About This Show

The popular Dixon Place annual program, Puppet BloK, presents groundbreaking new and developing works of puppet theater and features artists working in myriad forms including Shadow Puppetry, Object Theater, Bunraku, Hand and Rod, Toy Theater, Kurama Ningyo, Marionettes, Stop Motion Animation, finger to full-size puppets, and more!

 

Please! by Felicia Cooper

An excerpt of an evening-length performance using puppetry, miniatures, and new media, the script erects a modern Woyzeck, updated & befitting new conscriptions of power. As a cam girl, the New Woyzeck is both the object & subject of desire, pleasure, and purview. Using multimedia elements including puppetry & projection to adapt a nearly 200-year-old play, Please! extrapolates on the human condition’s unchanging imbalance of power in a class struggle.

Felicia Cooper is a Minneapolis-based artist. Her work has been seen at LaMama’s Puppet Festival, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, In the Heart of the Beast Theater, and more. Her work has been supported by The Jerome Foundation, National Humanities Center, Connecticut Sea Grant, Heinz Foundation, Pennsylvania State Arts Board, and others. She’s held artistic residencies with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, The Bell Museum, Winterthur Museum and Gardens, New Hazlett Theater, and others. She holds an MFA from the University of Connecticut. Go Huskies.

Photo Credit: Nicole Neri

 

time travels by max

An ode to dusk. An ode to dawn. Explorations of these times of sideways light emerge from heightened senses & old suitcases. Part of a longer work that travels in time with time. With text inspired by words from Diane Ackerman & Jay Griffiths, among others, and images from medieval books of hours, views from hills, and sightings from windows, time travels contemplates the folding & unfolding of the hinge times of dawn & dusk.

Max co-creates with and within ecologies of intimacy, vulnerability, reciprocity and play; through puppetry, design, performance & direction; ever curious about the patterns & potentials of holding, beholding, tenderness & tending – in ongoing conversation with cardboard, string, shadow, weather, glass, papier mâché, moss, metal, leaves & light. Original works include under the weather, a glimmer, for now, killing mom, sweet meat, on the ether: stories of flight, see things through, the sand child, a flutter, and apple steep.

Credits: Photo Credit to threadbare and thrum; more-than-human collaborators: time, books, glue, paint, paper, patience, presence and string & cardboard

Rainbow Magic by BreakFAST Puppets

CRAZY HARD STUFF (the clown) is fed UP with the world and everything is going wrong. Thankfully, her friend, Rainbow Magic, an inter-dimensional tarantula, is here to teach us all telepathy. But Crazy Hard Stuff can’t understand her so she uses the audience to help her translate.

Anthony Sellitto-Budney is a puppeteer and clown with a BFA from UConn’s Puppet Arts program. She has been an Emerging Artist at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, part of the New Orleans Giant puppet fest, the Asheville Fringe, Atlanta Fringe, and has been consistently touring the East Coast from Montreal to New Orleans since the summer of 2024. They have a variety of long form shows for children and adults and are a busker.

Credits: Anthony Sellitto-Budney, sole puppeteer and creator, Photo Credit to Sam Raywood

 

An Extract from The City That Slept by Tom Tuke

The City That Slept is a portrait of New York City, told through the voices of people talking about their dreams. Over two weekends in 2024, Tom Tuke recorded a series of interviews in Union Square, asking about people’s dreams and wondering what the city would look like if it ever did fall asleep. We see these dreams through a unique blend of water and shadow puppetry, developed during Tuke’s studies at the UConn Puppet Arts Program.

Tom Tuke is a puppeteer and visual artist from Aotearoa/New Zealand. He stumbled across puppetry in 2018, as a high school teacher in the remote town of Hokitika. As his class got sick of making driftwood marionettes, Tuke did not, and since then he has made a travelling marionette show, performing throughout New Zealand. In 2022, Tuke joined the University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts Program, and gained a grounding in many forms of puppetry. He attended the National Puppetry Conference in 2023, and has spent summers volunteering with Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont.

Credits: 

Puppeteer: Tom Tuke

Photo Credit: Richard Termine

 

Tuesday June 10: Maria Camia; William PK Carter; Charlotte Lily Gaspard & Ash Winkfield; Shabbi Sharifi
Curated by Ash Winkfield