New York State Puppet Festival 2022
*The event has already taken place on this date: Sun, 07/03/2022
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The second in-person New York State Puppet Festival takes place June 23 to July 3, 2022 across multiple venues in Perry, NY! This international festival of contemporary and traditional puppetry takes places over ten days, featuring puppet art exhibitions, performances, parades, and workshops!
Shows include:
Bread and Puppet Theater (Opening Reception performance June 23, exhibit through July 23 at the Arts Council for Wyoming County)
The New York State Puppet Festival presents an exhibition of puppets and other works from Peter Schumann’s Bread & Puppet Theater. The exhibit focuses on Bread & Puppet’s response to political issues and participation in social movements during its 59-year history. This anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, pro-humanity, pro-sky, Possibilitarian theater company has left an indelible stamp on the world of theater and the American cultural landscape since its founding in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side. Relentless! includes masks, puppets, giant puppets, cantastorias (picture performances), banners, flags, and other objects from such productions as The Whitewashing of the Dirty Sheets of Attica (1971), Budhoo’s Letter of Resignation from the IMF (1995) and The Persians (2022).
In the 1960s Peter Schumann explained his theater in this manner:
"[w]e want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual. Puppet theater is the theater of all means. Puppets and masks should be played in the street. They are louder than the traffic. They don’t teach problems, but they scream and dance and display life in its clearest terms. Puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures. A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric. We have two types of puppet shows: good ones and bad ones, but all of them are for good and against evil.”
The exhibit runs June 23 to July 23 at the Arts Council for Wyoming County. It is free and open to the public and does not require a ticket.
Opening reception on July 23 (6:30 p.m.) includes a short performance by Bread and Puppet Theater, and a talk back with the members of the company followed by B&P’s traditional post-show sharing of bread with the audience.
Shank's Mare (June 30-July 3 at Perry Central School Auditorium in Perry, NY)
by Tom Lee and Koryu Nishikawa V
Stories and traditions intersect in a journey across time and space. Traditional puppetry meets live-filmmaking!
Shank's Mare is an internationally renowned puppet theatre piece by Tom Lee and Japanese Master of the cart-puppet form, Koryu Nishikawa V of Hachioji Kuruma Ningyo. Shank’s Mare is the story of two wandering travelers whose paths intersect across time and space. A medieval astronomer and his assistant track a comet across the heavens; a swordsman turns bandit out of grief. All wander up mountains, into snowstorms and eventually, through time, to the sounds of hammer dulcimer and Japanese shamisan and flute.
Using traditional Kuruma Ningyo cart puppetry, video projection and live music, the piece explores themes of life and death and how tradition is passed on. Gorgeously detailed miniature sets combine with cinematic projections and virtuosic puppetry to create a once-in-a-lifetime performance event, appropriate for ages 5 and up.
"You simply won’t see better puppetry anywhere nor a tighter braiding of methods old and new nor artists working so confidently at the peak of their craft.”--Helen Shaw, Time Out, NY
Shank's Mare has been featured at the Musee de Branly in Paris, France, the Chicago Puppet Festival, the Iida Puppet Festival in Japan, La MaMa in NYC, and has toured across the United States, and Hawaii.
Approx. running time: 70 minutes. All-Festival Pass Eligible Show.
Kayfabe/Remember When They Told You This Was a Helicopter? (June 24-26 at Theatre@37 in Perry, NY)
Kayfabe by Josh Rice is the title of this absurdist wrestling puppet show-in progress, but "kayfabe" is also the term used in professional wrestling of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. Philosopher and critic Roland Barthes wrote “The function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions that are expected of him.” Drawing from Barthes and the work of Samuel Beckett, Kayfabe explores fantasy, reality, and the spaces in-between, using bunraku-style puppetry, projection, dance, and the very real world of professional wrestling. Josh/Kayfabe is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. More at joshriceprojects.com
Remember When They Told You This Was A Helicopter by Emma Wiseman & directed by Rowan Magee, is the story of a puppet trapped in a manipulative skyscraper with video game-like rules. This work in progress is the recipient of a Jim Henson Foundation Workshop Grant and an ACWC Mini Grant, and uses bunraku-style puppetry and projection. More at emmawiseman.me or on Instagram @emma_wiseman
Runtime approximately 75 minutes. All-Festival Pass Eligible Show.
Late Night Puppet Talk Show with Special Guest (June 25 and July 2 at 10 PM at Theatre@37 in Perry, NY)
From deep in the armpit of the internet to a theater near you, the Late Night Puppet Talk Show With Special Guest is an hour-long, interactive puppet catastrophe for adults, created by puppeteers Andy Manjuck and Dorothy James.
Join hosts Lord of Chat and Glenn LIVE from Theatre@37 in Perry, NY as they catch up with one another, cheerfully assault their interns (Manjuck & James), and navigate the ever-interrupting stream of puppets friends from their local community. With original music by Living Estonian Legend Der Südwind, and the looming potential of a Special Guest, this is one piece of weird puppet art you CANNOT miss. Bring a puppet, a sock, something else—remember, ANYTHING can be a puppet—or don't! This show is interactive!
Late Night Puppet Talk Show With Special Guest LIVE at 10pm Eastern: twitch.tv/talkpuppet2me
All-Festival Pass Eligible Show.
[sunflower]/To Be Alive (June 30-July 3 at Theatre@37 in Perry, NY)
Afro-surrealism meets Japanese poetry on a double bill of puppetry performance!
[sunflower] by Sifiso Mabena (directed by Marcella Renee Murray) is a multidisciplinary performance following a Zimbabwean woman’s quest to ‘make herself at home’ after decades of being an immigrant. This play is about roots: grass roots, being rooted in, and being uprooted. Using elements of puppetry, family history, Afro-surrealism and movement, [sunflower] explores notions of home, immigration and displacement as they pertain to identity.
To Be Alive by Leah Ogawa is a solo puppetry piece inspired by the poem To Live by Shuntaro Tanikawa, exploring the fundamental questions of life. Created by Leah Ogawa and John Tsung.
Total Running Time: Approx. 75 minutes. All-Festival Pass Eligible Show.
Puppet Slam (Wednesday, June 29 at Theatre@37 in Perry, NY)
An amuse bouche of puppetry! A variety of brand new, bite-sized works of puppet theatre!
The New York State Puppet Festival Puppet Slam is an evening of six, brand-new, short (10-minutes or less) works of puppet theatre! Come see a variety of styles of puppetry from local and national puppet artists!
Approx. running time: 75 minutes. All-Festival Pass Eligible Show.
...as well as workshops and pop-up offerings throughout the festival! For more information visit us at newyorkstatepuppetfestival.org or follow us on social media!
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