, however, best known for his unique solo rod puppet shows: Dick Whittington’s Cat (1966), Cinderella (1967), Beauty and the Beast (1969), Simple Simon (1976), and Divertissement (1978).

“Exceptional and Uncommon: The Puppetry of Dick Myers” is a revelatory and thought-provoking window into puppetry of the late 20th century, when American puppeteers combined technological innovations with home-grown humor and popular culture in order to re-define puppetry as an aspect of contemporary American culture.

The popular Frank Ballard: Roots and Branches exhibition at the Ballard Institute has re-opened for the season, with many new additions to this rich review of the wide-ranging puppet forms that influenced the work of the founder of UConn’s puppetry programs.  Roots and Branches features the work of significant American puppeteers of the early, mid-, and late-twentieth century whose work Frank saw while growing up in Illinois: Martin and Olga Stevens, Tony Sarg, Jero Magon, Rufus and Margo Rose, and Romain and Ellen Proctor; as well as contemporary puppeteers from across the country, including Ralph Chessé, the Kungsholm Miniature Grand Opera, Bil Baird, Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin, and the Turnabout Theater; and Ballard’s own contemporaries and colleagues, including Sidney Chrysler, Jim Henson, Dick Myers, Basil Milovsoroff, George Latshaw, and Peter Schumann.

The exhibition also features Asian and European puppet forms that also influenced Ballard’s understanding of puppetry, including Javanese wayang kulit shadow puppets, Chinese shadow theater, Sicilian marionette theater, and Javanese wayang golek rod puppets.