HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program to Present PUPPETOPIA in March

The OBIE-winning HERE has announced programming for its second annual Puppetopia, a three-week festival of new puppet theater. This presentation of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry program will showcase new, all-live, fully realized iterations of new works. Puppetopia will run March 8-25, 2023 in the HERE Mainstage & Dorothy B. Williams Theatres (145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan).

The festival opens on March 8-11 with a shared program of Mother Mold by the puppetry duo It Figures and Tin Iso and the Dawn by Tristan Allen. Mother Mold is a table top puppet show. It has no beginning or end. It's about getting lost and found and how to breathe through the in between. Tin Iso and the Dawn is a shadow puppet symphony performed alongside an original album. The project shares the origins of an imaginary world, the first chapter to a grand overarching story told through music and solo puppetry. Wordless narrative, magic lanterns, and detailed sound design collide in examining the universal longing to make sense of loss and what's beyond.

A centerpiece of the festival is the two-week engagement, March 10-19, of Deeper Closer Warmer, a new theatrical collaboration between the Puerto Rico-based puppetry duo Poncili Creación and the New York-based musicians The Daxophone Consort. Deeper Closer Warmer is an ancient surgery that examines the crevices of flesh and consciousness. Large-scale transforming foam puppets, with the shrieks, whistles, and melodic coos of an electronic orchestra, reveal a world inside the organism where empires of bacteria will fall and new organic machines will be created.

The final week of the festival features two evening-length works. Running March 22-23, The Emotions is a two-act experimental music performance co-conceived by Korean master instrumentalist gamin and Japanese composer and artist Sachiyo Takahashi. The evening opens with gamin's The Emotions: Impermanence, an experimental music theater piece exploring avenues to bridge the gap between traditional and modern, movement and stillness, sound and visual. Part two features Takahashi's The Emotions: Equinox, abstract storytelling through puppets/objects, live projection, and original music, developed in collaboration with Korean video and object designer Yudam and puppet builder/puppeteer Emma Wiseman.

Closing Puppetopia on March 24 and 25 is Offal Unstory by Kalan Shh (enormousface), which explores the brutal alchemy the human race has been exacting on the "Natural" world, transforming Life into Garbage. Mixing references from the Great Stories of humanity, beginning with Gilgamesh, so many of which are used to justify human domination over the non-human world, the work will tangle narrative with non-narrative performance and philosophy, examining also the role 'Story' per se takes in the Human Project of Killing the Earth.

Puppetopia is curated by Barbara Busackino and Basil Twist who said, "I am very excited to invite Poncili Creación from Puerto Rico, new to New York audiences, to create a show just for Dream Music, that partners with live-music and runs for 2 weeks of the festival. Puppetopia also features treasured local puppeteers revealing their new work. Who could resist the line up?"

General admission tickets for each Puppetopia show start at $25 (including a pay-it-forward option for $65). A Puppetopia package is available for $75 and includes admission into each of the four shows. Each performance will have 10 tickets available for $10. Tickets can be purchased by visiting here.org or by calling 212 - 647 - 0202. In-person sales at the box office after 5 pm only on performance days and two hours prior to curtain for matinees. For Group Sales, contact tickets@here.org.

Please visit https://here.org/shows/puppetopia-2023/ for more information.

About the artists

It Figures

is a puppetry duo comprised of Ben and Rosa Elling Ben Elling is a puppeteer and technician. He uses string in his work to create magic tricks that delight and confound. Rosa Elling is a puppet designer, maker and performer. She constructs intricate, abstract worlds to tell simple, universal stories. Find out more at www.itfigurespuppetcompany.com.

Tristan Allen

is a composer and puppeteer based in Brooklyn, NY. Tristan's work employs the narrative power of instrumental music and puppetry to create an imaginary world. With a background in piano, bass, electronic music, and marionette theater, Tristan applies an experimental mode of storytelling to create rich works of wordless fantasy. Tristan's ambitions to combine their music with puppetry is underway, beginning with a shadow puppet symphony named Tin Iso and the Dawn. tristanallen.org

Poncili Creación

is a performance duo based in Puerto Rico that creates foam rubber sculptures brought to life through manipulation by human bodies. These sculptures, as small as a coin or as large as a car, are tools for creating whimsical power that stains reality. In the duo's ritual-shows they attempt through a series of unorthodox methods to convince the audience that everything is possible.

The Daxophone Consort

is Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom. The daxophone is a modern instrument consisting of a thin, bowed wooden strip, whose sound ranges from delicate whistles to wild screams. Drawing on backgrounds in instrument building, theater, costume, and traditional music, the Consort creates and commissions new works and reinterprets the classical music canon from the 20th century through the middle ages. Past collaborators include Alvin Lucier, Yasunao Tone, the LeStrange Viols, Science Ficta, Gelsey Bell, and Judith Berkson.

Sachiyo Takahashi

is a composer, musician, and artist whose work centers around storytelling. Compositing sensory elements in a minimalist manner, she explores the border between narrative and abstraction to generate fables for the subconscious. Sachiyo founded Nekaa Lab in 2006 together with other "lab members" (stuffed toys and tiny figurines). She has been producing performances, installations and writings, while observing human nature from alternative perspectives. Sachiyo's Microscopic Live Cinema-Theatre - unique performances projected from a miniature stage - has been appraised as a quirky yet imaginative merging between theatrical and cinematic experiences. She has presented her works at international venues and festivals including Prague Quadrennial, St. Ann's Warehouse, and The Tank. Her recent work Everything Starts from a Dot was supported by The Jim Henson Foundation and premiered at La MaMa in 2018. Sachiyo is also an accredited master of Okamoto school Shinnai-bushi, a traditional sung-storytelling from Japan and performs as Miya Okamoto. www.nekaa.org

gamin

is a distinguished NYC soloist who tours the world performing both traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations. gamin plays piri (double reed Korean oboe), taepyeonso (double-reed horn), and saenghwang (mouth organ). She is a designated Yisuja, official holder of Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for Court and Royal Military music. Re-inventing new sonorities from ancient, somewhat restrictive, musical systems, gamin has received several cultural exchange program grants, including Artist-in-Residence (2014) at the Asian Cultural Council, and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism of Republic of Korea (2012). gamin has collaborated in cross-cultural improvisation in NYC with world-acclaimed musician Jane Ira Bloom, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, presenting premieres at Roulette Theater, New School, and Metropolitan Museum. Gamin was featured artist at the Silkroad concert, Seoul, 2018, performing on-stage with Yo-Yo Ma. gamin, as soloist, will perform her Carnegie Hall debut with the Nangye Gugak Orchestra in 2021.

Kalan Shh

(enormousface) is a slime mold who lives in a hole in time with dozens of feral pups. Formed in a Cascadian forest, xE hitchhiked to Patagonia before finishing a degree in Comparative Literature and then began developing xErr breed of non-narrative anarchist-nihilist literary theory and philosophy puppet shows on the streets of New Orleans and New York. Between free school organizing, art hacking, and a series of anti-activism arrests, xE toured the Americas and Europe severally, and learned to fathom the void. More recently, A colliding interest in Animism, Abjection and Ecology helped birth Garbage Fest, which has bloomed now ten times across the world. xE has just returned from xErr fourth European tour (this time with the poetry and film collective Creatures from the Hole and the Daughters of Shit), where xE is a founding organizer of the Midnight Cabaret at the Festival Mondial du Marionette and runs the Plus Bizarre competition. Now please close your eyes and create an impossible monster.

About HERE

HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. In addition, Dream Music brings to New York the most excellent of international puppetry, reflecting on Twist's roots at the École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France. Dream Music was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist's OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE's Dream Music is also proud to house the Griff Williams Puppetry Collection. The 6 antique marionettes of Harry James, Griff Williams, Cab Calloway, Arturo Toscannini, Ted Lewis and Paul Whiteman were all performed with The Griff Williams Orchestra in the 1930s & 40s throughout America's big band era. They have a permanent home outside the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE.

The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines-theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

HERE's standout productions include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs' Disposable Men, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and, this season Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram and Zoey Martinson's The Black History Museum According to the United States of America.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.

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