PROJECT GRANTS ($5,000)

Billy Burns (Brooklyn, NY)
Hobo No-no
Hobo No-no takes place during the Great Depression and follows a road-scarred tramp and his uneasy protege on their picaresque adventures that crisscross the country. It is a work of traditionally staged marionette theater employing a number of elaborate set changes and special effects, rhyming dialogue and original music.  Photo: Richard Termine

Center for Puppetry Arts (Atlanta, GA)
Don Quixote
Adapted from Miguel de Cervantes’ classic work of Spanish literature, Don Quixote utilizes Sicilian-style rod marionette puppetry and shadow effects as well as a cast of four bilingual puppeteers and a live guitarist, music reminiscent of traditional Spanish melodies, and bilingual dialogue.  Directed by Bobby Box in collaboration with Manuel Moran of Teatro SEA.

The Cosmic Bicycle Theatre (New York, NY)
Edward Lear’s Absurd-Ditties
Edward Lear’s Absurd-Ditties is a full-scale Puppet-Operetta, featuring Lear’s Fantastical Poems set to an original score for Accordion, Strings and Percussion. Set in a Victorian drawing room with a large Toy Theatre at center, a Family of Parlour Performers brings these works to life using Toy Theatre, Household Objects, Marionettes, and Magic Lantern Projections.

Mabou Mines (New York, NY)
Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto
Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto – Lee Breuer’s 2 satiric, nonlinear one-act plays combine to provide an epilogue to his 2002 pataphysical opus Ecco Porco. Summa Dramatica – a spiritual acting lesson, and Porco Morto – a memorial service for Gonzo Porco PhD, an avant-garde pig.

Madcap Puppet Theatre (Cincinnati, OH)
Master Pedro’s Puppet Show
Master Pedro’s Puppet Show is a chamber opera for puppets by Manuel de Falla. Broad in its style, dimensions and ambitions, this thirty minute chamber opera, written in 1922, is based on an episode in Cervantes’ epic novel, Don Quixote. Madcap collaborates with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, under the direction of Mischa Santora.

Dan Hurlin (New York, NY)
Everyday Uses for Sight No. 6: Disfarmer
Everyday Uses for Sight No. 6: Disfarmer is a puppet theater work created by Dan Hurlin, Sally Oswald and Dan Moses Schreier. It is inspired by the life of portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer, who brilliantly recorded small town America in the ’30s and ’40s. Disfarmer lived a hermit’s existence, yet took thousands of beautiful, compassionate portraits of the people he so despised.  Photo: Richard Termine

Frank Maugeri (Forest Park, IL)
Man of Steel
Man of Steel is geared for all audiences and explores the narrative of the fantastic life and mysterious death of television’s first Superman, George Reeves. The original poetic telling visually constructs George’s grand rise to fame, his immersion into his superhero character, and his tragic fall as the world’s first and greatest known live-action super legend.  Photo: Richard Termine

Nana Projects (Baltimore, MD)
Alonzo’s Lullaby
Alonzo’s Lullaby, an original overhead projector shadow puppet performance, inspired by the true story of the hard working train conductor Alonzo Sergeant and the performers of Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Bold graceful silhouettes bring to life dreamlike intrigue as our characters lives collide in the Indiana cornfields in the waning days of WWI.

Opera House Arts (Brooksville, ME)/
Quarryography II: Habitat
Quarryography II: Habitat is a choreographed puppet drama specifically created for and staged at the scale of this amphitheater overlooking Deer Isle Thorofare and islands all of who represent the diverse and often warring sectors of the local island community as they lay claim to the highly desirable landscape of coastal Maine.  Photo: Getty Images, Portland Press Herald

Rogue Artists Ensemble (Los Angeles, CA)
Gogol Project
Gogol Project is based on three short stories by 19th century Russian literary figure Nicolai V. Gogol: The Nose, Diary of a Madman and The Overcoat. It is through the re-examining of these three tales that the Rogues will expose the hypocrisy and oppression of modern class disparity. Gogol Project is adapted for the stage by Kitty Felde with music by Ego Plum.

ShadowLight Productions (San Francisco, CA)
Ghosts of the River
Ghosts of the River is a collaboration with Larry Reed, Octavio Solis, Favianna Rodriguez and I Made Moja, exploring the contentious immigration and the US/Mexico border issues. It is Inspired by Octavio’s personal experience growing up in El Paso, Texas, and his recent extensive interviews with residents, immigrants, their families, law enforcement officers and immigration lawyers in the city. 

Susan Simpson (Los Angeles, CA)
Exhibit A
Exhibit A interlocks the stories of three obsessive collectors who have struggled to gather and protect memory amidst a storm of forgetting in Los Angeles. Three puppet plays, presented episodically will examine the compulsion to collect, the intricacies of personal systems of categorization, and the burden of being a self-appointed custodian of collective memory.

Skysaver Productions (New York, NY)
The Traveling Players Present the Women of Troy 
The Traveling Players Present the Women of Troy is based on the merging of two sources: the text by Euripides, and the words of incarcerated women on New York’s Riker’s Island, developed in performance workshops at the prison. Photo: Aaron Long

Underground Railway Theater (Arlington, MA)
Galileo 2009 Project
Galileo 2009 Project newly-interprets Brecht’s master work as a uniquely-styled production combing actors and puppetry. Audiences will feel invited to connect the historical moment of the play with their own, to reflect on how scientific discovery shifts paradigms and profoundly impacts our lives. Diverse puppetry techniques will respond to both the content and aesthetics of ‘Galileo.’

SEED GRANTS ($2,000)

Matthew Acheson (Brooklyn, NY)
Dirt Project
Dirt Project is a puppet theatre work whose central set piece is a large pile of dirt. Using figurative puppets, objects and outdated technologies like phonographs and 16mm film projectors, Dirt Project creates theatrical compositions that speak to buried histories, life cycles, secrets, and civilations.

Michael Bodel (Brooklyn, NY)
Sonnambula
Sonnambula presents an amalgam of puppetry, contraptions and choreography that delves into the eventual reduction of everything to nothing. The work originates with the arias from Bellini’s mysterious opera following a soprano’s voice through the nebulous world that seperates human from object, living from lifeless.  Photo: Ben Aron

Jean Marie Keevins (Astoria, NY)
The Adventures of Liverwurst Girl
The Adventures of Liverwurst Girl follows 8-year-old Louisa May Kelly through an average day and get to know her liver-sausage-loving, crime fighting, dream making alter-ego Liverwurst Girl. This czech marionette show has been invited to be workshopped at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX in 2009. Our heroine will save the world one liverwurst at a time.  Photo: Jeffery Price

Kyle Loven (Seattle, WA)
My Dear Lewis
My Dear Lewis is an evening-length triptych, serving as a living document of one man and his forgotten memories. Intimate in scale, this one-man show incorporates Czech, shadow and hand puppets.

Amanda Maddock (Brooklyn, NY)
Do Elephants Dream of Eclectic Sheep?
Do Elephants Dream of Eclectic Sheep? wanders inside the head and bedroom of a giant sleeping elephant, who perhaps controls the world. The worlds of the large and small, waking and dreaming appear and vanish as the elephant lies in bed one night. 

Erin K. Orr (Brooklyn, NY)
Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man
Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man is a new puppet opera exploring the violent appetite and poetic possibilities of the Spanish Punch as he existed in the plays Federico Garcia Lorca and as he is imagined offstage. In these plays Lorca expresses his uniquely view that Don Cristobal has a life offstage, in which his traditionally violent role gives way to his essential goodness.

Red String Wayang Theatre (Gulfport, MS)
The Struggle for Justice
The Struggle for Justice celebrates the courage of people of all races who responded to violence and discrimination during Mississippi's Civil Rights era with non violent political action. Loosely inspired by the Javanese shadow theatre, Red String Wayang Theatre’s new production mixes American southern culture with traditions of shadow puppetry from several Asian sources.

Joseph Silovsky (Brooklyn, NY)
Send for the Million Men
Send for the Million Men is a performance about Sacco and Vanzetti, two Anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927. The work will combine robotics, video, puppetry and mechanical devices to tell their story. Photo: Sara Krulwich

Luis Tentindo (Brooklyn, NY)
La Escalera
La Escalera tells the story of a lonesome book restorer working after the catastrophic flood which occurred in Florence, Italy in 1966. Something magical happens to him while he is busy with his tasks. La Escalera is accompanied by an original sound score by Valerie Opielski.  Photo: Richard Termine

Trouble Puppet Theater Company (Austin, TX)
The Jungle
The Jungle, is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel about the effects of industrialization on immigrant laborers in the slaughterhouses and factories of Chicago. Based on a piece conceived at the 2007 O’Neill National Puppetry Conference, it uses tabletop and shadow puppetry, live actors and masks.  Photo: Lettuceturnip

Eric Van Wyk / Wonderstruck Theatre Co. (Ireton, IA)
O the Sky!
O the Sky! is a shadow puppet play that immerses the viewer into the vastness and motion of the Midwest sky. Shadow clouds of colored plastic and silk combine with poetic objects of the plains to form a dreamscape that 4 isolated characters in a car move through as a series of interludes discovering past and present. 

Karen Zasloff (Brooklyn, NY)

Dimensions of Kigali
Dimensions of Kigali traces the experiences of Rwandan survivors in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, and current tensions between reconciliation and the pursuit of justice. Combining shadow puppetry, papier-mache, dance and video, the performance explores how a traumatic history, revealed through testimony, impacts survivors, their immediate listeners and the larger society.

CHILDREN'S GRANTS ($3,000)

Blair Thomas & Company (Chicago, IL)
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick is a full stage adaptation of the novel Moby-Dick, based on an original song score by Michael Smith, staged with doll size bunraku style puppets by a cast of 6 puppeteers and 4 musicians for a theatrical run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Z Piuppets Rosenschnoz (Minneapolis, MN)
Gnip Gnopera
Gnip Gnopera – After an errant backhand sends an ordinary ping pong ball careening through the dusty reaches of the basement, the tiny sphere rolls up to a crack between faded velvet curtains. Hear the strains of an off-key orchestra tuning up? Sniff the aroma of high-art patrons taking their seats? Just as the ball gets its bearings, the curtains rise and the Gnip Gnopera begins. 

Hamumu Theatre Collective (Indianola, WA)
Echo
Echo features carved wooden masks, regalia and puppets, fully sculpted sets, traditional music and dance coupled with theatrical lighting, sounc and a scripted adaptation of the legend of the mythical character Echo. 

Dallas Children’s Theater (Dallas, TX)
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
The Tale of Peter Rabbit  will include orginal songs and instrumental numbers and will be told with black theater rod puppets, marionettes and hand and body puppets.

Strings & Things (San Pedro, CA)
Who Speaks for Wolf
Who Speaks for Wolf is based on Native American stories that have been passed down orally for centuries by the Oneida People and the writings of Native American author Paula Underwood. Our story follows a young city girl and her Native American father as he teaches her important life lessons in the same way their ancestors had taught their children for generations.

Teatro Sea (New York, NY)
Viva Pinocho! A Mexican Pinocchio
Viva Pinocho! A Mexican Pinocchio is a re-telling of the classic folktale Pinocchio from the perspective of a young Mexican immigrant (Nacho); following the puppet boy’s journey to understanding his sense of self, while struggling to maintain his Latino heritage and find his home in a new land (the United States.) 

Thistle Theatre (Seattle, WA)
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice – Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb are a pair of mischievous mice who move into a child’s doll house and leave chaos and destruction in their wake. This theatrical production incorporates a mixture of diverse media including bunraku puppetry, live actors, and a folding doll house that collapses and expands during the performance.