BRATTLEBORO — If your knowledge of puppetry goes as far as Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Muppets and Lamb Chop, prepare to have your mind blown.
Puppets in the Green Mountains, a biennial 11-day festival, continues through Sept. 26. Eric Bass, who founded Sandglass Theater with his wife Ines in 1982, promises plenty of interesting performances from a variety of puppeteers.
“I am the artistic director of the festival,” Bass said. “It's my job to find the companies, to make the selection of who will perform, and to fit each company into a performing space that will work for them and for their show. I look at each space through the eyes of the performers and understand how their show will play there. I look at the festival programming as a whole and make sure there is a balance of work: work for families and for adults, work that includes a range of styles and emotional qualities, [as well as] work that represents a diversity of cultures.”
So what does the Puppet Festival board look for when selecting the biannual line-up?
“We look for a certain number of shows for family audiences, at least one for the very young, a certain number for adult audiences, and one large event to open the festival,” Bass said. “We have to match shows with the venues that we have in which to present the work. We [also] have to look at the technical requirements of each group, as well as the size of the audience they can play for.”
“The festival is every two years, which gives us time to see work between festivals and decide which groups we want to invite,” Bass added. “After we make the invitations, then the question of availability arises. But first and foremost, we have to be excited about having the company come to perform in our community.”
This year, for the first time, PITGM is featuring mostly American artists.
“There are so many wonderful artists in the United States that we feel our audiences should have a chance to meet them, and these artists should also be here meeting their international colleagues. So this year, about half the performers are American, including Blair Thomas from Chicago, Paul Mesner from Kansas City, Larry Hunt's 'Masque Theater' from Connecticut, and Heather Henson from Orlando.”
Henson - daughter of the Muppets legendary creator, Jim Henson - performed a family-friendly (but Muppet-free) piece of her own creation, a puppet, dance, and multi-media piece, Panther and Crane to open the festival
Bass lists his personal favorite puppeteers as Thomas, Mesner and Larry Hunt.
“Blair Thomas is probably my favorite American puppeteer for adult audiences. His range is incredible in his styles, his versatility, and his emotional spectrum. Paul Mesner is one of the funniest people working in American puppet theater. Larry Hunt is a great favorite of mine and of our local audiences. He has performed selected mask pieces in the Hayward Gardens Puppets in Paradise event that we do on alternate years (when it isn't a festival year). It's great to have him here for a full show - and his rapport with family audiences is great.”
Festival-goers should bear in mind, however, that these are not all family-friendly shows. Productions such as the Spanish company Tabola Rasa's Moliere's 'The Miser,' Company Akselere's dark coming-of-age version of Sleeping Beauty and Blair Thomas' Heard-Headed Heart are strictly for adult audiences.
Children are welcome to enjoy Paul Mesner's re-telling of the Three Little Pigs (“As Told By A. Wolf,”) as well as his take on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.
Forewarned, all puppet-lovers - and those curious about puppetry - are encouraged to attend whichever productions they wish.
Bass points out that the festival aims to celebrate puppetry's anthropomorphic effect on the audience.
“Puppets are magically irresistible not just because they appeal to the child in all of us, but, perhaps even more, because in their witty abstraction of real life they can summon a culture's deepest hopes and fears and dreams,” Bass recently told the Valley Advocate. “In the right hands, a puppet becomes almost human-the all-but-breathing extension of a flesh-and-blood person.”
Bass says that the most enjoyable part of the festival is being able to present the performers and introduce them to the Brattleboro community.
“I love to see Vermont through their eyes, to introduce them to the community,” he said. “And I love to talk with the audiences about the shows they are seeing. These performers are coming from far away, playing unusual theater. They are some of the best puppet artists in the world. I just love to see the interaction with our community. And, quite frankly, I love to have the opportunity to see their work again myself.”