Puppet BloK! is a proud 4-time Recipient of grants from The Jim Henson Foundation. This original series:
- promotes innovative storytelling
- features new works of puppetry, animation, music, and other innovative styles of performance by emerging and established artists from the NYC area.
- provides an all-encompassing venue for alternative modes of storytelling.
- offers a haven for work that is uncomfortable and wonderful; work that is sculpted not polished; reactionary, not static; biting, not perfect.
Created in 2006, Puppet BloK! is curated by Leslie Strongwater. E-mail her for more information.
Puppet BloK! is funded in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency and the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, with presenters grants from The Jim Henson Foundaton.
Coming up:
Puppets, Lounge Tuesday, January 17 at 6:00pm Kate Brehm Fireside Puppet Chats Tickets: FREE
Hosted by Kate Brehm. Fireside Puppet Chats arose from the premise that puppeteers, people obsessed with visuality and performing objects, might have an interesting take on on other topics too! Join us in January to talk about MATH (does everybody hate math? what happened to you and math? why do we count in tens, is it really about our fingers?)
Tuesday, January 17 at 7:30pm
Animals / Doppelskope
Trash Beach / An Existential Sing-Along
Tickets: $12 (advance), $15 / $10 stu/sen (door)
for aswang dona from nikki calonge on Vimeo.
Trash Beach: Created by Animals with nicHi Douglas, designed Michael De Angelis, directed by Mike Mikos; written by Nikki Calonge, performed by nicHi Douglas and Nikki Calonge. Recently performed at Bushwick Starr's Band of Puppets Fest, Trash Beach is about twin sisters living on a remote island. They exist between an insulated world of child-like play and the global influence of modernity as it trickles down to them. Trash Beach imbues meaning in objects through video, dance, theater and puppets disguised as garbage. Watch as twin sisters Noli and Fili fill the room with Light and Magic on a trash heap by the beach where nature and developing nations spill over into each other, where ocean waves and radio static collide.Followed by
An Existential Sing-Along. Created and performed by Doppelskope (Christopher Scheer and Ora Fruchter, pictured above). A man, a woman and a kangaroo decide what's real. In this interactive, ever-changing event, Doppelskope uses puppetry, clown, magic and music to explore what children and grown-ups have in common in terms of obsession, anxiety and uncertainty -- they also flirt shamelessly with the audience. www.doppelskope.com
Puppets, Lounge
Monday, February 20 at 6:00pm
Kate Brehm with Nick Jones
Fireside Puppet Chats
Tickets: FREE
Hosted by Kate Brehm with Nick Jones and Special Guest. Fireside Puppet Chats arose from the premise that puppeteers, people obsessed with visuality and performing objects, might have an interesting take on on other topics too! Don't miss our cozy February chat on TRANSHUMANISM (is this a creepy obsession like furries? would you get a biological implant? what makes us human?).
Monday, February 20 at 7:30pm
Tim Lagasse
Other Forms of Puppetry
Tickets: $12 (advance), $15 / $10 stu/sen (door)
Created and performed by Tim Lagasse with Jim Napolitano. Puppet master Lagasse will premiere a few original short works utilizing puppet styles both new and long forgotten. Shadow puppet master "Nappy" Napolitano will be his special guest. You will also have the privilege to experience Lagasse's famous lecture "What is better: Puppetry or Animation?" and see the premiere of his Bed Bug Circus! And please remember, just because it says "puppet" in the title, doesn't mean it's for f!@#ing children.
Wednesday, March 7 at 7:30pm
Laurie O'Brien / Erik Ehn
The Architecture of Great Cathedrals
Tickets: $12 (advance), $15 / $10 stu/sen (door)
Directed by Laurie O'Brien, written by Erik Ehn, sound design by Kari Rae Seekins. Puppeteered by James Simmons, Charlie Del Risco, Erik Lindley & Emily Oliveira. US policy in Guatemala from the point of view of a drunk prison executioner from Texas gone AWOL. Rory's on a spree, with second thoughts about industrialized killing, thinking he is free (out from under the shadow), but he discovers wide reaching entanglement. A brief and swirling adventure.
The Architecture of Great Cathedrals, one of the seventeen plays that make up The Soulographie Cycle, premiering at La MaMa in November 2012. Soulographie is a durational performance event composed of 17 plays by Erik Ehn which examine the 20th century as the age of genocide. It brings a sustained arc of writing, making manifest summed ideas on art and trauma, on dramatic poetry, poetics and social change, theatrical uses of time, and cooperative art making.
