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PRODUCTION GRANTS ($7,000) | |
| Robin Frohardt (Brooklyn, NY)
THE PLASTIC BAG STORE
THE PLASTIC BAG STORE is a puppetry based immersive play that takes place in a storefront. It is a rich environment alive with puppets, actors and highly detailed sets. Drawing on themes of over consumption and the excess of waste created for the sake of convenience, THE PLASTIC BAG STORE is a tragi-comic ode to the foreverness of plastic. |
| Manual Cinema (Chicago, IL)
The Magic City
Loosely adapted from Edith Nesbit’s 1910 novel, The Magic City, uses overhead projectors, paper shadow puppets, live actors in silhouette, miniature toy theater, live feed cameras, and live music and songs. Philomena loves building miniature worlds out of books, toys, and other found objects from around her house. Philomena wakes up to discover that her minature city has come alive, and she and her stepbrother are drawn into an extraordinary adventure. Photo: Drew Dir |
| Oregon Symphony (Portland, OR)
Perséphone
The Oregon Symphony closes its 2016/17 season with a world premiere production of Igor Stravinsky’s hybrid work Perséphone with original puppetry and design by the famed Michael Curry. This unique concert experience will run May 13-15, 2017 in the historic Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, Oregon. Photo: Brud Giles |
| Ping Chong and Company (New York, NY)
ALAXSXA / ALASKA
ALAXSXA / ALASKA weaves puppetry, video installation, recorded interviews, and yuraq (Alaska Native Yup’ik drum and dance) in a collage of striking encounters between indigenous Alaska Native communities and newcomers to the Great Land. The title of the piece—an English translation of the Aluutiq indigenous word “Alaska”— serves as a metaphor for the personal and cultural clashes at its heart. Photo: Adam Nadel |
| Rogue Artists Ensemble (Los Angeles, CA)
Kaidan Project
Filled with playful tricksters, bloody haunts, and vengeful spirits, Rogue Artists Ensemble’s Kaidan Project is a multi-sensory theatre experience that brings the ghost stories of Japan to life. The final production will walk the streets of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, enacting the ancient game of Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (the telling of 100 ghost stories), opening the door between our world and the shadowside. Photo: Darlington Swink Photography |
| Sandglass Theater (Putney, VT)
Babylon
Babylon is a response to the rapidly escalating world crisis of refugees and asylum seekers. Through puppetry, testimony, and song, the piece looks at the relationship of refugees to their lost homelands, to their new homelands and languages, and to other migrants who might not be stateless, but who might also be fleeing violence and destruction. Photo: Kiqe Boch |
| Susan Simpson (Los Angeles, CA)
A Machine for Living
A Machine for Living is an original multi-media play combining puppetry and live cinema to create an intricate sensorial portrait of a mind pursuing order and artistic vision in a moment of disintegration. It explores the struggle to own and inhabit a creative impulse in the face of invisibility imposed by age and gender. |
| Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater / City Parks Foundation / Luca Veggetti (New York, NY)
Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas et Mélisande, a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, utilizes puppetry and dance to present the story of a doomed love triangle and explore the cosmic forces that determine people’s lives. CPF has commissioned Luca Veggetti to lead development of Maeterlinck’s play with Bruce Cannon, Artistic Director at the Swedish Cottage, and his team of puppeteers. |
| The Unitards (Brooklyn, NY)
Point Pleasant, The Legend of the Mothman
Point Pleasant tells the strange tale of the small town of Point Pleasant after four teenagers driving down a quiet country road encountered a winged specter with glowing red eyes. This would be the first of many sightings of the creature that would be dubbed the Mothman by local papers, which ushered in a year of terror, confusion and tragedy. Photo: Sandra Gunderson |
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| Alex & Olmsted (Takoma Park, MD)
Milo the Magnificent
Milo is an aspiring entertainer who uses Vaudeville-era music and suitcases to unpack his latest achievements in science and magic which don’t always go as planned. Photo: Kintz |
| Automata Arts / Janie Geiser (Los Angeles, CA)
Here/There
Here/There is a multidisciplinary puppet theater work that explores the liminal space between here and there—between home and combat, soldier and family, calm and terror, stasis and action, life and death. Developed by Janie Geiser with Jason Barlaan and Hsuan-Kuang, Here/There explores the body as the site of war, depository of memory, and vessel of scars. |
| Animal Cracker Conspiracy Puppet Company (San Diego, CA)
The Black Hen Society
Inspired by the first Russian children’s book, The Black Hen Society is a darkly humorous hybrid puppet performance. Blending secret societies, alchemy, and ecological disaster the piece charts the moral journey towards acquiring knowledge. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Blackspace / Tarish "Jeghetto" Pipkins (Durham, NC)
5P1N0K10
5P1N0K10 is an Afrofuturist Hip Hopera revisiting the classic tale of Pinnokio. It is a multi media experience of puppetry confronting current social issues in the inner cities of current America. Photo: J. Caldwell |
| Brian Brown (New York, NY)
Heimweh, Fernweh
“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” -Carson McCullers. Heimweh Fernweh is an ongoing experiment in breathing three-dimensional, kinetic life into the world of Brian Brown’s oil paintings. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Glass Half Full Theatre (Austin, TX)
Don Quixote de La Redo
Don Quixote de La Redo is an original adaptation set in an imagined future near the border between Texas and México, in a place that used to be called “Laredo.” A pair of drifters encounter the lost stories of Don Quixote and strive to “re-do” them with regrettable and hilarious consequences. Photo: Dannie Snyder |
| Nick Lehane (Brooklyn, NY)
Chimpanzee
An aging, isolated chimpanzee pieces together the fragments of her childhood raised with humans. Bleak reality bleeds to vivid memory in this non-verbal puppet play. Photo: Marika Kent |
| Rowan Magee (Brooklyn, NY)
No 1 Chinese
No 1 Chinese celebrates immigrants working in America, using puppetry, ensemble theater, and live music to illustrate the appearance and the invisibility of a family running a Chinese takeout restaurant. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Martin P. Robinson Productions (Redding, CT)
All Hallows Eve
ALL HALLOWS EVE… A dark, gothic, immersive theater Rock Opera following the journey of two disaffected kids through the trials and redemption of a particularly horrific Halloween night. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Nekaa Lab / Sachiyo Takahashi (Brooklyn, NY)
Everything Starts from a Dot
Inspired by a Wassily Kandinsky quote, Everything Starts from a Dot is an abstract journey of a humble dot told through a projection of miniature worlds and manipulation of large objects in live space. Through various encounters and a constantly shifting perspective and scale, the dot explores microscopic yet cosmic territories in itself and beyond. Photo: Richard Termine |
| Phantom Limb Company / Octopus Theatricals (Brooklyn, NY)
Falling Out
Falling Out is the final piece in Phantom Limb’s environmental trilogy, this time addressing Japan, water and Fukushima. This piece is an investigation into the meeting of Butoh and puppetry as an expression of our connection and loss to pure water and land. |
| Playwrights Horizons (New York, NY)
The Experiment
The Experiment by Lisa Kron, with puppetry by Dan Hurlin is a madcap romp about science that questions the notion of writing plays about science, featuring scientist characters portrayed as marionettes and other puppets. Illustration: Dan Hurlin |
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| Trouble Puppet Theater Company (Austin, TX)
The Bomb in Haymarket Square
The Bomb in Haymarket Square tells of a historical moment when political & commercial authorities used xenophobia & nationalism to repress the largely immigrant-led Labor Movement. With puppets & live music sing-a-longs of labor songs from the IWW, the show delivers an unabashed message of solidarity, equality, & justice for all. Photo: Chris Owen |
| Joseph Therrien (Brooklyn, NY)
Revolt of the Beavers
In 1937 The Federal Theater Project opened a 3 hour children’s musical starring 50 roller skating beavers fighting a violent class war. This version includes interludes from FTP director Hallie Flanagan’s passionate testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee complete with accordion and musical numbers. Photo: Lily Paulina |
| Karen Zasloff (Williamstown, MA)
Right of Admission Reserved
Right of Admission Reserved explores the dynamics between our own internal wiring and the physical and social spaces we inhabit. The work probes the “right of admission” to a foreign culture, and where ideals of integration and mobility collide with the entrenched economic and social structures left by apartheid. Devised in collaboration with South African artists, including acclaimed composer Neo Muyanga. |
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| Alchemists’ Workshop / Pat Picciano (Henniker, NH)
The Clown of God
The Clown of God is an original musical adaptation of the early European medieval tale that explores human creativity’s celebration of the Divine with wooden rod puppets and hand cranked puppets by Pat Picciano and using illustrations from Tomie dePaols’s book of the same name. |
| All Hands Productions (Decatur, GA)
The Pied Picker
When a group of party-hardy roaches threatens to disrupt the town of New Hamlin’s Founder’s Day celebration, banjo pickin’ Pied Peter comes to the rescue. However, it’s the town’s mayor who learns a valuable lesson when he refuses to “pay the picker.” |
| Chinese Theatre Works (Long Island City, NY)
Four Seasons
A collaborative production between Chinese Theatre Works and the Yangzhou Puppet Theater of China, Four Seasons fuses together classical Chinese poetry, music, dance, opera and puppetry with contemporary shadow theater technique. |
| First Stage (Milwaukee, WI)
Lovabye Dragon
From the Dragon and Girl series by award-winning author Barbara Joosse comes an enchanting new musical of an unexpected friendship between a lonely girl and an even lonelier dragon. Illustration: Brandon Kirkham |
| Mesner Puppet Theater (Kansas City, MO)
Hola!
Hola! follows the adventures of Isabella, a humble cook who wins a trip to Mexico on America’s 3rd favorite cooking show, Chef vs. Cook. Using her wits and her beloved Aunt Tia’s recipes, Isabella matches wits with a bumbling celebrity chef as they journey through Mexico, exploring the sites, sounds and citizens of a new culture. Photo: Claus Wawrzinek |
| MoonBull Studio (Cincinnati, OH)
How to Build a Flying Machine
How to Build a Flying Machine tells the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright as they dream, experiment, fail and succeed on their path to solving the problem of human flight. Told with bunraku puppets, live actors, mechanical objects, original music and a transforming set, this production will bring the Wright family’s story to life in inspiring new ways. |
| Miller Theatre at Columbia University (New York, NY)
The Bremen Town Band
Miller Theatre will develop a new production of The Bremen Town Band, pairing puppetry and live music, to be presented in May 2017. Lake Simons will design, direct, and choreograph the large-scale puppetry-based realization of this tale, working in close collaboration with composer Courtney Bryan. Photo: Kevin Alexander |
| Trusty Sidekick Theater Company (Astoria, NY)
CAMPFIRE
CAMPFIRE features puppets appearing as a variety of animals, birds – even a hot dog! These puppets engage the audience in a number of ways and help draw them into the magic created in the light of the campfire from which the play draws its name. Photo: Buatti Ramos Photography |
| Grand Pistachio - Liz Parker and Rachel Sullivan (New York, NY)
Layer the Walls
When modern day Nina peels away the tired layers of wallpaper in a Lower East Side tenement, she reveals the stories of three families who each made a life within the tiny rooms over 100 years ago. Puppet design and direction by Spica Wobbe. Photo: Hyphen Photography |
| Z Puppets Rosenschnoz (Minneapolis, MN)
Cellula
Cellula illuminates the true marvels of cell science inside us all with dazzling glow-in-the-dark puppetry & live accapella music. Cellula features highly-acclaimed improvisational vocalists Mankwe Ndosi & Libby Turner with the blacklight puppetry of award-winning performers Shari Aronson & Chris Griffith, directed by Kurt Hunter. Photo: Bruce Silcox |
