The Emerging Puppetry Renaissance

Figure 1.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Chapel/Chapter. Photo: Courtesy of Paul B. Goode.

For at least the last decade, puppetry has played an increasingly central role in theatre seasons around the world. In recent years, international festivals in Prague, Ontario, Melbourne, Oulu, Istanbul, and Jakarta, among others, have emerged, more than filling the void left by the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre, a biennial review that was active from 1992 to 2000. Puppetry courses both practical and theoretical are increasingly offered at major universities both in the United States—most notably at the University of Connecticut—and as far abroad as Indonesia and Vietnam.

Puppets have been interacting with human actors on stage with increasing frequency as well, even in the most ostensibly highbrow and mainstream of venues. Aaron Posner's Measure for Measure at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., and Sean Daniels's Merry Wives of Windsor at the California Shakespeare Theatre (both 2006) featured puppets in prominent roles. The current season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York features puppetry in two productions: Julie Taymor's The Magic Flute and, less predictably, Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly.

Despite these high-profile offshoots of the current craze, the heart of the puppetry scene remains rooted in more intimate settings. Small companies, devoted not only to their own work but to encouraging and developing the work of their peers, gather at conferences and workshops to offer each other feedback and applause as well as more material support like rehearsal space and grant proposals. In New York, the most visible of these sites of collaboration is the Puppet Lab at St. Ann's Warehouse, a decade-old consortium that meets weekly over the course of nine months and culminates in a mini-festival of performances each spring. Seemingly ubiquitous in the biographies of New York-based companies, the Lab is perhaps second only to the Henson Foundation in providing support to puppet and object-based performance.

Other significant sources for development support in New York have emerged more recently. The Voice4Vision festival at Theatre for the New City finds TNC combining its own resources with that of the Henson Foundation and other donors to create a season-long festival of puppet performances culminating in the annual appearance of Peter Schumman's venerable Bread and Puppet Theatre. HERE Arts Center—where Basil Twist's celebrated underwater puppet ballet Symphonie Fantastique premiered in 1998 and then ran for two years—has launched Dream Music Puppetry, an expansion of their artist residency programs that commission and support new work through multi-year development processes.¹ Avant-garde stalwarts Mabou Mines continue to nurture the work of young puppeteers in a variety of ways. The Linux Loft–sponsored Passport to Puppet Theatre acts as a sort of bridge between these events and venues. If audience members present a stamped "passport" at the box office of participating venues, they can receive ticket discounts and, oddly enough, free Linux-based operating system software.²

One of the companies at the center of all this activity is Drama of Works, a Brooklyn-based collective led by Artistic Director Gretchen Van Lente. It was awarded its first Henson grant in 1998 and has been active ever since. The year 2006 was a particularly busy one for Drama of Works: Warhol^TM was part of the Voice4Vision festival at Theatre for the New City; it has been curating and hosting the monthly Punch festival at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, occasionally including their own The Sid and Nancy Punch and Judy Show. They curated and hosted the Fifth Annual Carnival of Samhain, a kind of hipster puppetry and performance jam that ran concurrently with their full-length shadow adaptation of Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow.

Van Lente recently visited Bali for six weeks of intercultural puppetry workshops, which is where she met Vivian Fung, a Juilliard-based composer who contributed the musical score for Sleepy Hollow. Drama of Works publicity materials have noted that the project began in Bali as an exploration of collaboration...