Over new years, I caught a great feed with a link to the new Sesame Street Video site. So I have spent the last week randomly searching for all things Sesame St. Quite a treat to type in “Grover” and get a list of his skits to watch. Then search for “cookie” so I can watch back-to-back videos of Cookie Monster losing it over cookies. Tried to throw a curve ball when I searched for “Pinball” and got the Pointer Sister’s classic song twice! The beta version seemed to get hung up when I searched for “numbers” but when I put “paint numbers” in, the Mad Painter was listed. Haven’t seen those clips in a long time. Classics. They do not allow embedded videos, nor do any of the videos have their own links. So you’ll have to go to the site to catch the madness.
PuppetLOVE! 2007
experimental, political & emerging puppetry
October 5 & 6, 2007 ~ 8pm
CounterPULSE Performance Space
1310 Mission Street at 9th, San Francisco
Reservations: (415)905-5958 or wisefool@lmi.net
It is a small space and we expecrt to fill the house both nights, so make your courtesy reservation early to be sure you get in.
Please reserve by 4pm on the day of the show you would like to see. No one will be checking messages after 4pm on those days.
Same program both nights.
Work is geared for adults, but children are welcome.
Participating Artists
Bread & Puppet in NY Times
 For my articles about last year’s Bread & Puppet Vermont experience, go here and here and here.
August 5, 2007
Spectacle for the Heart and Soul
GLOVER, Vt.
FOR the first time in many summers the Bread and Puppet Theater will travel nine hours from northern Vermont for a New York City gig, at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening. Then the troupe will turn around and ride back to its farm just below the Canadian border, where it will put on the same show. You can easily spot the group en route: 1963 school bus, painted sky blue, with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun on the side.
People who know of the troupe without really knowing its work tend to link it to political street theater of the 1960s, an accurate but incomplete association. Recently I’ve been thinking of the theater in a contemporary context. At a time when the art industry is awash in cash and privilege, and theater tickets routinely go for $100 or more, Bread and Puppet continues, more than 40 years on, to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system.
Gonzo Puppeteerism
The Muppet universe is hardwired into my brain. I named this site after a Muppet Show tap dance bit starring Kermit. Last year, I caught the Muppet Movie at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH. The theater is an 1878 pre-film performance space built by a local beer baron, and the movie brought back timeless memories of old friends I knew when I was a kid. I got teary eyed when Kermit sang “Rainbow Connection.” I couldn’t sit still in my seat the whole show, and kept talking to the screen. The people sitting around me looked at me at the beginning, but then got into the laughs and comments much like we all enjoyed watching Statler and Waldorf heckle the Muppet acts. And on the SLR trip up to Portland last month, I checked out a real Studebaker in a junkyard, humming “Movin’ Right Along.”
While being sucked into other parts of the interweb this week, I had no idea that The Muppets where about to take San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) Screening Room this weekend and next. I just found out yesterday that master puppeteer Dave Goelz and his pal Gonzo will be in the house tonight and tomorrow night. I made plans tonight and will be off at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival tomorrow for my own puppeteering stint with Jonathan (getting a stipend even)! Can we smack our heads, open our mouths up to the sky, and run around with foam arms flailing and head swaying?
I hope to make some of the films when I return. Jonathan already knew about it and had it in his schedule.
Man, am I out of the loop sometimes….
Bread & Puppet: The Victory Circus
Sunday begins early after I wake up from a dream. My sister Karen teases and taunts me, and I end up crying on my great-grandmother’s antique, green sofa. “This is Nanny’s couch, isn’t it?” I sob. “It is!” my sister screams back at me.
Sitting up off the floor of my van, clearly awake after the dream, I instantly notice the quiet, Vermont solitude that surrounds me. I open the back doors to chirping birds and buzzing bugs. I do tai chi in the circus field where I camped and meditate in my van before I break down the sleeping set up. I then put the reworked spring on the high striker.
The barn’s bell finally rings for breakfast, so I head up to the house to grab some grub. I eat granola, cow milk (not fresh due to Bread & Puppet having to sell their dairy cow), and a banana slice. I also sip a cup of coffee made from their big machine (they also grind it with a huge grinder). Not to be greedy, I just try the homemade hot cereal with a small dab of honey. Oh, and there’s bread of course.
The Carny Mobile games set up for a Sunday Bread & Puppet show in Glover, VT
Continue reading “Bread & Puppet: The Victory Circus”
Sudden Puppet Theater in Irasburg, VT
As my final days in Concord begin to speed up, my gut tells me to call and check in with Linda Elbow at Bread & Puppet. Then, after the high striker breaks a spring in Keene two days before I leave the state, I have to trouble-shoot a way to mail the replacement. So I call Linda to get the OK to next day a spring to Glover if I have to.
She says that that’s fine, and also tells me that Bread & Puppet will perform in a parade in Irasburg, VT Saturday at 6PM. I have planned on leaving my Portsmouth gig at 2:30 to arrive at Glover by 6. Linda says to make it 5:30 and I’ll get to go to the parade. I make sure that I leave Portsmouth with enough time to get up there by 5:30.
Rain in Irasburg delays Bread & Puppet’s butcher assembly, as performers seek shelter under the roof’s overhang.
Pulling Strings in NYC with Kevin White
I first met Kevin White about 12 years ago in Atlanta, GA. At the time, Kevin toured the Southeast performing marionette shows with his brother Brian. They worked for a company named Vagabond and had a boss that mismanaged the business. I moved away from Atlanta a few years after meeting them and they had both quit working for that company due to the fact that their boss didn’t run things too well.
Kevin White behind the wheel of Puppet in the Park’s Puppet Mobile, NYC.
I lost touch with Kevin and found my own path to puppetry after moving to San Francisco in 1997. As I became an active member of the CELLspace Puppet Cluster (David Morely, Jonathan Youtt, and Joelle LaPlume were the main members, with Whitney Combs, Sam Bower, myself, and others as supporting cast) in 1999, I thought of Kevin often and wondered why I never felt drawn to puppetry in Atlanta.
Continue reading “Pulling Strings in NYC with Kevin White”
A Mind Full of Big Nazo
Inside the Lab and Up Close with Erminio Pinque
Providence, RI
My Boy Scout training failed me Wednesday in Rhode Island. I took a day of my Boston/Cambridge trip to meet Erminio Pinque, mastermind behind the puppet creatures that are Big Nazo. I planned on picking his brain and absorbing the scenes of Big Nazo Lab. I wanted to document his techniques, see what his style was all about, and meet a professional East Coast puppeteer. I only had about 4 hours to do all of this and should’ve brought a voice-recording device along with my camera. I wasn’t prepared, and rushed off to catch my train back to Boston awash in thoughts, visuals, and emotions that soon faded into shadows of their original energies. I wasn’t prepared!
Erminio Pinque shows two curious people a hybrid creature that Big Nazo created for a restaurant ad campaign. I think this is a brimp, a broccoli and shrimp creature.
Flashback: NYE06 Puppet Pics
While Googling for photos to send to an upcoming Puppet Workshop I tried to get into (too late, they’re full), I came across a few great New Years shots of me in the Wise Fool jester puppet. I spent most of that afternoon putting the puppets together with Jonathan and Emily. We then did a run-through with a cast of dozens, and many great volunteers that played the other puppets (about a dozen total). Then we did a Dr. Feelfine show at our small stage, met up, went backstage at the String Cheese Incident stage, jumped in to our puppets and were on! What a great way to bring in the New Year.
Continue reading “Flashback: NYE06 Puppet Pics”
A Visit to the Bread & Puppet Museum
Route 122, Glover, VT
Though you wouldn’t know it from Vermont’s official tourist maps and info brochures, an amazing treasure of art history resides in the state’s Northeast Kingdom. For over 40 years, Peter Schumann, and his collaborative project Bread & Puppet Theater, has produced amazing shows, pageants, and street theater via an infinite amount of imagination, scrap materials, and papier-mâché. Nestled in postcard-perfect rolling hills and meadows, their farm and land serve as a production area and summer performance area. They’ve been there since 1974, and have at least 3 buildings for storage.
The largest building by far is their over-100-year-old, 5 story barn, and it overflows with large and small art from decades of creativity. Only 2 floors are open for viewing, with the top two floors being full of costumes and other things. The bottom area, where the cows used to live, is currently being retrofitted due to a groundwater drainage problem.
4/29/2006: Puppets from Perversia in SF
Just got an early lead for this San Francisco show via Jack Rabbit Speaks (the Burningman em list). Puppets from Perversia is a benefit to raise USD to fly 7 Bangkok puppeteers to the USA and to Burningman this year. I say go to this show to support this cross-cultural puppet exchange (I may try to meet up with them on the Playa).
4/1/2006: Performing at PuppetLOVE!
After a year off, PuppetLOVE! will once again take the stage for a night of mature, diverse puppet performances. I have been in this festival several times in the past, once with my puppet creation, DJ Organik, and another time with the Monkey Thump Puppet Collective (that was the notorious, rated X Monkey Du Sade, complete with BDSM and ravaging banannas doing the can can). This year I’ll be performing a shadow puppet work-in-progress with Christine Marie (Shadowlight), Mia Rovegno (Hummingbird Works) and others. Playing with shadows is always fun, and making the puppets, screen, etc. is part of why I love puppetry.
So, come out and see me do puppets one last time before I head East to do that political carnie thang! This show will sell out due to being one night only at the tiny CounterPULSE space.