PUTNEY — Jana Zeller grew up with two acclaimed puppeteers: her parents, Ines Zeller and Eric Bass, co-founders of Sandglass Theater.
So perhaps it's hardly surprising that she has had a lifelong fascination with that peculiar art form. Nonetheless, it took Jana quite a while to become a puppeteer.
“Initially I worked in the visual arts rather than the theater,” Zeller says. “But even then, more often than not, puppets found their way into my work.”
Zeller did not begin to create her own theater pieces with puppets until she took Sandglass's Summer Puppet Arts Training Intensive, a two-week workshop in Puppet Theater for puppeteers, teachers, actors, directors, designers, and writers who want to expand and deepen their skill and understanding in the art of the puppet.
“This course gave me the formal training in puppetry, and it inspired me to develop my own work,” she says.
On Oct. 24 and 25, at 7:30 p.m., as part of the New Visions puppetry series, Spybird Theater brings a newly revised version of Zeller's first theatrical puppet piece, “Egg Noir,” a highly visual and distinctly surreal exploration of genetic engineering, to Sandglass Theater.
Zeller, who lives in Brattleboro and works as an administrator at Sandglass, is the artistic director of Spybird Theater.
“Spybird Theater presents works inspired by the manually operated machines of the pre-internet and pre-technological world,” she says. “The pieces are devised using puppets, objects, and shadows to create a visual dramaturgy.”
Her rich background in visual arts, paired with a lifelong fascination with puppets, brings a highly visual and sculptural quality to her pieces.
Zeller says her current show “is a whimsical work which, as the title suggests, parodies film noir.”
The story concerns a mad scientist who breeds egg heads, a machine that turns them into eyeballs, and a poet in the desert who records their vision. All three are locked into a routine that produces a healthy eyeball.
Conflict arises when, one day, a villain infiltrates this world and modifies one of the freshly hatched eggs in the beginning of the production chain. What used to be a flawless sequence of events now gets messy, and the world of “Egg Noir” unravels, threatening to dissolve its inhabitants and their globe.
“In this piece, I use object-inspired puppets,” says Zeller. “For instance, the villainess is an egg, and she is getting a propeller. To the sound of a helicopter, she first appears on the scene, and this additional prop will increase the humor.”
Zeller pauses and then feels compelled to add, “Although the treatment of the story is humorous, ultimately 'Egg Noir' is a serious work. It ends with a surreal twist that puts a new perspective on all the preceding events.”
With “Egg Noir” at Sandglass, Zeller is revisiting a work she created 10 years ago. The original version was performed at Mexico's International Puppet Show, and work-in-progress versions were toured in Canada, Boston, and New York City.
Zeller does not believe that it is unusual for its creator to return to a finished work in puppetry.
“My father has been performing and revising a piece he first performed 35 years ago, 'Autumn Portraits,'” she says. “Another project for me and my sister Shoshana in the near future is to revise a children's program that was originally developed by Ines Zeller. It is very exciting to become a second generation of puppeteers furthering the work of our mother.”
Zeller explains that the first “Egg Noir” did not have a long run.
“After I finished it, I had two children and made other theater pieces. Therefore, the show got relegated to the back burner. In my most recent work, 'Eye of the Storm,' I felt I had learned a lot about puppet theater; and using what I now knew, I became excited about revisiting my first stage work.
“I found myself having fresh questions to ask about what I had been doing in 'Egg Noir.' Although I had considered the show a finished piece, I always felt that it needed more work. It initially only had a very short run and then was pulled out, so now I feel compelled to re-think the work through New Visions.”
Sandglass Theater's New Vision series is a laboratory for new works by artists in the field of puppetry and movement-based theater.
“Works are presented by New Visions either shortly after their premiere or at least when quite far along in development,” says Zeller. “So an audience sees a piece well after the work-in-progress stage.
“Works shown in New Visions are not raw, as you sometimes find in other performance laboratories. For instance, some of the work shown at Guilford's Vermont Performance Lab (VPL) can still be in its early creative process. If I recall right, sometimes these artists are invited back at a later date to perform their work when it has been more fully developed.”
Zeller says she wants to make it clear that she is in no way denigrating the shows at VPL.
“It's a great organization, which has a vision closely aligned to Sandglass, and in fact both theater organizations collaborated last month on spectacular, 'Cry You One,'” she adds.
A special feature of New Visions is that, after each performance, time is set aside for a moderated discussion about the show.
“Here you can find out how an audience has reacted to what it has seen,” Zeller says. “This might mean, for instance, that the artist may have to go back to revise the work to make something clearer, something elaborate or more concise.”
Zeller says that the revision of “Egg Noir” will be quite different from the work she presented in 2004. She believes that she has improved the dramatic content and fleshed out the plot connections.
“This is essential because my piece is strictly visual,” she says. “There is barely any dialogue, so the audience needs clearly to understand what is happening solely by what they see onstage. The after-performance discussion provided by New Visions will be crucial to me because I must know how well the audience understands the action.
“'Egg Noir' is to some degree open-ended - it leaves room for the audience's imagination to discover for themselves the significance of the piece - but I do not want people to be confused about what is occurring on stage.”
Although she wouldn't quite call the Sandglass performances a premiere of the revision, Zeller assures everyone that the work audiences will see at Sandglass is definitely a finished piece. She has been working on “Egg Noir” since August.
“At first each day a little bit here and there, but for the last two weeks, it has been solid work,” she says. ”But a creator knows that moment to call the piece finished. You can fiddle endlessly, yet there comes a time to stop.”
Looking ahead beyond these performance at Sandglass, Zeller hopes to be able to take “Egg Noir” on the road. “It is a very tourable piece,” she says. “The show is a solo performance that can fit into three suitcases. I can easily go anywhere.”