Toy Theatre & Marionettes in Television

Isolating Together: Virtual Toy Theater Festival

COMING TO A PERSONAL SCREEN NEAR YOU!

*** I s o l a t i n g    T o g e t h e r  ***

Great Small Works' Online Toy Theater Festival

Day 1: Thursday, April 2, 2020 @ 7:30 - 9:00pm EDT
Day 2: Friday, April 3, 2020 @ 7:30 - 9:00pm EDT

Toy Theater practitioners from around the world will offer original (very) short shows. From the intimacy of the Victorian parlor to the intimacy of your personal viewing device, puppeteers transform the traditional form to reach out during these days of separation.

Some of the lineup of performers:
Dirk and Barbara Reimers, Papiertheater Polidor (Germany)
Modern Times Theater (East Hardwick, VT)
Great Small Works/Stephen Kaplin (Jackson Heights, NY)
Dan Van Allen (Baltimore, MD)
Dan Hurlin (NYC and Hawley, PA)
Ira Karp and Peter Schumann (Glover, VT)
Katherine Fahey (Baltimore, MD)
Katya Popova (Boston, MA)
Eli Nixon and Ida Marcus (Providence, RI)
Lindsay McCaw (Detroit, MI)
Tianding He, Yiru Chen, Ge Gao, An Hua (NY, NJ and Shanghai)
Laurie McCants (Bloomsburg, PA)
Amelia Castillo (Santiago, Chile, via Glover, VT)
Isabel Bazan and Mauricio Martinez (Mexico City)
Joshua Krugman (Glover, VT)
Kate Brehm (Brooklyn, NY)
Birthe Thiel, Theatre Mont d'Hiver (Germany)
Miss Pussycat and Quintron (New Orleans, LA)
Alissa Hunnicutt (North Hollywood, CA)
Michael and Valerie Nelson (Vallejo, CA)......and many, many more!

The Shackleford Project: Climate Change as Drama

"An entrancing production. For sheer power to haunt the imagination…it’s hard to picture anything surpassing 69°S.” - The Boston Globe

Phantom Limb: 69˚S. from EMPAC @ Rensselaer on Vimeo.

“Exquisitely rendered….beautifully constructed.”
– Los Angeles Times 

"A remarkable achievement of multimedia artistry, the spellbinding 69ºS. is like nothing you've ever seen before.”
– Backstage 

“Imagine the laboratory of a Victorian-age mad genius, and you’d probably come up with something like the Tribeca apartment of…Erik Sanko.”
– Village Voice

Phantom Limb Company’s 69 Degrees South may be  first production staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival to require a sojourn in Antarctica to make aural recordings. The company’s principals, set designer Jessica Grindstaff and puppeteer Erik Sanko, received a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers grant to capture the sounds of ice cracking, wind shearing, and feet trudging through the snow—all part of their layered spectacle opening April 28 2020, running through May 3rd.

But 69 Degrees South—which chronicles Ernest Shackleton’s almost doomed 1914 Antarctic expedition—is no National Geographic special: It includes puppets and live dancers, 28-foot-tall moving iceberg sculptures, NASA satellite imagery, and a minimalist score by the Kronos Quartet, along with Sanko’s legendary downtown noise-rock band Skeleton Key creating its own rather maximalist cacophony. “We’re big fans of letting images evoke meaning,” says Grindstaff, who, along with Sanko, hopes to make one of history’s greatest adventures resonate deeply—and wordlessly—for a contemporary audience.

Sock Monkey Sneak Peek