Coming Soon: Three Countries, One Great Show!

GREAT SMALL WORKS  &  FACTO TEATRO  perform together

      

TWO NYC SHOWS  -  MANY SHOWS THROUGHOUT NEW ENGLAND

Three countries meet on one small stage: Great Small Works members Trudi Cohen and John Bell are teaming up with Facto Teatro from Mexico City and Barbara Steinitz from Berlin to share a program of Paper Theater for venues across New England and New York City.

Facto Teatro's Don Chico con alas (Don Chico with Wings) is based on a story by the Mexican writer Eraclio Zepeda. To go from one village to another Don Chico must come down the mountain, cross the jungle, then the river and up the opposite hill. He decides he needs to build himself a pair of wings and fly, to reach the sky before national holidays.

Great Small Works' Living Newspaper, Episode Two: Sidewalk Ballet contemplates the life of the city, featuring Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, a burning bush, and the sidewalk.

Where noted, Living Newspaper will be replaced by Great Small Works' Lyzer the Miser. Based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, clever Todie teaches greedy Lyzer a lesson about generosity.

In Facto Teatro and Steinitz's collaboration Duraznos azules (Blue Peaches), Pedro asks his grandmother why the peaches in her garden are blue.

In Paper Theater, also known as Toy Theater, flat paper figures evoke grand worlds, as they did centuries ago in the living rooms of European homes. Through international Toy Theater Festivals in New York and Mexico City, performances around the world, and workshops for people of all ages and persuasions, Great Small Works and Facto Teatro have been responsible for a resurgence of interest in this accessible, inexpensive form. The grandest of tales with the simplest of means! And—you can do it yourself!

TOUR ITINERARY:

Sunday, August 30, 5:30 PM: Bread and Puppet Theater, Glover, VT. FREE. www.breadandpuppet.org

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 7:30 PM: AS220, 95 Empire Street, Providence, RI. $15 https://www.as220.org/event/paper-theatre-by-great-small-works-and-facto-teatro/

Thursday, Sept. 3, 7:30 PM: Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, University of Connecticut, 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, CT. $12 http://bimp.uconn.edu/

Saturday, Sept. 5, 7:30 PM: Mayo Street Arts, 10 Mayo Street, Portland, ME. $12/advance, $15/door. http://mayostreetarts.org/event/trudi-cohen-john-bell-with-members-of-great-small-works/

Sunday, Sept. 6, 7PM: Temple Stream Theater, Temple, ME. $10/general; $5/students and seniors; pay what you can

Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7PM: Pontine Theater, 959 Islington Street, Portsmouth, NH. $18. http://www.pontine.org/

Sunday, Sept. 13, 11AM and 3PM: Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival, Latchis Theater Ballroom, 50 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT. $10/general, $8/seniors and students. Bell and Cohen will present "Lyzer the Miser." http://puppetsinthegreenmountains.com/great-small-works-toy-theater-workshop-and-performance/

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 6:30 PM: Russell Library, 123 Broad Street, Middletown, CT. FREE. "Lyzer the Miser" will be performed.

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 6:30 PM: Fair Haven School, 164 Grand Avenue, Fair Haven, CT.  Sliding scale $5-$15, pay what you can.

TWO SHOWS IN NYC:

Thursday, Sept. 17, 8 PM: Jalopy, 313 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY. $12/adults, $5/children. Facto Teatro and Steinitz only, with guest performance by Sam Wilson and Joseph Therrien.

Saturday, Sept. 19th, 3:00 PM: Teatro SEA, 107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY. $20/adults, FREE/children. Facto Teatro and Steinitz only -- en espanol!

Great Small Works holds Benefit

Art, Justice, and Pasta: A Benefit for Building Stories

Join Brooklyn-based theater company Great Small Works on Friday, August 14 at 7:30 Eastern Time for a free, online version of the company's long-standing Spaghetti Dinners, entitled Art, Justice, and Pasta: A Benefit for Building Stories. This exciting array of over a dozen new activist performances, puppet shows, films, and music (as well as a live cooking show revealing the secrets of Great Small Works' beloved spaghetti recipe) will feature performers including: Great Small Works, BoxCutter Collective, The People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, Chinese Theatre Works, the Inanimate Intimists, Nathan Leigh, Raphael Mishler, Marina Tsaplina, Jacqueline Wade, and chef Roberto Rossi.

Viewers can connect to Art, Justice, and Pasta via the Great Small Works facebook video page:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/GreatSmallWorks/videos/

Opportunities to make contributions to Building Stories will be available during and after the event. Donation link is here:

https://bit.ly/3gA4KbW

Since 2017 Great Small Works has shared space, projects, and enthusiasm with Building Stories, LLC, a Brooklyn-based community of artists, teachers, builders, designers, writers, filmmakers, organizers, performers, and thinkers who collaborate with organizations working toward economic and racial justice, environmental protections, labor equity, prison reform and immigrant rights. The Building Stories shared studio in Gowanus is a design, construction, and rehearsal space for multiple overlapping projects involving puppets, masks, banners, costumes, and signs, as well as film and video editing.

Art, Justice, and Pasta: A Benefit for Building Stories will include performances by the following Building Stories members:

Marina Tsaplina and Alexandra Zevin, who will present their short video

• What is Building Stories?, a you-are-there tour of the Building Stories workshop and studio in Gowanus.

People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, founded in Zuccotti Park in the first two weeks of the 2011 Occupation of New York City, is a collective that helps other activists build beautiful and effective visuals for actions. People's Puppets will present:

• Masque of the Red Death: 2020, by Alexandra Zevin, a digital adaptation of a work by Edgar Allen Poe, in which the rich are partying during a pandemic, and a fracking executive steps away from the masquerade ball.
• Surviving the Storm: A Shadow Puppet Show, Kim Fraczek’s video about a mourning dove protecting her nest eggs in the tree outside Kim’s window in Brookly during a day filled with violent winds and rain; the dove’s resilience and tenacity recall the story told by 1,000-year-old Redwood tree named Luna to her protector.
• The Luxury You Deserve, Alexandra Zevin and Morgan Jenness's video reconciling anger and panic in response to recent political events, with an understanding of economic structures that influence history: we are living in the grips of settler colonial histories and a corporate takeover of the living world. Where are we going?

BoxCutter Collective, an extended family (Sam Wilson, Jason, Hicks, Tom Cunningham, and Joseph Therrien) of puppeteers, painters, performers, builders, educators, workers, union organizers, and mischief makers who have been working together in various forms for the last 15 years. They will perform:

• A Series of Questions for Those Not Yet in Favor of Police and Prison Abolition, a picture performance by Tom Cunningham.
• How to Overthrow a Statue, a how-to toy-theater instruction video by Jason Hicks.

Chinese Theatre Works, co-founded by Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin, who have collaborated together on dozens of theatrical productions that fuse Chinese opera with Western puppetry practice, will perform:

• The Warrior, based on a Japanese Zen parable, as interpreted by the great, late, master storyteller Ken Feit.

Great Small Works, a collective of six theater artists–John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi and Mark Sussman–who create original performances aiming to keep theater at the heart of social life, drawing on folk, avant-garde and popular theater traditions, will present:

• What Kind of Bear am I?, a video conceived and directed by Jenny Romaine, based on a song by Geoff Berner, and part of a larger production, The Revival of the Uzda Gravediggers, about life in the "mostly ordinary town" of Uzda in Belorusia before the rise of a nation-state.

The Inanimate Intimists (Ali Goss and Liz Oakley), who animate objects in order to explore their inner thoughts and desires, and have performed on their fire escape, from inside a bathtub, on their stove, and on their stoop, will perform:

• The Future of Pigs, a hand-puppet lecture by Professor Pig about the violent history and imagined future of the humans giving pigs a bad name: the police.

Nathan Leigh, a member of People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, will present:

• I Know What It Means To Be Free, a video animation created in collaboration with Israel Adeyemi Adeniji, who spent 190 days in ICE detention, and the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund's "Let My People Go" campaign to release our immigrant neighbors in detention; and
• The Immortan Joe Memorial Highway, a stop-motion animation video Leigh made for a tune by his band Nathan Leigh and the Crisis Actors.

Raphael Mishler, a visual designer for New York theater productions, will present:

• Quarantine Stroll, a collage crankie based on walks through the artist's neighborhood during the beginning of social distancing.

Jacqueline Wade, a professional hybrid filmmaker/storyteller/actress/puppeteer/fabricator/activist, and graduate student in the MFA Integrated Media Arts Program at Hunter College, will present

• A Slice of History, a multi-media triptych perspective on Human Zoos, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Young Lords, created, written, directed, and edited by Jacqueline Wade.

Marina Tsaplina, a transdisciplinary performing artist, disability advocate, and scholar in the medical/health humanities, will present:

• Body Poem #1: That Place of Freedom, a short meditation; an exploration of body, place, breath, sound, and image.

Festival: Behind-the-Scenes!

Twas the day before Festival, and all was definitely NOT quiet at St. Anne's Warehouse and Great Small Works studio...

Photo Credit:  Great Small Works

Erica Harris's inspired archway entrance to the Temporary Toy Theater Museum.

Photo Credit:  Great Small Works

The Dolly Wagglers rehearsing in Great Small Works studio.

Photo Credit:  Great Small Works

Occupy Wall Street Puppet Guild rehearsing their toy theater show for the Friday Slam!

To see more photos of the festival getting ready, go here...

Great Small Works: NEW SHOW!

We are delighted to announce that La MaMa, in association with Great Small Works, presents our newest show,  

Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls

From October 28th through November 6th, 2016.

Please come, invite your friends, and support this exciting project!

Did we say we are delighted?

Yes, indeed!

And we are also struggling to find the funds to make these performances possible. Any donation will go a long way toward paying our artists -- keeping flavorful modernist Yiddish alive! Asking useful questions in tough times! Laughing at jokes our ancestors laughed at (still funny and in translation!) 
       

WE THANK YOU!

Great Small Works revisits the work of radical 20th-century New York City puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler. In a bilingual Yiddish-English play that uses Maud and Cutler's satirical puppet scripts and original graphics, together with Great Small Works' own puppets and projections, and appearances by demented dybbuks and Mae West, Muntergang is a meditation on historical models for changing power relationships.

Created in collaboration with the archive of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research by Great Small Works members John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine and Roberto Rossi.

With puppeteers Joseph Therrien and Sam Wilson

Music by Jessica Lurie and Hannah Temple

Lights by Meredith Holch; sound by Akeyjoa Ando

Script by Jenny Romaine

Nourish your queer political desire today. Enjoy this limitless non-normalized,  very open utopian vision of what's possible...

Buy tickets here

Make a donation here

Great Small Works - What Makes Them Tick...

Great Small Works Interview


Interviewee: John Bell
Date: 09/11/2005

- Interest in Toy Theatre grew out of their background in puppetry, as well as their influences...

- "Political Theatre is O.K." : John sees Toy Theatre as a means to express political statements or ideas - "Toy theater is a fast, cheap, way of responding to mass- produced images and mass media, with flat cut-out tabletop figures on a proscenium stage. We have used the form to create The Toy Theater of Terror as Usual - a series of shows inspired by Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig, John Heartfield, Jane Geiser and Edward Gordon Craig - which re-fashions images of mass-media news and entertainment into episodes of a toy theater epic commenting on the politics and culture of our time."

- In 2005, received Jim Henson Award for Innovation: JIM HENSON AWARD FOR INNOVATION recognizes innovation in puppetry that is technological, dramaturgical or collaborative in nature - Great Small Works is a puppet company created by a collaborative of extraordinary puppet artists from different backgrounds in New York City. They have worked steadily for years to make the art form of Toy Theatre something innovative and relevant to the world today. Toy theaters became popular in the early 19th century, as cardboard replicas of actual stages. The miniature, two-dimensional, mass-produced theaters became popular entertainment. Great Small has been successful in attracting many new devotees and inspired many puppeteers to experiment with the form. Their annual Toy Theatre Festival is a “must see” event for puppeteers and the public. Since 1993, at seven festivals, hundreds of artists from around the world (Jerusalem, Mexico City, Toronto,) around the county (California, Illinois, Vermont) and around New York, converge at a New York location for a ten-day celebration of the power of the miniature. The 7th festival held in 2005 was held in Brooklyn at St Ann’s Warehouse. Working with guest artists, they reinvent the nearly extinct tradition of Toy Theater for contemporary audiences. The venue is reconfigured to house small-scale performance spaces where dramatic spectacles unfold, often simultaneously, alongside a grand toy theater exhibition! - From http://www.puppeteers.org/awards.html

- GSW works with schools, jails, and other community groups holding threatre workshops, which includes the use of toy theatre...

- Contemporary design and production of new toy theatre are being done by: Jon Bankert; Robert Poulter; Alain LeCucq; Jane Geiser; Susan Simpson, and Blair Thomas

- In early GSW festivals, they spread the word among the puppet and theatre community there was a 'revival' in Toy Theatre; actually, there wasn't...yet - there is now, partially due to their proactive efforts. Part of the annual festival is the 'Temporary Toy Theatre Museum', an exhibit that is never meant to be permanent; it is exhibited to showcase what toy theatre was, is, and can be into the future...

Cantastoria Festival Starts June 19th

I am passing on an announcement I received today, in hopes that it will let others know about a wonderful event beginning this weekend.  I doubt  you'll find many productions like this anywhere else!

Pre-cinematic technology takes over HERE for a week of contemporary cantastoria cooked up by puppeteers, artists, and craftspeople from across the country. A millenium-old art form is rejuvenated and re-imagined, as performers animate paintings and banners alongside texts, puppets, jokes, songs and stories.

Each unique program features several original shorts on a given theme such as: Boom or Bust, Phobia & Fetish, or Sink or Swim. On June 22nd and 23rd, Great Small Works will perform a brand-new cantastoria, Three Graces, in which three mythical graces — Harmony, Strategy and Splendor — float down to earth for an Op-Art romp inspired by Grace Kelly, Grace Paley, Grace Jones and Grace Lee Boggs.

The Greatest Smallest Band will kick off the afternoon with a parade, followed by simultaneous shows throughout the park. Bring a picnic and the whole family and celebrate Father’s Day and the third longest day of the year with Great Small Works, Bread and Puppet Theater, The Dolly Wagglers, Jonny Clockworks & the Cosmic Bicycle Theatre, Clare Dolan, Sara Peattie, Sam Wilson, Daniel Lang-Levitsky, Theater Oobleck, Redwing Blackbird Theater and the Lubberland National Dance Company, all in full view of the New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan. Free of charge!

AND Great Small Works will present the opening event for Banners and Cranks on Sunday, June 19th, from 4 to 7:30 PM at Pier One in Brooklyn Bridge Park (rain location: the Tobacco Warehouse) in DUMBO on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Toy Theatre Festival Benefit Gala

Great Small Works invites you to join your friends and supporters of Great Small Works at the GALA TOY THEATER FESTIVAL BENEFIT on Thursday, May 23rd, at the powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn, to support Great Small Works' TENTH INTERNATIONAL TOY THEATER FESTIVAL, June 14-23 at St. Ann's Warehouse.

The guest performers at this not-to-be-missed event include master puppeteer BASIL TWIST, toy piano virtuoso MARGARET LENG TAN and the inimitable musician and composer RIMA FAND. The powerHouse Arena storefront will also be filled with an ongoing spectacle of intimate paper theater plays created and performed by LAKE SIMONS, ERIN ORR, CHRIS GREEN, TONI SCHLESINGER, ED VALENTINE, and other luminaries of the miniature theater world! Join us for an evening of sparkling wit, compelling ideas, and visions of the possibilities of puppetry and community for the 21st century! How could you not come?

To find out more details, visit the event site.

Politicizing Puppets: GSW10 Review

A well-done review of the recent GSW10!

Politicizing Puppets at St. Ann's Warehouse
By Emma Wiseman

Great Small Works’ International Toy Theater Festival is in its 10th year of celebrating miniature puppet works of all kinds.  The last two weeks saw the festival transform St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO, Brooklyn into a family circus-style labyrinth festooned with hand-painted banners, dividing the space into several individual makeshift theaters supplementing St. Ann’s usual venue.

The festival program describes toy theater as “a do-it–yourself storytelling form which can be elaborate yet simple, grand yet inexpensive, full of deep critical thinking yet accessible to all.”  A toy theater piece is typically self-contained within its own mini proscenium and in general is characterized by its small size. In an age of CGI and 3D printing, there is a certain nostalgia and familiarity to be found in all styles of puppetry, though perhaps more so in toy theater, evoking as it does childhood living rooms, scissors and tape, and the excitement of putting on a show for the grownups.

St. Ann’s transformed by the arrival of Great Small Works’ 10th International Toy Theater Festival

The work on display at the festival, which closed on Sunday and included both live shows and a “Temporary Toy Theater Museum,” arrived from all over the country and from several cities around the world.  While all could be categorized under the umbrella of “toy theater,” many of the pieces took that concept and exploded it, incorporating other puppetry and performance styles. While I wasn’t able to see all of the performances, I did catch several wonderful pieces and some pretty stunning examples of just how effective this medium can be.

Detail from Annie Silverman, “The Great Danes,” part of the Temporary Toy Theater Museum

Erik Ruin and Maryann Colella of Providence, Rhode Island presented One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin, an exploration of several different disasters — notably the San Francisco earthquake and fires — and the coming-together of affected communities in response to these events. The construction of the piece was in classic toy theater style with a stand-alone proscenium arch piece, made instantly eye catching by a bold, almost Art Deco looking image of two figures holding hands. Ruin is a prolific printmaker with a striking visual style that pervades One Touch… Rather than individual figures moving through the space, the puppets of this piece are large fragments of landscapes, all done in complex lines that reminded me of woodcuts.  These pieces are hung from the top of the proscenium and fit together in a dense collage, capturing both the crowds of a city or town as well as the chaos of a major disaster.  Both performers narrate the story, with Ms. Colella helpfully pointing out individual figures and images within the dense artwork.

One Touch… stood out to me among the other shows in its particular program, all of which shared the theme of “Disaster!” Great Small Works, the presenting company for the festival, grew out of a collaboration with Bread and Puppet Theater, and as such has an activist vein running through much of their work.  Whether it is their influence over the art form or that there is something about toy theater, and puppetry in general, that complements political dissent, some of the Disaster pieces made me want to call out “I’m sorry!” Overt, talk-y messages about the dangers of global warming and the evils of government were washing over the audience like a Superstorm surge. I believe fervently in the importance of theater to a larger political discussion, but the nuances of that is a conversation for another day.  Suffice to say that One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin, by taking a historical view and by making well-executed performance its first priority, was a compelling breath of fresh air in a program hot with indignation.

Hand painted signs welcoming people to the Festival

Claire Dolan came to the Toy Theater Festival from rural Vermont, where she works as a nurse, she explained in a disarmingly un-theatrical way at the beginning of her piece. She also brought her neighbors along to help her tell a “very simple story.” Elephant has a narrative woven from Dolan’s personal experiences in Shanghai, her changing relationship with her mother in the last weeks of a mentally debilitating illness, and actual facts about elephants.  Specifically, the piece explores the nature of memory: in Shanghai entire neighborhoods have been razed to make way for more modern buildings, which in turn are torn down in favor of fake historical buildings for tourists; tribes of elephants mourn over the dead body of a companion and then return much later to the same place to actually cradle the bones with their trunks; a mother ceases to recognize her own daughter.  I was utterly charmed and transported by the work, which, while in reality being far from simple, was presented in a clear and measured way by performers with a sincerity that I actually think receiving a BFA can often kill.  Ms. Dolan was also appearing as a representative ofThe Museum of Everyday Life, for which she serves as the Chief Operating Philosopher.

I was completely surprised at the parallels I found between Elephant and Beth Nixon’s Lava Fossil, which was presented in a different program.  For one thing, both pieces were inspired at least in part by the death of a parent. Nixon presented her story using several suitcases containing pop-up sets, taking a traditional toy theater format and running with it. She talked about the death of her father and mused on the nature of time, and a dead person’s place in it. Her childhood dentist also made an appearance, as did some passionate dinosaurs, Pompeii victims and several different types of volcanoes.

Amanda Villalobos, “Sister Adorers in the Cardboard Convent” at the Temporary Toy Theater Museum

I was struck by the way in which both Ms. Dolan and Ms. Nixon constructed their stories: juxtaposing seemingly unrelated topics and coaxing out significance, breaking down an idea into layers of meaning and sifting through. Puppetry is particularly powerful when it is used in this way; not simply as a visual aid but a method by which ideas can be furthered and explored. Furthermore, I think that creating artistic work out of personal pain is a complicated affair that can often slip down a theater-as-therapy path, and I was very moved by each of these pieces, both of which were incredibly well thought out and artfully composed while remaining intensely individual.

Zach Dorn, from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, performed Five Excruciatingly Ordinary Toy Theater Shows, one or two in between each of the other live performances in his program. Each brief, hilarious piece came from a diary entry in a “particularly boring notebook” that Mr. Dorn found among his belongings. One of my favorites was entitled World of Poop. His cartoon-y sets and figures were very small, and he used a handheld camera to direct the audience’s attention.  Mr. Dorn’s work brought smallness to the forefront, as did Kevin P. Hale’s Poe-Dunk, which examined the life and works of Edgar Allen Poe with puppets stuck to matches and matchbook-sized sets.  In these situations especially, a screen above the stage that provided rock concert-like close ups of the work via a live feed camera was invaluable, though for most pieces in the festival it was still a helpful perspective.

View of one scene from Janie Geiser’s “The Reptile Under the Flowers”

Janie Geiser’s The Reptile Under the Flowers was presented in one of the festival’s makeshift individual theaters to which audience members were admitted eight at a time, every fifteen minutes. The piece comprises twelve scenes, each of which lives in its own stand-alone light box-theater and describes part of one family’s history. It was the miniature Sleep No More of the Toy Theater Festival.  Some of the scenes only allowed for two audience members at a time to peer through eye-holes, creating a unique and intimate viewing experience.

I found the Toy Theater Festival to be thoroughly enjoyable in the way that a difficult yoga class is. The theater was a million degrees, some shows were harder to sit through than others, and I started to recognize the diehards who were coming back day after day. In terms of the scope and breadth of the work there is really nothing like it to be found in New York, and for $10-$15 it’s the most cost-effective way to experience the great St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Festival Fundraiser

I received a message this morning that I'd like to pass on to all toy theatre lovers...

Greetings, Friends!

And thank you once again for coming to the Great Small Works 9th International Toy Theatre Festival. It was great seeing you, and being able to perform for you.

There is a campaign afloat to help with the Festival finances, complete with video. The festival is a mammoth undertaking. It has not been until we were "behind the scenes" that we have been able to appreciate the full scope of this event, and the talented people, the extent of the effort, and the degree of collaboration that putting on the toy theatre festival at St. Ann's requires. Although performers are not paid for performing, we are reimbursed for travel expenses.

Trudi Cohen, impressario extraordinaire and one of the producers of this wonderful events writes:

Our finances are still pretty shaky, and it's likely that Great Small Works will lose money on the festival. We've created a Kickstarter campaign, and would be grateful if you could send your friends and fans to the site!

Please visit the site, enjoy the video, and if you wish, and you are able, do make a donation. You could get a festival poster or tee-shirt!

Thanks,

Ann and George - still pushing those figures on and off the stage!

It is my hopes you'll contribute and support the ongoing work of this great toy theatre festival which not only showcases the world's finest performers of the small, but is involved with educating the public and preservation efforts.

NOTE: With only 3 weeks of the fundraiser to go, they are only a bit over half-way to their goal. From what I understand, it's a 'fully-funded' model, meaning if they don't meet their goal of $3,000, they get nothing at all. So I strongly encourage everyone to give what they can - every little bit helps!

Isolating Together: Virtual Toy Theatre Festival IV

ISOLATING TOGETHER 

Another night of Toy Theater wonders.

Another colossal event of miniature proportions.

Presented by Great Small Works: John Bell, Trudi Cohen (Cambridge, MA), Jenny Romaine (New York, NY), Stephen Kaplin (Jackson Heights, NY), Roberto Rossi (Red Hook, NY) and Mark Sussman (Montreal, QC) Technical Support: Sarah Goshman

All proceeds from Days #5 and #6 of Isolating Together will go to The Black Puppeteer Empowerment Grant & Creative Research Residency under the leadership of Program Mentor Brad Brewer through an initiative by Puppet Showplace Theater Brookline, MA. Congratulations to the first grantee cohort!

WE SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES. www.greatsmallworks.blogspot.com

With thanks to the Puppet Slam Network, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Mental Insight Foundation for their generous support.

RUNNING ORDER

In Kinship Fellowship: Lilah Akins, Devon Kelley-Yurdin, Emilia Dahlin, Cory Tamler, Jennie Hahn, Tyler Rai (Maine)

Sieglinde and Martin Haase, Haases Papiertheater (Germany)

Maria Camia (Brooklyn, NY)

Honolulu Theatre for Youth (Honolulu, HI)

Houseboat Productions (Baltimore and Cincinnati)

Amelia Castillo (Glover, VT)

Precarious Works, Siena Mayers (Lake Worth, FL)

Paul Zaloom and Lynn Jeffries (Los Angeles, CA)

Kate Brehm (New York, NY)

Kathleen Doyle (Newburypoort, MA) and Christa Haxthausen (Los Angeles, CA)

eliana stinky (Worcester, MA)

Coalfather Industries (NY and Illinois)

Great Small Works/Stephen Kaplin (Jackson Heights, NY)

Patrick Costello (Brooklyn, NY)

Leah Ogawa and John Chao (NYC and Houston)

Elle Love and Caitlin Ross (Glover, VT)

Kalan Sherrard (New York, NY)

Andrea Lomanto (New York, NY)

13 Pratt Theater Company – Rainier Pearl-Styles, Nick Chieffo and Riley Fox Hillyer (Boston, MA)

Madness in Miniature

The House Theatre presents Madness in Miniature.

Performer, designer and puppeteer Meredith Miller stars in this elegantly macabre evening, which recreates the early 20th-century practice of parlor entertainment featuring toy theater and adult puppetry. Accompanied by live jazz and ragtime on grand piano, Miller evokes an Edward Gorey-esque vibe that tells a story of love and loss.


Meredith Miller’s hour-long escape into the depths of the Chopin Theatre’s opulent lounge recaptures the intimate feeling of the time when people performed toy-theater and puppetry for each other as live entertainment in their parlors. The mood is evocative of the artwork of Edward Gorey—elegant, macabre, understated, and hovering somewhere between Victorian and Art Deco. And by pairing a line-up of intimate, lush puppetry performances with virtuosic jazz and ragtime played live on a grand piano, we have the feeling of having slipped back in time and found ourselves in a mysterious, timeless, parlor populated by dark humor macabre notions of love and loss.

Meredith Miller is a Chicago-based designer and performer of original object-based theatrical works. Her recent work includes The Abduction, originally created for "The World is Flat! A Weekend of Toy Theater" at Chicago's Links Hall, where she shared the bill with Great Small Works. Following this performance, Meredith was invited to appear in Open Eye Theater's annual Toy Theater After Dark festival in Minneapolis, and Great Small Works' 9th Annual Toy Theater Festival in New York.

Sources: goldstar.com and thehousetheatre.com

Article: Toy Theatre Thrives Online During Quarantine

Great Small Works, a New York-based performance collective, recently organized the first virtual Toy Theatre Festival, providing an online platform for international artists who responded to an open call. 

And boy, did they respond!  In a matter of just days - sometimes hours - performers from around the world stepped up to volunteer performances in the time of our mutual pandemic quarantines.

John Bell (Great Small Works) hosts the festival with two alternating puppets designed by Isaac Bell. 

The result has been magical!  The first two evenings were last month, and the next two are later this week and early next week.  I invite you to come watch, to join in, LIVE, as amazing small stage productions are streamed out to the world...

GSW9: Festival Report III (Part 1 of 2)

From our on-the-spot reporter Tess Elliott come these reports for Sunday at the ongoing 9th Annual International Toy Theatre Festival in New York...

SUNDAY

Tony Schlesinger as The Palace. She is not like a palace, she IS the Palace Theatre and she sits on the stage dressed as an older glam star "incognito" complete with sunglasses and scarf. It's a layered show. There is the actual miniature movie theatre, and a large screen for the projected images full size, and then the persona of the theater as a retired movie star. The persona and the mini theatre are surrounded by her court of staffers: the usher/butler, the candy girl, and the manager/director. She tells of her woes without whining: how she was once a palace of the greatest films, fell into disrepair, became a ratty porn house, and had a brief revival as an art film house. She, in truth, was the real show. There was a lovely way they had of showing just a close up of her elegantly stockinged legs on the big screen as she spoke, and as she tells the tale of disintegration, her stockings become more and more riddled with runs! There was a funny little bit where she talks about actually having therapy, and they trot out a little prop of an even tinier theater resting on a fainting couch! For some reason, I love imbuing inanimate objects with life, because like the astronomer John Dobson I feel like the entire universe is alive, and in truth, our fantasies are not interested in real life but in dreams. This grand dame doesn't know how anything works, or how the mysteries end, and doesn't really care.

I have to say that I grew up in movie houses because my father was a projectionist. He protested hopelessly against cable because he was sure he was going to lose yet another means of income. He actually died of a heart attack in the projection room after getting the movie running again once the power came back up after a thunderstorm! Those tarted up old film houses were made to seem grander than the most expensive mansion in the world, and they will always be full of mystery for me.

The next show was Meredith Miller, a tiny woman who wears a three tiered set of stages complete with plush red velvet curtains. She tells a tale of love that starts with romance in the head, progresses to love in the heart, and ends up with passion that plays itself out leaving her empty, (her heart having been consumed by her lover). She is desolate and inconsolable, and we as an audience felt sorry for her at the end. It was an interesting spectacle--simply done with a clear message.

She was followed on the same stage with Pop-up Theatre: John Mejias and another man (sorry I don't hear better) were in a box that looked like something cobbled from alley wood disgards. It was the kind of thing kids would build as a clubhouse, except for the collage of wood that stands for the city on top. They tell the stories in a disembodied voice coming through a speaker at the side, even though you know someone is in that box. The puppets remind me of German Expressionist woodcuts, very attractive and fierce, while the stories are rather odd events that take place at the school where he teaches. It's about parents who teach their children not to be victims by hitting back (with some becoming perpatrators as a result), lost dogs, and fire drills where neighborhood bullies throw eggs. Again, there seems to be this acceptance of the scary, the weird and the unfair as it comes and goes. It's that gigantic bored shrug called "whatever" that seems hopeless to me, but it is a very hard world graduating kids face now. Maybe it's a very necessary emotional distance.

The last show was by The Puppeteers' Coop of Boston & NYC with Sara Peattie & Theresa Linnihan and a young man who did their sound effects (he is from a separate company). It was a classic toy theatre performance, all about Coney Island--funny and sad at the same time. Someone really knew how to do Dwight Frye's mad laugh from the old Dracula which told me it was Coney Island as created by Dr. Frankenstein and Igor. I got a big kick out of it.

SUNDAY NIGHT (Cabaret)

...Hi! It's gotten cool again, though not inside the Festival Warehouse! Tonight was a little bit of everything. I can probably describe them but I want to look for pictures in the morning because some are not in the exhibit. It was a bit more adult but I got to actually see Great Small Works perform a newer piece--they did a satire on the Oil Spill and apparently this was a revamped version of an old one they performed before. You can really tell they have worked together for a long time. I can tell you, it REALLY makes the difference when the music and singing are quality. But that's tomorrow. Am going to really sleep tonight. But here are the pictures I promised. I could not get a great one of Torry Bend's odd theater that she wears. It's in a dark corner. I will try to do it with a flash to put on the DVD for you. Will also be uploading two shorter videos of walking through the exhibition.

They [Great Small Works] were the last act of the cabaret, and their theatre stage has to be fairly big. In truth they barely fit on the stage but they managed to crush in for their opening "stance" of shock and awe before they take up their stations around the stage (they each have their own frozen emotion, though they break it and either scream or laugh maniacally). I found myself wondering if they did that in response to the audience awaiting them. Everyone has their assigned task.They sang a sea chanty with lovely harmony about the "Red Rose going down" while an old style ship bobs in waves of gold, not blue. Here is a link with the words and a performance so you know what it sounded like: sea chantey The ship left and there came tea cups in saucers bobbing on the waters, and tea bags hovered over them like clouds (everyone loved that part) until a giant gas pump comes down to pour gas or oil into the cups. The cups float away and an oil derrick plunks down into the waves. The narrator talks about people saying "accidents happen" and then puppets act out repeating that like hysterical parrots, so the narrator says "sometimes it's just wickness." The sea chanty starts out again, and several BP logos, like colored clouds whisks across the sky (I thought of it as ball lightning, which bounces around and off things). The song is a haunting tune that seems appropriate for what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. It got a rousing response from the audience. It was a pleasure to see them do their thing after years of reading about them.

More to come in Part 2...

Isolating Together: Virtual Toy Theatre Festival III

We're back! Coming again to a personal screen near you!

ISOLATING TOGETHER

Another night of Toy Theater wonders.

Another colossal event of miniature proportions.

Presented by Great Small Works: John Bell, Trudi Cohen (Cambridge, MA), Jenny Romaine (New York, NY), Stephen Kaplin (Jackson Heights, NY), Roberto Rossi (Red Hook, NY) and Mark Sussman (Montreal, QC)

With thanks to the Puppet Slam Network, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Mental Insight Foundation for their generous support.

With thanks to the Puppetslam Network, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Mental Insight Foundation for their generous support.

RUNNING ORDER

Amanda Card (NYC)

Robert Poulter’s New Model Theatre (London, UK)

Maisie O’Brien (Dallas and Philadelphia)

People’s Puppets of Occupy Wall Street (Brooklyn, NY)

Felice Amato (Boston, MA)

Alex and Olmsted -- Alex Vernon and Sarah Olmsted Thomas (Takoma Park, MD)

Steph Hill-Wood (Detroit, MI)

Sue Truman, The Crankie Factory (Seattle, WA)

Paradox Teatro Family (Mexico City)

Bénédicte Guillon Verne et Pierre Bérerd of Le Chemin qui Marche (near Québec City)

Edna Bland (Sanford, FL)

Léonie Zikos (Cappadocia, Turkey)

Felicia Cooper (Stafford Springs, CT)

Great Small Works/Roberto Rossi (Red Hook, NY)

Linda Wingerter & Polly Sonic of the Stringpullers Puppet Company (Ithaca, NY)

The Weeping Mary Collective, submitted by Alva Rogers (New York, NY)

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!

GWS Does it Again...

I promised more information, and here it is...

The 8th International Toy Theatre Festival will be presented by Great Small Works May 23-June 1, 2008. It will be held at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York.

It's one of the largest and most comprehensive toy theatre festivals in the world. If you have the chance to go, be sure and let us know what you think. I'd love to hear back from attendees!

"[Great Small Works has] breathed new, pointed life into the form of toy theater." - Ross Wetzsteon of The Village Voice

GSW10 Performance on Video: Bradley Manning

Filmed June 15, 2013, 10pm. The latest episode of Great Small Works' signature production, "The Toy Theater of Terror as Usual", focuses on the trials and tribulations of Bradley Manning, and freedom of information. Performed at Great Small Works 10th International Toy Theater Festival, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn.

GSW9: Final Festival Report

Tess Elliott had one more report she sent me last night from the final hours of the Festival.

Considering that Tess lost her DSL access for almost half the festival - and my satellite access has been capped the last 4 days due to my going over our threshold (yes, satellite has broadband caps...don't get me started...!) - it's been a struggle for this website to get reports out on a timely basis. Thank you, Dear Readers, for being patient.

Now, here is the final report - Enjoy!

“Fiesta Graveyard” from Mexico City was written by Mercedes Go'mez Benet, who also played a small harp. The puppeteers were Alejandro Beni'tez and Mauricio Martinez of Facto Teatro, who also performed songs. The other musician was Gerardo Tame'z. Part of the success of their show is that the music and sound effects were just stunning. They did the show with some English translation, but most of it you could follow once they set the scene. A man, Procopio, has died a natural death, and to reach the eternal Fiesta, he must go through some supernatural tests. A hairless dog that in some cultures had mystical properties (and in others was food) becomes his guide, only the man first must realize he is dead. Each scene change is punctuated by a supernatural interval of ghostly winds done beautifully with various pipes which ends with more music bringing in the next scene. The guitar and harp are very wonderfully done, so that it feels like an orchestra. They accompany him fighting a supernatural lizard, mountains crashing together, and other tests.

The performers were very funny and fierce with a mixture of good puppetry and making great faces as they tell the story. Oh the weeping when poor Procopio dies! And of course, it ends with a Day of the Dead altar, which is one of my favorite traditions. After several years of painting in the New Mexico desert at Halloween time, I got to know a lot about the tradition of Dios de Los Muertos, and now make my own home altar to remember those who I have lost. It is a very friendly, warm way to remember your loved ones, and the home altars are really quite beautiful. This was such a happy surprise for me to see the show was about this great tradition. It was magical and mesmerizing (and they, too, made their own jokes about Arizona). I hope to see this company again. It gave me more insight into a tradition I already love.

Shoddy Puppet Company's leader Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews was in the Saturday symposium, so I looked forward to seeing his company. They performed “Fables of Light and Falling” in an interesting looking tent, with scenes painted on the outside, and a window flap to be raised for the small stage. The other puppeteers were Zac Palladino, Leslie Rogers, and Kestrel Plump. There were four interwoven stories, that involved a mule who was mistaken for a woman, a wooden man, two people made of straw, a scarecrow man (who later meets the straw woman who has a stone tied around her belly), and how the straw man did not want to fight in a war. He ran from one, but was absorbed by the Earth for signing a paper that he would pay for someone else to fight when another war is declared. It is a morality tale because the man who was taken in his place was the wooden man who helped him when the scarecrow ran from the first war. Crows are the device that take people and become frightening symbols. The scarecrow is afraid of them. I remembered thinking they were bullies as a little girl and the truth is crows recognize people and carry grudges.I am very glad I didn't throw stones at the ones who perched on my swingset! This is also a political tale about war, and everyone is given a silver pencil as a symbol of the right person signing the right paper at the right time to prevent wars and other terrible things. Mr. Andrews was a musical narrator, with a Woody Guthrie sort of persona of folk music and plain speaking, telling the stories and playing, while the little tent twirled with activity, as puppets popped up out of slashes in the fabric set, and then up on the stage to tell the story. That is some close quarters to perform in, though it reminded me of the old seaside Punch and Judy theaters that were worn ON the puppeteer. It's certainly handy to bring your own theater.

Often, I find myself disliking being lectured to about what is right and wrong by sidewalk petitioners and protestors, but the charm of the puppeteers and the humor in the stories (all the political satire) are a delightful way to present controversial points of view. Unfortunately, they are preaching to the choir in Brooklyn. This is an artistic community that in general hates war, and banks foreclosing (I have memories of some small farms going down when I was a 4H girl in Indiana) and I like the way the puppets can charm their way into telling you their point of view. Protesters don't have that luxury, to make people laugh while they get them to listen. I like the puppet way better! I think if I ever manned a petition table, it would have to have puppets handing out pens instead of big angry signs and in-your-face criers of protest. Maybe the liberal world ought to think of this when they want to change something?

The Cosmic Bicycle Theater, performing “Clockworks Universalis.” This company has a terrific website except that while I love playing with it, I still want more information and pictures of performances. They have a long record of performing, even when “steampunk” was not really a genre well known, but one they may have helped develop. So when I saw their set, and the derby clad automata-like performers sitting on either side I was in heaven. Only trouble is that it took a third of the performance to see that their set was a wonderful 3-dimensional collage of all sorts of old clip art, much of which came from Dover Publications, which I pay homage to in much of my decoupage work. It reminded me a lot of the collage work of automata maker Simon Venus (am a huge automata fan). Check out Cabaret Mechanical Theater's little flick on YouTube made by Gaz Cobain - Venus's piece is the first one - and you will see why I connect the two. I am playing with my own automata design kit, which makes my head explode on a regular basis.

So while I was mesmerized by the puppeteers, I must admit one of their devices, the Victorian engraved pointing hand zipping in and out, sometimes doing some damage, did interfere with my mindset, because when I see that device my brain goes : Blue Meanie Flying Glove, or “the Fickle Finger of Fate” award by Rowan and Martin. It made me hold back laughter, and I wonder if maybe it was okay to laugh. We heard someone say not to clap, that they needed silence. Clockwork is noisy. It was beautiful but I wanted noise.

The set is a 3D collage that sits in a long box lit with oil lamps, behind a many-paned window with something foggy on the glass. The device of wiping off the glass is really cool, until you have had to watch the window cleaning six or seven times. The collage is beautiful, and tells a creation story that is artistic and funny when the two puppeteers get going. It was well-timed, and the only thing I wished for was larger panes of glass and less window cleaning.

Great Small Works film, “White Pajamas” was a lovely little film done by Jenny Romaine with Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. It is the paintings of Mayer Kirshenblatt about his childhood in Poland, and they are wonderful naïve paintings of the local city life and how his father tried to get a boy after seven daughters. He is told by the nearby Rebbe to dress the baby in white so that the Angel of death won't take him, and how that boy always wore white pajamas. The scenes are just beautiful. There is the inevitable memory of the Holocaust, but I really loved the sweet paintings of a happier life—one that never seems to be covered enough. It was a perfect ending to all the marvelous, frantic and funny dreams of utopia, and transformed anger of the toy theater performances. Especially giving it that “citizen of the world” passport stamp for an audience who passionately supports seeing work from other countries.

Bravo, and Brava to Great Small Works!

NOTE FROM TRISH: I concur - an amazing festival, indeed!