PUTNEY — On Friday, Oct. 10, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 12, at 3 p.m., six artists at Sandglass Theater will share the mystique and low-tech charm of pairing song and story with scrolling pictures.
With a serenade of ballads, stories, comic songs, and original compositions, the team of Eric Bass and Ines Zeller Bass, Amanda Maddock, Kirk Murphy, Anna Patton, and Brendan Taaffe will present an assortment of beautifully handcrafted “crankies” for your delight and entertainment.
As Sandglass explains in its program announcement, crankies are scrolling illustrations wound inside wooden boxes and hand-cranked so that the images move across a viewing screen.
Once called “moving panoramas,” crankies were as close as it got to films in the early 19th century. Now they're enjoying a revival nationwide, appearing in circuses, music events and puppet theaters.
In this show, Taaffe will perform three cut-paper crankies: “When the World Comes to An End,” a haunting depiction of a traditional camp meeting song; “Gum Tree Canoe,” a magical rendition of a traditional minstrel song; and “You Raise The Hawk,” which brings together Taaffe's stark paper imagery with the poetry of Maurice Manning.
Taaffe will also sing a song from his recent album, “Can't Hold The Wheel.”
Patton, a musician, composer, and crankie creator, arrived at crankie-making through the love of combining music with visual storytelling. Sandglass says she “jumps at the chance to be involved in theatrical and multimedia collaborations whenever possible amid her touring schedule with the dance band Elixir and other groups.”
Patton composed the score and recorded the soundtrack for Spybird Theater's production “The Eye of the Storm,” which debuted at Sandglass Theater's International Festival of Puppet Theater in 2012.
Patton's crankie, “Interferon,” is part of her longer work-in-progress theater piece based on the work of Czech poet/immunologist Miroslav Holub, who, as Sandglass notes, “was fascinated by public displays of futility - a car accident, a beached whale, a doomed helium balloon - because of the hush that falls on the spectators, the sense of theatrical significance, and the way that 'entropy is abjured for the moment.'”
Always as much a scientist as poet, Holub drew a parallel between this phenomenon and the effect of interferon on human cells (thus the title of the crankie.) The crankie art was created in collaboration with Anna's brother, Ben Patton.
Representing the Sandglass company, Murphy and Maddock will debut “Huey,” “a ridiculous survival story featuring dancing chickens, singing crickets, and threats that lurk in all the darkest places.”
Murphy has been a company member at Sandglass Theater since 2006. He is a puppeteer and musician “and an amateur chicken herder.”
Maddock, fresh off a five-month tour in China, has trained extensively with Sandglass Theater. She is a puppet artist from New York City (and is now based in Vermont).
Eric and Ines Zeller Bass, co-directors of Sandglass Theater, will present “Au Bois Marguerite,” which charmed audiences at Puppets in Paradise in September 2013. The show is “a delightful rendition of a French Canadian comic song about a young woman who falls asleep in the woods and finds her true (if somewhat imperfect) love,” Sandglass says.
The couple also will perform “Three Little Fishies,” which Sandglass describes as “a dark take on the 1939 novelty song in which three little fish swim out of their pond to discover the real - and scary - world. This will be their first formal showing of this newest crankie.”