2000

PROJECT GRANTS ($5,000)

Adzak’s Garden Inc./ Puppetsweat Theater – Three Tales by Poe A new stage of development for a shadow play/oratorio adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories using computer generated animations. ($3,000)

Batoto Yetu – The Mukishi
A dance piece based on African dance, music, and folk legend, with puppets designed by Garland Farwell. ($3,000)

Center for Puppetry Arts – Wrestling Macbeth
For an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play through the lens of personality-driven pop culture as exemplified in professional wrestling. ($2,000)

Great Small Works – Satie Cabaret Project
A collaboration with pianist Margaret Leng Tan combining the music of Erik Satie with innovative puppet and performance techniques. ($2,000)

Hanne Tierney – Man, the Flower of all Flesh
A work based on a 1928 science fiction story by E.M. Forester expressing the recurrent fear of machines over the last two centuries. ($2,000)

Dan Hurlin – Everyday Uses for Sight #3 & #7
An evening of two companion pieces exploring the power of seeing through landscape painting and architecture. ($3,000)

In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater – Awesome Vessel Power
A puppet and mask play weaving the styles and visions of individual artists into a single thematic piece. ($2,000)

Mabou Mines – Red Beads
A puppet opera based on a Russian folk tale with puppetry by Basil Twist and music by Ushio Torikai.($4,000)

Mettawee River Theatre Company – Psyche
A visual theater adaptation of Moliere’s version of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. ($2,000)

Sandglass Theater – The Pig Act
A dark circus piece about the delicate balancing act that we must all perform in order to survive. ($2,000)

Saw Theater – And the Movement of Hearts Came at Me Like a Storm
The story of a character’s search for meaning and beauty told with puppets, objects, projections, film and live sound. ($4,000)

Skysaver Productions – Lives of the Artists
A site-specific theatre work that explores writings about the lives of the most important and popular visual artists of the past 600 years. ($2,000)

Smokebrush Theater – Dream Cafe
A story told with actors and puppets that begins in a realistic setting and develops to reveal the mythic underpinnings of the scene. ($2,000)

Rudi Stern – Theater of Light
A series of performed compositions of projected light and objects set to music. ($2,000)

Top Shows – Madison’s Descent
A performance pageant by Page Allen and Michael Curry telling the story of one child’s journey into being. ($2,000)

Basil Twist – Behind the Lid
A work with a text by Lee Nagrin and puppetry by Basil Twist. ($4,000)

SEED GRANTS ($1,000)

Cave Dogs – Ferrous City: Tunnel Visions
A story about an urban night drive from three different perspectives using improvisational shadow puppetry.

Fred Curchack – King Lear Project
A show in which an old actor/puppeteer relives decades spent touring a solo adaptation of King Lear.

Drama of Works – Doctor Faustus
A version of Christopher Marlowe’s classic text focusing on Faustus’ inner struggle between good and evil.

Figures of Speech Theatre – She-Who-Is-Alone
An adaptation of the Comanche story for performance by puppets and actors.

GOH Productions – Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Joan of France
A staging the 1913 poem in prose by Blaise Cendrars about his adventurous travel on the Transsiberian railroad in 1905.

Samantha Hack – Isolation Island
A work that tells the story of a group of dogs stranded on an isolated island.

The Heuristic Theatre Company – Harrison Bergeron
An adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story performed with rod, shadow, and stop motion puppets.

Eric Jacobson – Galileo’s Telescope
A piece combining Bunraku puppetry, masks, original music and lighting effects to transport the audience to the edge of the universe and back.

Billy Jarcho – The Fattest Kitty on Earth!
A collaboration between Minneapolis puppeteer/director Andrew Kim and writer, designer and animation director Billy Jarcho.

Liz Joyce and a Couple of Puppets – Lorca Puppet Plays
A production with 14 hand-carved puppets, four puppeteers and three musicians, based on the writings of Federico García Lorca.

Mum Puppettheatre – The Leonardo Project
A collaboration between puppeteer Robert Smythe and corporeal mime Daniel Stein based on their studies of human movement.

Ontological Hysteric Theater, Inc. – Bad Boy Nietzche
A work written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman, which explores the philosopher Nietzsche’s eastern influences.

Redmoon Theater – Things That Eat Other Things
A large-scale shadow puppet show to be performed in the windows of the facade of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tom Ross – American Hunger
A work based on the autobiographical writings of African-American novelist Richard Wright.

ShadowLight Productions – Dreaming California
A shadow theater piece depicting the cultural and natural history of California.

Manju Shandler – Stories for the Sultan
A play based on One Thousand and One Nights to be developed as a theatrical serial.

Michael Sommers – Elijah’s Wake
A work for both actors and puppeteers based on the stories and myths surrounding the Prophet Elijah.

Lisa Sturz – Still Life
A rod puppet operetta in which the protagonist journeys into the unconscious world of hidden potential and emerges as a new woman.

Ellen van Wees – Tales of the Powdered and Periwigged
A shadow and toy theater piece using classic fairy tales as a springboard to explore human behavior, with a Freudian/Jungian twist.

“Puppetry is a mirror of design, engineering and dramaturgy.”

– Dan Hurlin