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| Animal Cracker Conspiracy (San Diego, CA)
PAPER CITIES
Paper Cities is a devised puppet theater performance that investigates man’s relationship with cities, with nature, and the impact of cities on nature. Considering the ‘sense of place’, the piece questions, ‘what do you take from your environment and more importantly, what do you contribute back to it?’ Photo: Iain Gunn |
| Margarita Blush (Storrs, CT)
Unfolding the Story: A Journey of Her Own
Unfolding the Story, A Journey of Her Own is a bold international project in which a diverse group of artists come together to create an original puppet theatre production delving into the themes of women’s wisdom and empowerment. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Chinese Theatre Works (Long Island City, NY)
Mulan: Holding Up Half the Sky
Written and directed by Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin, Mulan: Holding Up Half the Sky presents episodes from 2500 years of Chinese history, seen through the lives of four outstanding women warriors. Their exploits are interspersed with comic interludes on the 4 Confucian virtues that underlay proper woman’s conduct. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
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| Julian Crouch & Saskia Lane (Brooklyn, NY)
BIRDHEART
Theatre maker Julian Crouch and composer/musician Saskia Lane join forces to tell a story of man’s relationship to the world. Using a single sheet of paper, a box of sand and little else, Julian and Saskia create a world that expresses the inevitable loneliness of existence. Photo: Jill Steinberg |
| Marsian De Lellis (Los Angeles, CA)
Object of Her Affection
Object of Her Affection is an unconventional love story centered on a woman who desires intimate relationships with inanimate objects and her search for love that is just beyond her reach. Photo: Rafael Hernandez |
| Janie Geiser (Los Angeles, CA)
TUNGSTEN (artery)
Tungsten (artery) is a multidisciplinary performance conceived and created by Janie Geiser, Erik Ehn (playwright), and Shannon Scrofano (installation/space). A woman is serially born and eaten by the planet; going back and forth from grave to rebirth, her experience grows confused. What does it mean to be free of the earth and in love with it; to be possessed by the earth and in doubt; to be born of the earth and to crush it; to be crushed by the earth and thereby freed? |
| James Godwin (Brooklyn, NY)
The Flatiron Hex
The Flatiron Hex is a solo puppet performance that tells the story of Wylie Walker, a contract shaman who works for NYORG, a city in the middle of a swamp. Inspired by speculative fiction and neo-noir, The Flatiron Hex is a peek inside a parallel world of weird magick and an impending super-storm. Tom Burnett directs, co-writes and provides live sound design. Photo: Richard Termine
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| Chris Green (Brooklyn, NY)
American Weather
American Weather is an original evening-length work of puppetry, movement, objects, and songs visualizing the strange and iconic folklore emanating from an empire in decline. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Inkfish (Jackson Heights, NY)
The Digger: A Subterranean Allegory
The Digger: A Subterranean Allegory is a satire about the risks of mankind’s technological obsession. Part man, part machine, The Digger is a new-world pioneer who strives to find the source of life hidden in an underworld dominated by greed, lust, fraud, and treachery. Facing otherworldly demons and those within, The Digger’s search for meaning becomes a sacrificial journey that pushes him to transcend his earthly attachments. Photo: Richard Termine |
| David Lane (North Adams, MA)
The Chronicles of Rose
The play weaves together the story of Rose Valland, who fought to save countless treasures from being lost forever during Nazi occupied Paris, Coneilus Gurlitt, the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was one of a handful of Nazi-approved art dealers, who had kept his father’s collection of 1,280 Degenerate Art works hidden in his apartment in Munich for almost 60 years, and a contemporary historian. Photo: Jonathan J Davis |
| Tom Lee (New York, NY)
Shank’s Mare
Created by Tom Lee with Japanese Master Puppeteer Koryu Nishikawa V, Shank’s Mare is the story of two wandering travelers whose paths intersect in time and space. Using traditional kuruma ningyo puppetry, live feed video projection and live music, the piece explores themes of life and death and how tradition is passed on. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto |
| Loco7 Theatre Company (New York, NY)
Life’s a Dream (or Undefined Fraction)
Life’s a Dream (or Undefined Fraction) is a dance puppet theatre piece inspired by the Spanish-language play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca – Life Is A Dream, which traces inequality and reflects on the principles of justice, guilt, punishment and the conflict between free will and fate. Photo: Vanessa Schonwald |
| Manual Cinema (Chicago, IL)
Mementos Mori
When Death takes an unexpected holiday, an elderly film projectionist finds a new lease on life; a ghost explores the afterlife with her iPhone; and a seven-year-old girl discovers her own mortality. A cast of six puppeteers use hundreds of paper puppets, seven overhead projectors, two cameras, and three screens to create a live “movie” in front of the audience. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Phantom Limb Company / Octopus Theatricals (Brooklyn, NY/Princeton, NJ)
Memory Rings
Memory Rings uses non-verbal storytelling techniques to weave myth and fable (old and new) with 5,000 years of human & environmental change, all under the watchful gaze of the Methuselah Tree, the world’s oldest living tree. Photo: Sierra Urich |
| Trouble Puppet Theater Company (Austin, TX)
The Siege of Heaven: Resistance
The Siege of Heaven: Resistance is part II of a trilogy of puppet plays (Conspiracy, Resistance, and Rebellion) about a coalition of factions from the Heavenly Host and the Infernal Legions, who conspire to undermine Hell and overthrow a Heaven founded on arbitrary and autocratic rule. Photo: John Clark |
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| Stefano Brancato & Michael Goldfried (Astoria, NY)
The Indelible Mark on Edward Barron
Edward Barron, a beautiful, toy theater puppeteer has secluded himself in his home suffering from the later stages of dementia. He is haunted by the memory of the one man he could have loved – and the work they could have made together. Photo: Richard Termine
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| Zach Dorn (San Antonio, TX)
An Excruciatingly Ordinary Toy Theater Show
A lonely puppeteer stalks the child of two notorious celebrities, a three-foot ghost plagues an eight-year-old boy’s fragile psyche, and an opera-singing landlord refuses to return a security deposit. These stories and more explode onto the stage in this modern exploration into Toy Theater. |
| Drama of Works (Brooklyn, NY)
Blood Red Roses
Blood Red Roses is an immersive shadow puppet theater experience exploring the explosive history of female pirates. What made these women choose this life – as opposed to that of wife, salesgirl, cook or whore? Why choose to be a pirate? We want our audience to examine these choices – while at sea with us, drinking rum with us, singing along with us, going on a journey with us… |
| Great Small Works (New York, NY)
Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls
Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls is a new production by the Great Small Works collective, developed with Dr. Eddy Portnoy using the archives of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It is based on the lives work of Yosl Cutler and Zuni Maud, two graphic artists and satirists whose Modicut Puppet Theater thrived in 1920’s New York City, and was the first Yiddish-language puppet theater.
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| Dan Hurlin (New York, NY)
Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed
Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed is a puppet theater work by Dan Hurlin based on four, newly discovered plays written in 1917 by Fortunato Depero, a painter and leading member of the Italian Futurist movement. These short, wordless plays existed only in Depero’s own handwriting and prior to Hurlin unearthing them in Italy, have never been translated into English. |
| Lone Wolf Tribe (Brooklyn, NY)
BULLHEAD
BULLHEAD radically reexamines the ancient myth of the Minotaur to investigate modern corporate policy changes implemented during the Reaganomics years. LWT aims to daringly theatricalize to what extent income disparity and a growing class divide has contributed to a greater frequency of ‘going postal’ in Western society, leading more and more individuals down an inexorable path to violence. |
| Spencer Lott (Brooklyn, NY)
Blossom
James Blossom has Alzheimer’s disease, and now that he’s living at Garden Ridge, he’s disgusted to find that he is surrounded by old people. Forced into an early retirement, the former Hollywood set painter starts to fill his bland nursing home walls with a mural of his life’s most defining moments. |
| San Diego Guild of Puppetry (Chula Vista, CA)
Life
To be told with music, movement and simple foam puppets, Life is envisioned as a piece about beginnings, endings, and all that lies between: an exploration of the “IF”s of the human condition, the decisions we make, the paths we take, that start at birth and end at death (or do they?) |
| Lake Simons (Brooklyn, NY)
Tree Pop
Tree Pop is a puppet theatre piece by Lake Simons with an original score composed by John Dyer. Tree Pop investigates the idea of things and people living in and amongst themselves in harmony within a crop of pine trees. Inhabitants emerge from the woods to share moments in their lives non verbally through images created with puppetry, mask, and movement. |
| Studio Reynard (Saugerties, NY)
Fox vs. Kingdom
A satiric performance of puppet theater, based on the darkly funny escapades of Reynard the Fox, an ancient beast epic. Reynard stands accused of murder, theft, adultery, sacrelege and excessive violence. Witness the court’s unraveling as lust for revenge and grisly tales of woe overwhelm the official festivities. |
| Visual Expressions (Boothwyn, PA)
Dream of Land
Dream of Land uses dreams as a vehicle to create a meditation on the expansive nature of consciousness and sub consciousness through puppet art, installation and performance. |
| Wakka Wakka Productions (Brooklyn, NY)
Made in China
Made in China will be a dark musical comedy about the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China, specifically related to the production and consumption of goods, and examined through the lens of an unlikely relationship between an eccentric middle-aged American woman and her Chinese ex-pat neighbor. It will feature over 30 puppets and masks, 7 puppeteers, 3 musicians and animated video. |
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| Katie Campbell (Little Rock, AR)
The Ugly Duckling
The Ugly Duckling is a modern reimagining of the classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Inspired by Andersen’s paper cuttings, a young girl embarks on a journey of self discovery and personal transformation. The story unfolds with three actor/puppeteers, two overhead projectors, over sixty paper puppets, and original music performed live by an ensemble of youth musicians. |
| Dead Puppet Society (Jersey City, NJ)
Laser Beak Man
In a story jam packed with the trademark humor and visual puns that come from his literal interpretation of language, Laser Beak Man is a new visual theatre work under development by the Dead Puppet Society and Tim Sharp that explodes with color and energy. |
| Peppercorn Theatre at the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem (Winston-Salem,NC)
The Tourist Trap
The Tourist Trap is an original, musical road-trip that explores life, love, and companionship. When an aging couple, Jerry and Evelyn, become stranded on a drive to their granddaughter’s wedding, they resort to a derelict and forgotten roadside attraction run entirely by a family of puppets. Song and storytelling guide them to revive the park, ultimately rekindling their love. |
| Spellbound Theatre (Brooklyn, NY)
Ears, Nose and Tail
Ears, Nose, and Tail is the story of a dog who isn’t sure he wants to be a dog anymore. Blending shadow puppetry, animation, and live-illustration, Spellbound Theatre artists explore how play and imagination can shape who we are. This interactive show is being created for audiences ages 2-5 as part of the New Victory LabWorks Resident Artist Program. |
| Thistle Theatre (Seattle, WA)
The Funny Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling
Based on a Japanese story, a funny old woman follows a rice dumpling down a hole as it bounces it’s way into another world. |
| Eric Wright (New York, NY)
Two Stories About Exploring: The Soldier’s Tale and Four Seasons in Buenos Dairies
A soldier trades with the devil and ends up whisked off to marvelous, fantastical and dangerous locations; two cows in love find themselves in a tango with the law when pushed outside their ordinary pastures. Classical music sets the scene, and puppets take audiences on a journey beyond our heroes’ familiar territory. |
