PUTNEY — On the occasion of Sandglass Theater Company's 30th anniversary producing puppetry in Vermont this month, co-founders Eric and Ines Zeller Bass sat down with The Commons to reflect on their journey of three decades.
Sandglass is an internationally known theater company specializing in combining puppets with music, actors, and visual imagery. In its 60-seat renovated barn theater in Putney, Sandglass Theater produces works for both adult and youth audiences. The company's productions have toured 24 countries, performing in theaters, festivals, and cultural institutions, and winning numerous international prizes.
Eric has worked for 30 years as a director, playwright, performer, and mask and puppet maker. He served for five years on the board of the Network of Ensemble Theaters and in 2010 received the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Ines, who is the Director of Sandglass Theater's children's programs, collaborates with Eric on all of the theater's programming, works with local schoolchildren, and directs workshops and residencies for puppetry students. She is a UNIMA citation winner, and in 2010 received the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
On Sept. 10 and 11, Sandglass Theater will celebrate 30 years in Vermont with its annual Puppets in Paradise, two days of puppetry, food, and performance in the enchanted garden of landscape architects Gordon and Mary Hayward.
“Puppets and Paradise began as a fundraiser, but it has become our most beloved family event,” Eric says. “Join us in a walk through the gardens, enjoy the sight and aroma of herbs and flowers, taste great food and refreshments, and meet puppets, theater artists, and musicians.”
This year, Eric said Sandglass is especially excited to welcome back Curtiss Lee Mitchell, a globally-renowned artist from Orlando, Florida, who specializes in kites, puppetry, and lighting/projection design.
“As a special gift for our anniversary, Curtiss will be presenting a hand-crafted, original Sandglass kite, which will be for sale over the weekend as a fundraiser to Sandglass,” Eric says.
German roots
Sandglass Theater may now be very much a Vermont institution, but the company was founded and spent its first four years in Munich, Germany.
That was where Eric met and later married Ines, who has been performing with puppets since 1968, when she became a member of the Munich marionette theater, Kleines Speil. In 1978, she created her children's hand-puppet theater, Punschi, which has toured Europe and America.
“We established Sandglass in Munich because in those days we were working exclusively in Europe,” Eric says. “I had a French agent at the time who told me that for tax reasons the company had to be registered somewhere, so it was registered in New York in 1982.”
The Basses moved to Vermont in 1986. They had friends there, and Ines became enamored of the area.
The couple first worked out of their garage in Putney.
“We did not have a theater in those days,” Eric says. “so 98 percent of our work was on the road, mainly in Europe. No one in the area even knew what we did.”
When Eric and Ines decided they needed a bigger workspace than the garage, they found an old barn on Kimball Hill Road, which served them perfectly. The couple soon realized they could use it as a performing space too.
“We looked for a studio and found a theater,” Eric says.
In the beginning, Sandglass was just Eric and Ines.
“We collaborated with other organizations, and performers were brought in on a show by show basis,” Ines says. “Many of those came from pretty far away, such as Germany, where we knew a lot of people working with puppets. Those long distances made it very complicated to arrange things.”
“We were pretty naive choosing to live in Vermont,” Eric says. “A colleague in Germany moved from Frankfurt to be 20 minutes from the airport, and here we were moving to a place 2 1/2 hours from an international airport. We thought it wouldn't matter, but it made touring for us difficult and expensive. We had to overcome huge obstacles to get work.
“But ultimately we came to appreciate those difficulties. During the long ride home from Boston airport, we would be filled with joy crossing the border into Vermont, where there were no billboards or city lights. In some ways, those very obstacles that made work difficult also created things we love about life here.”
Growing pains
Sandglass may have relocated to Vermont, but after many years in the U.S., Eric and Ines found themselves still mainly performing in Europe.
“We had our connections there,” Eric explains. “We knew networks of puppeteers in Germany, France, Scandinavia, Spain, and Eastern Europe. We performed in East Germany too. Remember this was still the Soviet era, and we had a lot of border-crossing escapades. For instance, one time we quite easily went to perform in East Germany, but found it quite difficult to return to the west.”
Besides knowing people, Ines and Eric found that puppet theater itself was thriving in Europe more than in the U.S.
“The 1980s was a time when puppet festivals appeared all over Europe, springing up like wild mushrooms,” Eric says.
“Things seemed to move by self-propulsion,” Ines adds. “You would meet someone at a festival who would invite you to another festival or who knew a friend who would be very interested in what you did. Events were snowballing for us.”
“Agents were now interested in puppetry and suddenly we were also getting work through ours in France,” Eric says.
The puppet scene was very different in the U.S. The Basses found it much more difficult to find work here. However, things were starting to change.
“That time was the beginning of the light, you might say,” explains Eric. “Timing is everything. All who we are is the result of where we were at certain moments.”
“Frank W. Ballard started the first program of puppet arts at the University of Connecticut, but before that there was nothing,” Ines says. “I remember we were among Frank's first teachers in a small room.”
“Jim Henson initiated a puppet festival in the late 1980s at the Public Theater in New York which raised the profile of puppet theater in America,” Eric says.
The Basses still perform around the world, though they do perform in the U.S. much more than before.
“That all changed about four years ago, with 'D-Generation,' a piece which dealt with issues of Alzheimer's and dementia,” Eric explains. “With that work we traveled to parts of America we never had been before, places such as Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Montana. We really started to see this country in a new way.”
Fusion of genres
Increasingly, the work being developed at Sandglass hasn't been limited to puppetry, but has embraced the wider world of theater.
“We work with puppets and actors, using design and movement, all to create theater,” Eric says. “No longer do we think there is a significant difference between puppetry and other forms of theater.”
To consider puppetry an integral part of the theater scene is a relatively new concept in America.
“The first outsiders who caught on to the potential of puppets were set designers,” Eric says. “Choreographers suddenly were using puppets in their works. Dance has always been more inclusive of the arts. For choreographers, movement and imagery, that's dance. In fact, the first critics from The New York Times that reviewed puppet theater were its dance critics.”
American playwrights also soon began to use puppets in their work, often to evoke memories, or to portray young children, as in the recent acclaimed production of Puccini's “Madama Butterfly” at the Metropolitan Opera.
“In the early 1990s, there actually were editorials in American Theater Magazine swearing that puppets would never replace the actor,” laughs Eric. “It is an absurd contention, because puppets bring something very different to theater than live actors.”
Eric is pleased that, today, theater has evolved far beyond the defensiveness of 25 years ago.
“Theater now readily embraces many things,” he says. “Not only puppets, but such things as physical theater, and foreign theatrical traditions such as commedia dell'arte and the No Theater of Japan.”
Sandglass Theater has done its part in promoting puppetry in America through its Puppets in the Green Mountains festivals. Sandglass first tried out the idea in 1988 in a one-off collaboration with the Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center.
“Much later we rethought the idea and brought the festival back in 1997 in a new form,” Eric says. “The then-director of BMAC, Mara Williams, bought into our vision and added her own passion and enthusiasm. It was a tremendous partnership.”
Puppets in the Green Mountains changed Sandglass's relationship to the community.
“After the festival you would see things like puppets in store windows in downtown Brattleboro and, even early on, we got good audiences,” Eric says.
Puppet festivals weren't unheard of in the U.S. in those days, but besides the Henson festival at the Public, they were primarily aimed at puppeteers, rather like a convention where the artists could learn from each other.
“We wanted Puppets in the Green Mountains to be similar to the European model, where a festival was held for the people in its community,” Eric says. “We were delighted to see our neighbors embracing this art form through the festival.
In other ways too, the festival was a community event.
“Since we could not afford anything else, all of our artists were housed in homes of our friends, and they joined together in community meals. This was an eye opening experience for many, especially those performers coming from out of the country who harbored ideas about America that were not so wonderful. Here, they saw a remarkable community opening their arms to them, and this undercut a lot of prejudices they had about our country.”
Ines adds, “It was the special people in the towns in and around Brattleboro that made this work. Here was the right place for this event. Audiences are pretty amazing for this small rural community which is so open to the arts. When those foreign performers saw what it was like here, a lot of their minds were changed.”
Looking ahead
So what does the future hold for Sandglass?
Something special will happen Nov. 13 to 20, when Sandglass Theater joins forces with Next Stage Arts Project to present “Voices of Community: Art, Food, Shelter, Justice,” which will bring together artists, activists, and members of the community for a variety of events that address the need for the arts to be a powerful means for effecting social change.
The week has an overarching structure: progressing from how we listen to community stories, moving through how the community comes together around local needs, and culminating in the planning of forward-looking actions, all the time keeping theater practices as a core resource.
Sandglass Theater also is developing a new production, “Babylon,” a work in response to the rapidly escalating world crisis of refugees and asylum seekers.
Its premiere is still in the distant future.
“A piece like this takes around two years to create,” Ines says. “Of course, we do other things at the same time to make ends meet as we work on it.”
“Babylon” is noteworthy as the first time neither Eric nor Ines will perform in their own work. “We still are designing, directing and guiding the production, but we are leaving it to others to perform it,” Eric says.
As Eric and Ines step back, others are stepping forward. Two of their children, Shoshana Bass and Jana Zeller, have developed their own interest in puppetry and already are an integral part of Sandglass Theater. Both are puppeteers whose work has appeared at Sandglass, and both seem ready to take on roles of increasing leadership.
Whatever comes next, Eric and Ines feel pretty confident that Sandglass will be in good hands.