Collaboration Through Puppetry in the 21st Century
Collaboration Through Puppetry in the 21st Century
Hosted by the International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research (IPCCR)
Co-sponsored by the Clarice Performing Arts Center
The festival explores how puppetry is a mind expander, a sparker of creativity, a barrier destroyer and a bridge builder. Given the deep history of puppetry at University of Maryland, we will also examine the resurgence of puppetry in the here and now. Join us for workshops, presentations and opportunities to create.
Free and open to the University of Maryland community.
Events are being held *in-person* at the Clarice Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park.
The festival will follow all university COVID-19 protocols. Proof of vaccination required.
Registration is required. If events hit capacity for online registration you will be notified and put on a waitlist. Please show up to events *on-time* to secure your seat.
Workshops: There are limited spots for puppetry workshops. Express your interest below and look out for an email from ipccr@umd.edu confirming your spot. If confirmed, please let us know if you can no longer attend as there will be a waiting list.
Questions? Email ipccr@umd.edu
Festival schedule (subject to change)
Friday, April 8
Milo the Magnificent
10am, 12pm & 3pm / Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, Piano Room
No reservation required, first come, first serve! Alex and Olmsted's Jim Henson Foundation Grant awarded Milo the Magnificent is a highly engaging puppet show about an aspiring magician. This wordless comedy, inspired by turn of the century vaudeville entertainers, is as highly physical as it is charming. Great for all ages!
Henson Awards Showcase 2022
7:30pm - 9:30pm / Cafritz Foundation Theatre
The talented student recipients of the Jim Henson Fund for Puppetry will perform/present their funded projects.
The Art & Craft of Puppetry Exhibit in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library will be open for 30 minutes before and after the Henson Awards Showcase. The exhibit explores how puppets have captured our imagination by examining specific puppets, universal characteristics, international aesthetics, and local puppet companies. Six puppets, including a character from the original Fraggle Rock series on loan from The Jim Henson Company and others on loan from the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, will be on view. Open through July 29, 2022.
Saturday, April 9
Presentation and Performance: Balinese Puppetry
10am - 11am / Dance Theatre
Balinese puppetry features two major styles of puppet: the three-dimensional wooden puppet (wayang golèk) and the flat leather shadow puppet (wayang kulit) representing animals, mythical figures, and human beings. The dalang (puppet master) is responsible for passing down culture and tradition to future generations. Narratives are based on the Mahābhārata, but the form is heavily improvised, open to various adaptations, and responds to the given desa-kala-patra (place-time-circumstance). Join Dr. I Nyoman Sedana, instructor, scholar, and performer of Balinese traditional performing arts, for a presentation (live from Bali!) followed by an innovative wayang performance with his company of puppeteers, musicians, and singers.
Dr. I Nyoman Sedana is one of three active professors of performing arts at Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Bali, Indonesia. He received his MA from Brown University and my PhD from the University of Georgia. Sedana has published dozens of international publications including articles in the Asian Theatre Journal and co-authoring Performance in Bali (2007). Check out his international training program called Balimodule here. Check out videos of his work here.
Made Georgiana Triwinadi is an award-winning puppeteer and recent graduate of Indonesian Institute of the Arts. His professional credits are extensive, performing in over 75 productions since 2009, including puppetry, mask, and dance. Georgiana currently works as a teacher, choreographer, screenwriter, and director in Bali.
Workshop: “The Art of Bringing Objects to Life” with Doug Fitch
11:30am-1pm / Schoenbaum Rehearsal Studio
Doug Fitch leads a workshop that introduces how inanimate objects can be brought to life when activated by human hands under the influence of human souls. We will take ordinary objects and make them fall in love with each other, react to surprising situations, tell each other stories and actively listen to them, be ornery, obnoxious, charming and polite. In short, we will investigate the most basic aspects of the art of puppetry, how to give objects theatrical presence.
Workshop: “Hybrids, Puppets and Puppeteers Sharing a Space” with Yael Inbar
11:30am-1pm / Rever Rehearsal Studio
Yael Inbar is a theater director, puppeteer, and script writer for animation films. She is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Animation Department of Sapir Academic College in Israel. She established the "Gertrude Theater" - a theater company which combines puppetry and choreography. The Gertrude Theater's productions have been performed world-wide in festivals and theater seasons winning the first prize in the Valencia International Puppets Festival in Spain and in the Cannes International Theater Festival in France. The Gertrude Theater was chosen by the Israeli Ministry of Culture to represent Israel in the "Israeli Season In Paris". Yael holds a Master's Degree in computer animation from Bournemouth University UK. She graduated with Honor from the School of Visual Theater, Jerusalem.
Sammies and Ice Cream Social
1pm - 2pm / Cafritz Foundation Theatre & Clarice Courtyard
Presentation: Puppets as a Radical Mirror with Yael Inbar
2pm - 3pm / Dance Theatre
In this talk, Yael will introduce forms of art which explore through puppets the most unsettling question of what’s between the natural sentient life and the artificially created for a purpose ones. We will look at puppets portrayal in literature, films, theater and installations that utilize a mix of real and digital space to raise interesting questions about it.
Workshop: “The Art of Bringing Objects to Life” with Doug Fitch
3pm - 4:30pm / Schoenbaum Rehearsal Studio
Doug Fitch leads a workshop that introduces how inanimate objects can be brought to life when activated by human hands under the influence of human souls. We will take ordinary objects and make them fall in love with each other, react to surprising situations, tell each other stories and actively listen to them, be ornery, obnoxious, charming and polite. In short, we will investigate the most basic aspects of the art of puppetry, how to give objects theatrical presence.
Workshop: “Bunraku-Style Puppetry” with Dan Hurlin
3pm - 4:30pm / Rever Rehearsal Studio
Panel: The Art of Puppetry
5pm - 6pm / Dance Theatre
Presenters: Doug Fitch, Dan Hurlin, and Yael Inbar
Moderated by Adriane Fang
Reception
6pm - 7pm / Cafritz Foundation Theatre & Clarice Courtyard
Performance: Innate
6pm - 7pm / Cafritz Foundation Theatre & Clarice Courtyard
During the reception, keep an eye out for a roving performance. A collaboration between costume and dance, Innate looks at the ways we anthropomorphize the abstract through body and form.
Marielis Garcia is the Dance Artist in Residence within the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a Dominican American dance artist who has performed and toured with Brian Brooks (NY), Helen Simoneau (Winston-Salem, NC), Peter Kyle Dance (NY), iKapa (Cape Town, SA), and Douglas Dunn and Dancers (NY), among others. She received her MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from City College of New York. Her graduate thesis here, then & now was a live streamed performance that investigated the ways documentation and live performance coexist. Marielis’ work has been presented both nationally and internationally. She has taught dance, choreographic practices and interdisciplinary digital practices at Rutgers University (NJ), North Carolina School of the Arts (NC), Howard Community College (NC), Guttman College (NY), among others. https://www.marielisgarcia.com/
Ashlynne Ludwig is a costume designer and technician who received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015 with a major in Production Design, with a concentration in Costume Design and a minor in Art History. Ashlynne's recent credits include working as a resident costume designer and associate costume shop manager at the Cumberland County Playhouse (2015-2018), costume designer for Goodly Creatures (2019), and stitcher at the Opera Theater St. Louis (2019) where she was awarded the Emerson program scholarship for her work. https://www.ashlynneludwig.com/
Documentary + Q&A with Dan Hurlin
7pm - 9pm / Dance Theatre
Moderated by Lisa Nathans
We will view Dan Hurlin’s film (directed by David Soll) and have the opportunity for dialogue with the artist himself. This documentary, PUPPET, interweaves a broad look at the fraught history of American puppetry (its marginalization as children’s theater and its sudden explosion as high art) with an intimate thread following Hurlin, a downtown artist who is creating a complex puppet work called “Disfarmer” based on the life of a Depression-era portrait photographer. Hurlin’s struggle to mount the show has an eerie parallel to his subject whose stunning body of work was very nearly lost forever.
Dan Hurlin has been creating original puppet theater since 1980. His work has been presented widely at such spaces as New York’s The Kitchen and Dance Theater Workshop; Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; the Duke University Institute for the Arts; and the Flynn Theater for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont. He has been awarded funding from the Greenwall Foundation, Art Matters, the Peg Santvoord Foundation, The New England Foundation for the Arts, and the NEA. From 1980-93, Hurlin was the artistic director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, New Hampshire, a program that facilitates creative collaborations between children ages 8-18 and internationally acclaimed artists.
Hurlin currently teaches performance art, dance, and puppetry at Sarah Lawrence College, where he also serves as the director of the graduate program in theater. Twice a fellow at MacDowell, he is the recipient of a 2002 fellowship in choreography from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a 2004 Alpert Award in the Arts for theater, the 2008 United States Artists Prudential Fellowship in theater, and the 2013/14 Jesse Howard Junior Rome Prize Fellowship in visual art at the American Academy in Rome. Hurlin's theater and puppetry work has received the OBIE Award, the New York Dance and Performance Award (also known as a "Bessie"), and the UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette) Citation of Excellence. He has performed with Ping Chong, Janie Geiser, and Jeffrey M. Jones, and has directed premieres of works by Erik Ehn, Lisa Kron, Holly Hughes, Dan Froot, and John C. Russell, among others. In 2015, Hurlin served as a Performance LOI panelist.
Discover more about festival artists and presenters here.
The festival is free and open to the public. Please note that masks are required in our classroom and studio spaces.