PUTNEY-This week, Sandglass Theater presents the 12th edition of the Puppets in the Green Mountains (PGM) international festival. Local and international artists and community leaders bring to life this year's theme "Just Around the Bend."
Organizers say the festival "celebrates the thriving art of puppet theater as a means of enhancing perspectives, generating compassion, and celebrating the human spirit."
The festival offers family shows, shows for adults, and workshops and forum discussions, all in and around the Brattleboro area. Venues include the New England Youth Theatre, Latchis Theatre, Hilltop Montessori School Theater, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 118 Elliot, Next Stage Arts, and Sandglass Theater.
What began 28 years ago as a homegrown event to present unique and inspiring puppet theater from around the world now welcomes thousands of participants. This year's festival will include artists from Germany, Spain, Canada, Puerto Rico, and across the U.S., and a world premiere of a new Sandglass production.
"Puppet theater is unique in its ability to give audiences a focused lens through which to reflect and explore what is 'Just Around the Bend' as we navigate evolving technologies and strive to honor living/embodied knowledge," said organizers in a news release. "The festival offers meaningful engagement for any theater lover, maker, educator, or those looking for art that examines our roles and responsibilities in this world."
As described by Sandglass, renowned companies from around the world will offer glimpses into their relationships with objects, technologies, and memory through an expert sense of play and performance.
Working closely with regional leaders, the theater will presents a program that its leaders say "goes beyond the stage and aims to foster meaningful conversation around these performances and the themes they address."
This year's program (with descriptions/reviews provided by Sandglass) includes:
• Feral - A new ensemble piece by Sandglass Theater will have its world premiere at PGM. This piece centers the frightening and humorous struggle between intuitive wildness and the domestication of women captured by an allegorical transformation into a werewolf.
• Marooned! A Space Comedy - Created by Alex and Olmsted Company from Baltimore, Maryland, this innovative and whimsical sci-fi puppet show takes place at the outer reaches of space and follows the survival of an astronaut on an uncharted planet.
• Bois (Woods) - A mystical children's show, created by Puzzle Théâter from Quebec, in which all of the puppets are made from tree roots and branches, awakening ways in which a forest can come alive.
• A Chance Shadow - Created by Double Image Theater Lab, this poetic play is inspired by the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo and the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. By using beautifully crafted pop-up scenery, shadow theater, toy theater and poetry, the show brings the audience into the poets' lyrical and historical worlds.
• Free as a Robot - Created by FAB-Theater from Germany, the "Behavioral Research Department" invites audiences to become part of an investigation of the relationship between robots and humans and the exciting experiments involving robots, puppets, and people.
• The Road of Useless Splendor - Presented by Maskhunt Motions and Deborah Hunt from Puerto Rico, this piece follows two Travelers, mad alchemists from another time. Their knitted meandering road leads them to the Book, whose pages spring to life and are populated by strange characters, artifacts, and objects to tell its absurd and tender tale.
• Things Easily Forgotten - Created by Xavier Bobés, this show for five people at a time is about the history of Spain in the second half of the 20th century. Around a small table, in an intimate, salon setting, a powerful sequence of close-up sensory experiences invokes a fascinating story exploring memory and identity. Like a magician, or medium at a séance, Bobés manipulates both past and future.
• The Doubtful Sprout - Created by A Couple of Puppets (Long Island). This underground puppet adventure features Worm and Sprout as they discover the mysterious life found inside soil. Along the way, kids help figure out the secrets that help Sprout grow. Award-winning puppeteer Liz Joyce brings this ecological wonderland to life with multiple puppetry styles, projections and songs.
All venues in the Puppets in the Green Mountains festival are wheelchair-accessible. Assistance can be provided for priority seating and parking.
Two of the performances, The Doubtful Sprout and Feral, will be offered with ASL interpretation.
Sandglass welcomes people of all abilities and strives to provide programming that is inclusive and accessible to all.
For more information, visit puppetsinthegreenmountains.net.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.