Pam Arciero, Artistic Director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Puppetry Conference, announced today the projects selected for the 2008 Conference, which features puppet artists from throughout the world who come to Waterford to collaborate on new puppet theater works. The National Puppetry Conference will culminate in two public performances on Friday, June 13 and Saturday, June14. These popular performances, by conference participants and Guest Artists, are each different and emphasize the latest techniques and ideas in puppetry.
The National Puppetry Conference will be held at the O'Neill's Waterford campus from Saturday, June 7 through Sunday, June 15, preceded by three-day intensives from Wednesday, June 4 through Friday, June 6, featuring workshops, where participants are able to investigate one aspect of puppetry in concentrated master workshops. Jim Kroupa, co-owner of 3/Design Studio, once again presents his master workshop "Creating Mechanisms for Puppets", where students use hands-on examples to design and build a puppet mechanism. Founding Artistic Director of Philadelphia's Mum Puppettheater Robert Smythe presents "Fundamentals of Puppet Performance: Performer, Instrument and Score" using LeCoq mime technique and other theatre exercises to develop performance skills; found objects to create hand-puppets and Japanese-style bunraku puppets for instruments; and simple improvisational exercises to open the exploration of developing works for puppets.
2008 National Puppetry Conference Guest Artists Luman Coad of Coad Canada Puppets (Vancouver, B. C.) and Paul Mesner of Paul Mesner's Puppets (Kansas City, Missouri) lead "The Ensemble Productions", presenting master classes, and working side by side with participants to immerse themselves in the creative process through which work is refined. The resulting works may include one of the artist's choosing or individual works by the participants, and are presented as part of the public performances at the end of the conference. Luman Coad will address "Individual Production Development." This workshop, based on the premise 'Theatre is communication,' will rehearse and hone scenes from participants' own new productions. Through exercises, discussions, plus group and individual interaction, these scenes will be rehearsed and refined with the purpose of communicating through movement, the core of the puppets' characters. Paul Mesner works with participants to build a rehearsal rod puppet in "Spare the Rod, Spoil the Puppet!" While addressing rod mechanics and techniques of their use, participants will create, rehearse and perform an ensemble piece while exploring Mesner's process action, ideas, where he allows "chaos and some deviation from the subject matter, which sometimes leads to jewels that become the heart of the piece."
"Video Anarchy", an especially innovative and popular strand of the conference, explores the creation of new puppet forms and function using video. Led by Tim Lagasse and Martin P. Robinson, participants learn basic filmed puppetry techniques, hands on, while being and integral part of the filming and editing of a puppet film. This year's project, written and directed by Robinson, is "The BOTTLE STOPPER PROJECT": Carved wooden animated bottle stoppers from Northern Italy, circa 1930... They are beautifully realized characters, distinct little personalities all... and they do things: they talk, tip their hats, kiss, thumb their noses, stick out tongues, whap each other with brooms. Having been designed for use in taverns as corks, they are, most of them, denizens of bar life. So; a small scale smokey traditional old bar, peopled with all the colorful characters you would expect to see there...until the small bottle stopper reality begins to cross over into the real world. Did my drinking buddy just get grabbed out of existence? Did he die? Was that a glimpse of God? Just how much wool actually IS over my eyes?
The "Artist In Residence" project provides invited artists the full support of the conference using both participants and selected puppeteers to further refine a work in progress. 2008 Artists in Residence present "Robert's Etude": Ulysses Jones & Megan McNerney, together as Puppet Odyssey Productions, have been developing two parallel projects: one, a study of Meyerhold's system of biomechanics and its potential for application to puppetry; and the other, the search for a fitting means of telling a specific, true story of the life and death of one man, Robert "Woody" Woodward. "Robert's Etude" is the nexus of these two lines of thought and an experiment in both. Past artists in residence have included artists have been Ron Binion, Marc Weiner, Bonnie Remsberg, Richard Termine, and Heather Henson.
Other strands of the conference include "Marionette Performance and Construction", an audience favorite on performance nights, where participants construct a marionette or refine their performance techniques under the expert guidance of marionette masters Philip Huber and Jim Rose; "Writing and Performing Music for Puppet Theater," led by composer, performer, and founder and director of the Tricinium community arts residency program, Larry Siegel, encourages musicians and composers to create specific 'music scapes' for puppet performances; "Emerging Artists" invites previous participants to return to the conference under the guidance of former conference Artistic Director Richard Termine, to further develop their works with the additional support of performers from the Flock Theater of New London, who have volunteered their talents for more than 10 years; and "Participant Projects," short works created by the participants apart from regular conference activities under the guidance of a staff member, presented to the whole conference on Saturday morning, from which a few are chosen for public presentation that evening.
Public performances of these innovative, exciting new works are scheduled at the O'Neill, 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford, on Friday, June 13 and Saturday, June 14 at 7pm, both evenings in the Rose Barn Theater (named in honor of Margo and Rufus Rose, pioneers in the art of puppetry) and in the
Dina Merrill Theater.
Tickets to the performances are $15 for O'Neill members, $20 non-members. Tickets will go on sale Wednesday, June 4. Please call the O'Neill Box Office at 860-443-1238 for performance times, reservations or additional information. For more information about the O'Neill's 2008 National Puppetry Conference and artist biographies, please visit
http://www.oneillpuppetryconference.com.
The O'Neill National Puppetry Conference was founded in 1990 by Jim and Jane Henson of The Muppets fame. The mission of the conference is to encourage puppet artists to create and communicate through the visual and kinetic form of the puppet, push beyond their personal boundaries and develop new works for puppet theater. Participants collaborate with renowned guest directors, puppet artists and playwrights to develop innovative productions conceived by guest artists, as well as presentations initiated by the conference participants. Hundreds of puppetry artists have attended the O'Neill National Puppetry Conference to explore this engaging and unique art form. Past conference participants have gone on to work in such puppetry venues as The Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre (New York City), HERE Arts Center (New York City), The Puppet Showplace (Brookline, Massachusetts), The Sandglass Theatre (Vermont) The Center for Puppetry Arts (Atlanta), and Zeum (San Francisco) and on television shows including Sesame Street, Between the Lions, Bear in the Big Blue House, Blue's Clues/Blue's Room, Dave Chapell Show, Lazy Town and Crank Yankers.
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