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| Patti Bradshaw (New York, NY)
continuing adventures of out of nothing: nature morte
Patti Bradshaw will present the continuing adventures of out of nothing: nature morte, choreography for marionettes, dancers, flora and fauna. A look at how the mind travels from image to idea, memories to image, paralleling the endlessly creative natural (compromised) world. Photo: Julie Lemberger |
| Chinese Theatre Works (Long Island City, NY)
Chang-Er Flies to the Moon
Chang-Er Flies to the Moon explores the mythic romance between the Moon goddess of Chinese myth and her husband, the archer/hero Ho Yi. Their complex love and estrangement is caught up in the machinations of heavenly and terrestrial politics. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist |
| Drama of Works (Brooklyn, NY)
Leakey's Ladies
An exploration of three women: Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas and Jane Goodall; and their lifetimes of work bridging the gap of knowledge between human beings and the other members of the Hominidae family: gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. |
| Evolve Company (Great Neck, NY)
HOME
HOME explores the human desire to put down roots and live in comfort, and our equal desire to pull them up and live a life of freedom. It portrays generations of humans struggling against instinct in order to seek an undefined happiness, alongside generations of birds who seem to find happiness simply following their instincts. Photo: Richard Termine |
| The Object Group / Michael Haverty (Decatur, GA)
The Colour of Her Dreams
A new theatrical production from Michael Haverty exploring the life and work of his mother, outsider artist Keturah Curbow. Keturah obsessively illustrated Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books as a means to gain solace from her struggle with bipolar disorder. The Colour of Her Dreams aligns the Alice story with Keturah's story, and holds the imagination up as a powerful tool for catharsis and communication. |
| Mabou Mines (New York, NY)
La Divina Caricatura
Lee Breuer's La Divina Caricatura encompasses the birth to death life history of the "Dog Rose" a "love object“ the romantic animal in the pragmatic world" and is a dramatic comic book, ironic in the Brechtian sense, which takes the Japanese concept and translates it into an American avant garde aesthetic language built from theater, film, music, dance and puppetry. Photo: Beatriz Schiller |
| Now or Never Theatre / Betsy Tobin (Boulder, CO)
The Odyssey
Strong visuals transport audience members into the fantastic world of Sirens and Cyclops, man, and beast where heroes, heroines, gods, and goddesses spar, each with their own flaws. Photo: Ken Miller |
| Red String Wayang Theatre (Gulfport, MS)
The Struggle for Justice
A shadow puppet play based on some of the events of the Civil Rights Era in Mississippi from about 1930-1955. The piece aims to fulfill Red String Wayang Theatre's ambition to create " An American Wayang ", mixing blues music, Southern culture, and nearly 50 original transparent leather puppet designs with inspirations from the traditional shadow theatres of Indonesia and India.Photo: Courtesy of the Artist |
| Redmoon Theater (Chicago, IL)
The Tempest
The Tempest will be a collaborative work between Redmoon Theater and Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) that combines CST's skillful interpretation of Shakespeare's final work along with Redmoon's unique Spectacle aesthetic to result in a dynamic re-telling of this timeless tale of forgiveness and redemption that resonates with modern audiences. Photo: Michael Brosilow |
| Rogue Artists Ensemble (Signal Hill, CA)
Pinocchio
Rogue Artists Ensemble's Pinocchio focuses on the great struggle between free spirit and morality, duty and more selfish pursuits. The Rogues explore the original intentions of Collodi's work, while updating its telling in bold and daring ways creating a highly modern and relevant piece of theater. |
| Sinking Ship Productions (Brooklyn, NY)
Powerhouse
Powerhouse takes the audience inside the mind of Raymond Scott, composer and electronic music pioneer. He wrote fast-paced, tightly orchestrated compositions, attempting to reinvent swing in the 1940s. Wildly successful in his own time, his music would be completely forgotten were it not for its use in countless Looney Tunes cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s -- but Scott never watched a cartoon in his life. |
| Skysaver Productions (New York, NY)
Lysistrata
The character of Lysistrata is an ordinary woman who becomes a hero by persuading the other women to withhold sexual priveleges from their men as a means of forcing them to end the interminable Peloponnesian War. This story is intercut with accounts of real-life sex strikes that have occured throughout the world in recent years, such as in Turkey, Columbia, Kenya, and Liberia. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Spirit Cabinet Productions (Los Angeles, CA)
The Narrative of Victor Karloch
The Narrative of Victor Karloch is a traveling stage show presented from an elegantly decayed Victorian triptych puppet theater. This show uses 30 inch tall rod puppets, traditional shadow puppets, rear projected elements and vaudeville trickery to present the adventures of Victor Karloch, an alchemist, scholar, and ghost hunter, as he battles the supernatural forces of the Unknown. |
| Stefano Brancato & Michael Bush (New York, NY)
Icarus
Icarus adapts the ancient Greek myth of the boy that flew too close to the sun. It explores the kings, queens, monsters, mazes, old men, giant birds, and angry gods that lead to this fateful flight. In this full stage production, thirteen ensemble members tell their tale through puppetry, poetry, drama, acrobatics, and song. |
| Visual Expressions (Boothwyn, PA)
The Monkey King
The Monkey King is probably the most famous character in Chinese literature. Now this "super-hero" comes to delight American audiences in a new production that utilizes a spectacular synthesis of contemporary American shadow puppetry and traditional Chinese visual designs, all filtered through the sensibilities of artistic co-directors Hua Hua Zhang & David Regan. Photo: Matt Hicks |
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| Actors Theatre of Louisville (Louisville, KY)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Actors Theatre of Louisville and The Center for Puppetry Arts will workshop a new theatrical adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea using puppetry to bring the sprawling, imaginative world of Jules Verne to life. From sea monster attacks on ocean liners, to underwater fights with sharks, these monstrous almost mythical characters and feats of heroism are fertile ground for a puppet-infused production. Photo: Jason Hines |
| Animal Cracker Conspiracy (San Diego, CA)
The Collector
The Collector is a mysterious tale, set in an alternate reality, about a lowly debt collector, who, under the management of a mechanical, tyrannical overseer, undergoes a radical transformation of spirit in the process of collecting outstanding debts. A story looking at the human inclination and desire to collect objects- how they permeate the self, giving it identity or a sequence of identities. Questioning what possessions we hold most dear, what can we live without, and what is the price of our obsession with stuff. |
| In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (Minneapolis, MN)
What If?!
Sandy Spieler of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre will lead the research and invention of puppets for a piece to cheer forth local and global initiatives of transitioning from oil dependency and ecological depletion to local resilient sustainability. |
| Jenny Campbell & Company (Woodside, NY)
Idle Hands
A disquieting puppetry performance about memory, musical hallucination and haunted technology. A forceful and ghostly piano/reel-to-reel machine has hidden (dangerous?) music that demands to be played. The piece is inspired by ideas about memory and music in the book Musicophilia by neurologist Oliver Sacks and the classic horror film Carnival of Souls. |
| Kyle Loven (Seattle, WA)
Loss Machine
Everything is somewhere. Part installation, part image-driven theater, Loss Machine unearths a world of lost items, misplaced thoughts, and fractured journeys all housed within an intricately detailed set. In a tower filled with life’s debris, a collection of characters move through an ever-changing apparatus with their shared emotional journey driving the mechanical process forward. |
| Laurie O'Brien (New York, NY)
The Collector of Lies
A haunting tale about a reclusive woman who spends her days organizing and cataloging mysterious objects that arrive in the mail. Next door, a shady pilot struggles with his own deceit and tries to hide the evidence that later links him with his neighbor. Their past lives between the walls of their rooms reveals itself from time to time providing clues to the history of these trapped souls. Photo: Jeffery Price |
| Open Ink Productions (Brooklyn, NY)
Triangle
Early industrialized New York haunts Triangle, a play for table-top and shadow puppets, dramatic text, and live musicians. Rose (actress Amy Carrigan), a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, ruthlessly retells her story from the side of the stage to her workers. Puppets act as silent, spiritual incarnations of the story's characters, searching for their more fragile origins in Patrick Keppel's tragic play. Photo: Julia Newman |
| Janaki Ranpura (Minneapolis, MN)
Grace
After the crash of civilization, in the black box is a small horse. It is the kit from which two religious men of the past, St Francis and the Sultan of Egypt, must create the future. Using paper cut-outs, optics, and large-as-landscape puppets, Grace invites its audience to partner up and figure out how to re-make an unmade world starting with one simple idea: horse. |
| Lake Simons (Brooklyn, NY)
Wind Set-Up: a composition for materials and elements
Daily life set into motion by the wind and what it carries your way- a newspaper, a chair, a house? This describes a typical day in Wind Set-up, a composition for materials and elements a new visual theatre piece with object puppetry by Lake Simons and live music composed and performed by John Dyer. Photo: Oliver Dalzell |
| Hanne Tierney (New York, NY)
Strange Tales of Liaozhai
Strange Tales of Liaozhai is an experiment with Gerturde Stein's idea of Theater as Landscape. Hundreds of feet of fabric, a landscape of patterns and color, are strewn on the stage, and as the narrative unfolds, certain fabrics begin to move and are manipulated into characters that act out a scene. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Urban Research Theater / Malgosia Szkandera (New York, NY)
Bag Lady
She is that Lady who gives the breath to the happy and sad, to the white plastic bags... Bag Puppets born from the darkness, transforming with her body in small characters without words, with silence and music, they show us little pieces of their own life and step by step illuminate the dark stage. |
| Amanda Villalobos (Brooklyn, NY)
Light Keepers
An old desk, a fading lighthouse, a tiny model town, and books with waterlogged spines open to tell the story of Jordan, an androgynous orphan taken in by the mysterious and impossibly ancient lighthouse keeper Isaac Small. The daily work of keeping the light brings these two outcasts purpose beyond the practical. |
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| Bart Buch (Minneapolis, MN)
Kid Enkidu
Kid Enkidu follows the epic journey of a mysterious boy from a distant star who lands on a planet where a quiet war wages against the planet's inherent nature. Evoking a children's fantasy for all ages, nature boy is a poetic meditation on connections between biodiversity and imagination, using bunraku-style puppets, hand puppets, rod puppets, toy theatre, large puppet projections and stylistic influences of street art, anime, comic books, and skateboarding. Photo: Bruce Silcox |
| Penny Jones & Co. Puppets (New York, NY)
Four Seasons Puppet Show
A series of 4 classroom puppet shows each performed in the appropriate season as enrichment of school curriculum in collaboration with the teacher: a pop-up book about squirrel family life in the Fall; shadow puppets and lights in Winter, butterfly metamorphosis in Spring; a tabletop dinosaur family drama in Summer. Photo: Geoffrey Jones |
| David & Jennifer Skelly (Los Angeles, CA)
David and the Phoenix
David and the Phoenix is a stage adaptation of the classic children's book by Edward Ormondroyd. It's a charming, funny, and heartwarming story about a young boy's friendship with the mythical Phoenix, and the dangerous adventure they embark upon to stop a predatory scientist. |
| Tears of Joy Theatre (Portland, OR)
The Ugliest Duckling
The Ugliest Duckling is a retelling of the famous story by Hans Christian Anderson, set in Australia. Rather than a swan egg hatching in the nest of a duck family, the egg becomes little Yuckay, a platypus. Since a platypus won't grow into anything but a larger platypus, The Ugliest Duckling is a story which shows us that everyone is different and unique for their own reasons, even though we may not become "swans." |
| Teatro SEA (New York, NY)
Legends of the Enchanted Treasure
Four kids discover an old enchanted chest full of magical tales from the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Then the stories come to life before their eyes, transporting them (and the audience) to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Puerto Rico, where they learn lessons of courage and pride and, of course, have tons of fun. |
| Whorls of Wonder Puppet Theater (Orange, NJ)
Terran's Aquarium
Terran's Aquarium educates the coming generation of the global fresh water crisis. Through puppetry, live action, audience participation and projections, audience members discover what a closed system is, how water works in us (our bodies), the community (through the water treatment system) and in the world (through the water cycle). Photo: Anthony Arnista |
