![]() 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. ![]() 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.
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