Pollock's Toy Museum Presents: Fitzrovia Féte 2021

Pollock's Toy Museum is thrilled to present the Fitzrovia Féte 2021! Join us on Saturday, August 14th, for a day of free workshops, performances and play around the Museum on Whitfield Street and Scala Street!

The day event's include Punch & Judy, Magic Shows, Toy Theatre Performances, local stalls (including cakes and artworks made by locals), free art workshops for all ages and The Hope pub will be serving summer drinks! Bring change with you as we will have limited card machines! Schedule of events can be found below...

Performance times:
12:30- Punch & Judy Show with Robert Styles
13:30- Magic Show with The Illusioneer
14:30- Punch & Judy Show with Robert Styles
15:30- Magic Show with The Illusioneer
16:30- Toy Theatre Performance with Pollock's Toy Museum

Throughout the afternoon:
Art workshops with Emma Carlow and members of the Pollock's Toy Museum Trust, street games, local Stalls (tombola, cakes, art) and more to be announced!

This is a free event and is welcome to all.  Pre-booking your free tickets will help us manage numbers more effectively.  There are two time slots available (12:00-2:30 and 2:30-5pm). 

We will be managing numbers in line with the current Covid-19 guidelines. Please do not attend if you are experiencing any Covid-19 symptoms (and get better soon!)

The Museum and Toyshop will also be open to visit, too! Please book a separate, priced ticket to enter the Museum on the day. Book your museum admission here.  Donations to the Museum fund are welcome, donate here.

If you have any questions please contact Emily at info.pollockstoymuseum@gmail.com

Fun Online, Interactive 'Live' show!

Xavi is a little girl with a big imagination, stranded alone in her bedroom. When a mysterious visitor drops by looking for a missing part to fix his magical flying machine, they explore the hidden depths of her room and use the power of imagination to turn her isolation into an epic indoor voyage.  

This online interactive experience borrows techniques of the Victorian toy theatre (like paper cutout characters) and combines them with contemporary style puppetry and original songs. Designed specifically for online viewing, it invites viewers to turn their cameras on to participate in select scenes. A post-show talkback after each performance invites them to meet the puppeteers, ask questions, and explore behind-the-scenes. Audience members will also receive a printable puppet template that they can make and color at home.

PUNCH Kamikaze!

Puppets Come Home! & Drama of Works present...

-- PUNCH Kamikaze: Punch & Judy --

When: Thursday, August 13th, 8pm ET
Where: www.coneyisland.com/puppets
Who: Adults Only

An assortment of puppeteers perform various scenes from the 358-year-old traditional English puppet show, Punch & Judy.

FEATURING:
- Drama of Works (Brooklyn, NY)
- Connor Hopkins, Artistic Director and Janitor, Trouble Puppet Theater Company Workshop (Austin, TX)
- Deborah Hunt, Jorge Díaz and musician Agustín Muñoz (San Juan, PR)
- Jeghetto's Entertainment, LLC (Asheville, NC)
- Sarah Nolen, Resident Artist at Puppet Showplace Theater (Boston, MA)
- Noisy Oyster (Somerset, UK)
- Brendan Schweda/Puppets Come Home! (Brooklyn, NY)
- Tooth and Nail Cabaret = Elle Love, Caitlin Ross and Marcus Fioravante (all over the place)
- Amy Trompetter/Redwing Blackbird Theater (Rosendale, NY)

* * * * * * * * * * *
Once upon a time in Coney Island, there were so many Punch & Judy shows happening, that "Punch and Judy together with [their cohorts] the devil, the priest and the hangman could be viewed on almost any part of the beach..." - Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 Jun 1878

For the first time in PUNCH puppet slam’s history (it’s been around in some form since 2005) we are taking on our namesake! Artists who already had a tradition of doing Punch & Judy shows were asked to share a snippet of their piece with us or create a new scene for this event - and it’s going to be EPIC!!!

“Kamikaze” is a term Drama of Works uses for its themed puppet slams, based around one story/event/play. A multitude of puppet artists are given sections of the story to reinterpret and create with wild abandon. Then it is presented in order. No one knows how it will come together until the night of the show. www.dramaofworks.com/punch

Puppets Come Home at Coney Island is a series designed to celebrate Coney Island's 150-year legacy of puppetry & provide a platform for contemporary cutting-edge puppeteers. Produced in collaboration with Coney Island USA.

Suggested Donation - A link will be provided during the show to support the artists, and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Domestic Violence Project at the Urban Justice Center.

PUNCH Kamikaze is made possible in part through the generosity of The Puppet Slam Network.

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.

Gepetto: Extraordinary Extremities

La MaMa in association with Concrete Temple Theatre and Bridge Street Theatre presents

Geppetto: Extraordinary Extremities

Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 2 PM – 3 PM EDT; to join this live event, go to http://lamama.org/gepetto/

We are deeply honored at this time to be able to present a live streamed performance of Geppetto!

Geppetto: Extraordinary Extremities is a tale of resilience, adaptation and ingenuity that tells the story of puppet-maker Geppetto, who is attempting to perform — all by himself for the first time ever — the grand mythical love story of Perseus, who slays a sea monster to save his beloved Andromeda. During the show things begin to go haywire, and Geppetto finds himself desperately improvising to overcome the challenges of performing solo while at the same time scrambling to devise new story lines, new characters, and even new limbs.

Geppetto: Extraordinary Extremities was inspired by a NPR story on Hugh Herr, whose legs were amputated after a climbing accident and who now designs technologically advanced artificial limbs.

“The play focuses on a longing for magic, a wish for a transformative power…A compelling performance, enhanced by haunting cello music…It celebrates human ingenuity.” – New York Times 

“It’s romantic in an old-fashioned way…lovely music…Carlo Adinolfi’s performance is charming.” – New Yorker

We dedicate this performance to anyone who has lost a loved one during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Streaming Event: Jules Verne Adaption

HEAR YE, HEAR YE...

Each weekend, Saturday and Sunday only, you'll be able to see one of legendary productions of the famous marionette company Carlo Colla & Figli of Milan. This weekend, "From the Earth to the Moon", after the novel by Jules Verne, written in 1865, with music from Jacques Offenbach's operetta "Le Voyage dans la lune". Carlo Colla's first marionette production of this show was in 1898.

Only today Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 May will be online "From Earth to the Moon", by the Fondazione Carlo Colla & Figli, which comes from Jules Verne's novel of 1865.

In 1875 composer Jacques Offenbach composed the operetta "Le Voyage dans la Moon" which the show was inspired.

In 1898 Charles II Colla put hand to the lyrics to create a version suitable for puppet representation. The Company worked on making puppets, hand scolding them and making their clothes. The sets were commissioned by Antonio Rovescalli, to be integrated by Ugo Bellio, Achilles Lualdi, scenographers of the Teatro alla Scala, in the early 900. s.

A work of artisan effort that led to the show "From Earth to the Moon", with puppets impersonating Terrestrials and Lunari, achieving a great success.

In 1993 a new version of the show was presented at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, last represented at Piccolo Teatro Grassi at the end of December 2019.