It helped me understand how puppetry and engineering are so deeply related.”īell has been exploring that relation in a variety of ways, including a BIMP Puppet Forum moderated by Mehdi Anwar, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the School of Engineering, with historians of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, who focused on the origin of the annual parade’s world-renown character balloons created by Tony Sarg. I realized puppetry is kind of the performance of technology or the performance of engineering. “I build things out of wood, paper, and plastics that move on the stage. Puppetry is always designing things and building things and making objects work and mechanisms to make objects work,” says Bell, an associate professor of puppetry and director of the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry (BIMP). ![]() ![]() This similar design process was reinforced for puppeteer and theater historian John Bell when he served from 2007-2011 as a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., first at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and then at the Program in Art, Culture and Technology, which bring together distinguished artist-thinkers to explore art’s complex relationship to culture and technology. CRT Technical Director Ed Weingart worked with Jordan Wolfson on the artist’s installation Colored Sculpture, a giant animatronic puppet. She happened on the arch and fought to get the library in there.Visitors to the Puppet Arts Complex at UConn’s Depot Campus will find that in addition to classrooms, offices, and performance rehearsal space, the largest area of the complex is the workshop where puppets in various stages of design, construction, and completion outnumber visitors, student puppeteers, and faculty.įabric, wood, wire, ping-pong balls, closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam – better known as Styrofoam – and other materials can be found in the Puppet Arts Workshop, along with saws, hammers, screwdrivers, and just about any other tool used on an episode of “This Old House” on PBS. Puppeteers make their puppets from a variety of materials based on how they want their puppets to move and perform, using a thought process much like engineers who develop designs for machines, objects, and structures like buildings and bridges. When George died, Linnihan took over the library. Her partner George was living in New York City so the collection started to take hold there. The Puppet Library began in Boston, where it “sort of drifted into experience,” says founder Sara Peattie, a puppeteer by training. But when the arch started leaking and the roof fell in, the museum needed to find a new home – one big enough to house the collection. Puppet shows would take place at the top of the arch interior. People never knew you could go inside.” There was a spiral staircase inside and visitors could wander freely to take in the museum. ![]() Until 2008, the museum was housed inside the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza, a place the Puppet Museum librarian Theresa Linnihan says was “a mysterious place. ![]() And it seems that no matter where it has been, The Puppet Library always finds itself in a rather hidden spot. The Puppet Library has been located here since 2008, in a space run by the Brooklyn College Community Partnership, an after school program but the Puppet Library itself does not have a website or a phone number.
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