Toy theatre is a whole production in a box.  The toy theatre shows I saw last night were each created, written, teched and performed by one person.  It appeals to the control freak in me. 
in this one box you can show your dreams, your fears, your pride, or your passion.  In the first toy theatre a young man (high school kid?) presented an Edward Goreyesque nightmare.  My favorite part was when he slid a shadow screen out of the top to project the monstrous mother chasing the protagonist.  In the second, a man played an interview with his grandfather who was a puppet on a little porch hooked onto the side of a suitcase.  In the suitcase were photos on foamcore that showed the places and people in the story of this man's grandmother.  What a great way to share personal history!  The 3rd theatre was a miniature schoolhouse with numbers representing the teacher and students.  The play was about the scandal in Atlanta where administrators and teachers changed students' answers to raise scores and get more money.  I'd like my Theatre Team to explore Toy Theatre more -- especially if they want that control over an entire project.  It would be a great addition to the Party for the Arts too.

The other experience my students are going to love is a shadow puppet improve technique I explored in a workshop this morning.  Teams work on an overhead projector with puppets they have made or are making on the spot and improvise a story told by another teammate who is taking suggestions from the audience.  I was nervous about being in an improve competition, but I felt all my creative juices gurgling up, and I had a ball.

 

Puppet Slam and a western Wayang

Last night was Puppet Slam night.  It's a great way to see a variety of very short works by skilled - though often amateur - performers.  The pieces are light and humorous - no deep meaning here- but the writing was clever and allowed puppeteers to try out new material in front of an audience.  Particularly noteworthy to my mind was magic tricks performed by a big hairy monster and a version of Peter and the Wolf that turned into a telenovela with a Lady Gaga wolf!

Today after a great workshop on creating character through mask, I lunched with a couple of college professors who were particularly interested in shadow puppetry.  Me too!  We went to a shadow puppet play about the Civil Rights Movement.  Michael Richardson of Red String Wayang Theatre, designs his puppets and has them cut out in Indonesia.  Then he paints them with watercolor himself.  He must have used 50 puppets in this play he put together with a drama teacher from a high school in Mississippi.  He admitted to us after the show that this was the debut performance!  He has had great difficulty getting anyone to book it. Even the Indonesian government refused to let him perform it there when the US promised to pay the bill.  They thought he'd stir up trouble in their country.  Shame because it was an inspiring piece - really three 20-minute plays with gorgeous puppets that he let us photograph afterwards.



Performances

The attendees here take only 4 workshops - tops, but much of the learning comes from watching the performances.  You pick tickets for 11 shows and then you can watch 1-2 performances with everyone else after dinner each night followed by a bunch of other pieces in the Puppet Slam (short pieces) on one night and the Fringe (longer pieces?) on another.  There's also a Potpourri night, which is kind of an open-mic event - The performers get 5 minutes to do something on Potpourri night.  The MC's for Potpourri were  3 puppeteers from Sesame Street.  They were hilarious.  I noticed that Telly's operator watched every 5-minute act with great attention.  Some of them were dumb, but there were a couple notable surprises such as a girl who had never performed outside of her house who had a 2-headed dragon puppet lip-synch "Confrontation" from Jeckyl and Hyde.  I know, sound absurd, doesn't it?  But here's what happened:  This girl remained expressionless throughout and put all the expression into the movement of the puppets.  One head would sink in despair, the other head would shake with rage - she never lost her focus through the whole song.  Her performance brought the audience to their feet, and she stood there impassive, bowed the puppets' heads, and bowed them again.  Perform. Transform.                A 99-year-old woman performed at Potpourri too.  She held a Ben Franklin doll and a John Adams doll and read the script verbatim (including saying "next page").  It was really funny and this woman is obviously a hero to everyone in Puppets of America.  The Sesame Street puppets posed for a picture with her after her bit.

There was also a really disgusting, really XXX monologue by a puppet, naked except for a Mexican wrestling mask and a cape.  It was called "I'm Sick"  They should have hooked that one offstage - if for no other reason than the puppeteer kept forgetting his lines and dragged it out forever. 

Besides Potpourri, I've seen "Dreams in the Arms of the Binding Lady" that fused dance, puppets, object manipulation, and storytelling of Japanese ghost stories. Izumi Ashizawa directed this incredible piece.  D-Generation takes place in a nursing home for people with dementia.  The patients were puppets who, guided by artists in residents (live actors) would make up a story about a picture.  The artists would turn it into a play, but the patients themselves would have this incredible fantasy that sprang from the story.  My friend, Jim Hoare once described the reaction of some elderly patients to one of his students' shows.  He said they unfolded in their chairs like flowers blooming.  That's what these puppets did.  It was so moving.  The Silent Shadow Cinema did some remarkable shadow imagery in "Voyage to the Skies", but I was blown away by Manuel Cinema doing "ADA/AVA" using both shadow puppets and live human silhouettes in a very touching story of loss.  The

scene in the house of mirrors was amazing and made me yearn for more.

 
 
 
 

Shop and See

This may be the last time that the festival hosts a puppetry store.  I guess it's a lot of work for not much return, but it was VERY popular with the attendees.  Both new and used puppets, parts, books, DVDs and magazines are on sale.  The line went on for miles.  I did my share of buying!

 

There is also a gorgeous exhibit of puppets from many of the attendees representing some of their productions.  I don't know if I could ever make any such exquisite puppets, but I took a lot of pictures for future inspiration.

 

The College

This campus is lovely.  I haven't found the amphitheater yet, but when it stops raining, I may go seek it out.  The whole campus is an arboretum.  Many of the buildings have a Quaker sensibility, and both the interiors and exteriors are inviting.

Workshop 1 Ensemble Puppetry

This workshop gave me some tips on how to help my students work together to manipulate one puppet.  The idea is to breathe together, to include a preparatory movement for each movement, and to see the working parts of the puppet at the same time as you see what the puppet is seeing.  It's this bi-optic that brings the puppet to life.  I also saw two designs for simple puppets that would be much lighter for my students to hold and easier for them to make.