The Puppeteers (or Puppeteers') Cooperative is an association of puppeteers, musicians, dancers, and singers, working to form community bonds through the medium of puppets, parades, and pageants. [1] [2] It is an extremely loose affiliation - there is no membership as such, so that people are sometimes surprised to find themselves belonging to the group without having joined it.
The Puppeteers Cooperative was formed in San Francisco in 1976 [3] by George Konnoff [4] and Sara Peattie, two puppeteers formerly with the Bread and Puppet Theater. [1] It was incorporated as a non-profit in Massachusetts in 1994. [5] In 1993, Teresa Linnihan, [6] then the director of the Newburyport Children's Theater at Maudslay State Park, [7] [8] joined in about 1997. George Konnoff died in 2001. [4]
The Puppeteers Cooperative is known for its community outreach and education. The Cooperative has giant puppet pageants, [9] community workshops [10] that stress community involvement, and Free Puppet Lending Libraries [6] [11] [12] that make giant puppets available to the general public. It publishes an educational booklet called "68 Ways to Make Really Big Puppets: A Patternbook of Parades and Pageants," [13] web pages, [14] [15] and videos, all of which share ways of making giant puppets and spectacles from simple techniques and everyday materials. As well as the Lending Libraries, the group includes The Back Alley Puppet Theater, which does pageants, parades, and puppet dances in the Boston area; [16] The Construction Section, giant puppet makers; [17] Hi-Art Productions, video makers; [18] and Puppaganda, which performs short and small news shows.
Puppetry is a form of theatre or performance that involves the manipulation of puppets – inanimate objects, often resembling some type of human or animal figure, that are animated or manipulated by a human called a puppeteer. Such a performance is also known as a puppet production. The script for a puppet production is called a puppet play. Puppeteers use movements from hands and arms to control devices such as rods or strings to move the body, head, limbs, and in some cases the mouth and eyes of the puppet. The puppeteer sometimes speaks in the voice of the character of the puppet, while at other times they perform to a recorded soundtrack.
The Bread and Puppet Theater is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, based in Glover, Vermont as of January 2020. The theater was co-founded by Elka and Peter Schumann. Schumann is the artistic director.
The Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade held on the night of Halloween, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. The parade, initiated on October 31, 1974 by Greenwich Village puppeteer and mask maker Ralph Lee, is the world's largest Halloween parade and the only major nighttime parade in the United States. The parade reports itself to have 50,000 "costumed participants" and 2 million spectators. The parade has its roots in New York's queer community.
Jeanne Fleming is an American Celebration Artist from New York City, who organized the Harbor Festival Fair in 1986, the Official Land Celebration for the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty and who is currently director of New York's Village Halloween Parade.
Sophia Michahelles is one of the two chief artists and puppeteers of Processional Arts Workshop, makers of pageant puppets and other processional art in upstate New York. She works closely with co-director Alex Kahn. The couple's work, under the informal moniker "Superior Concept Monsters" has been commissioned each year since 1998 to lead New York's Village Halloween Parade, the largest puppet parade and street-pageant of its kind in the United States, drawing two million spectators.
In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre is a puppet company and nonprofit organization from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The company has written and performed scores of full-length puppet plays, performed throughout the US, Canada, Korea, and Haiti and toured the Mississippi River from end to end. The theatre is best known for sponsoring the annual May Day Parade and Ceremony that is seen by as many as 50,000 people each year.
The Center for Puppetry Arts, located in Atlanta, is the United States' largest organization dedicated to the art form of puppetry. The center focuses on three areas: performance, education and museum. It is one of the few puppet museums in the world. The center is located in Midtown, the city's arts district. It was founded in 1978 by Vincent Anthony.
Spiral Q Puppet Theater is a puppet troupe founded in 1995 by Matthew "Mattyboy" Hart in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After traveling the country, Hart was inspired by the street performance work of the Radical Faeries and the Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. On his return to Philadelphia, Hart founded Spiral Q as a way to use his new interest in puppetry, street theatre and pageantry to promote social and political change.
Alex Kahn is an American visual/performance artist and co-founder of the arts ensemble Processional Arts Workshop. He is most widely known for his creation of the large-scale puppet performance works that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade each year.
A puppet is an object, often resembling a human, animal or mythical figure, that is animated or manipulated by a person called a puppeteer. Puppetry is an ancient form of theatre which dates back to the 5th century BC in Ancient Greece.
Processional Arts Workshop (PAW) is an ensemble of performing artists and theatrical technicians founded in 1998, devoted to pageant puppetry and processional art. They are also known by the name Superior Concept Monsters (SCM). They are best known for creating the large-scale puppet performances that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade.
Great Small Works is a performance collective founded in New York City in 1995. Its six founding members—John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, and Mark Sussman—draw on avant-garde, folk, and popular theater traditions to address contemporary social issues in a various scales, from tiny toy theater spectacles to giant puppet pageants.
Puppet Showplace Theater is a nonprofit puppet theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. The organization was founded in June 1974 by Mary Churchill. Since 1981, it has been located at 32 Station Street. The theater presents performances by local and traveling professional puppet companies.
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry (BIMP) is a public museum of puppetry operated by the University of Connecticut and located in Storrs, Connecticut.
Randal John Metz is a professional puppeteer and variety/stage performer. He is known for creating puppet productions, and puppet performer for Children’s Fairyland’s Open Storybook Puppet Theater in Oakland, California, the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States. He currently produces seven different puppet shows a year for the theater, and tours his shows throughout California under the name The Puppet Company. He has served several terms as President and Vice-President of the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.
Mary Phipps Putnam Churchill was an American puppeteer, educator, and entrepreneur. Her puppet troupe, The Cranberry Puppets, entertained children for 25 years with witty feminist adaptations of folktales. Churchill was founder and director of Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Paul Vincent Davis is an American puppeteer. For over 30 years, he served as Artist in Residence at Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. In the 1980s, UNIMA-USA awarded Davis five Citations of Excellence for his work.
Animal Cracker Conspiracy Puppet Company, or Animal Cracker Conspiracy (ACC), is a contemporary hybrid puppet company co-founded by Iain Gunn and Bridget Rountree that is invested in pushing the boundaries of kinetic performance, creating performances that "decenter expectations, open new avenues of thought, and invoke the uncanny." Their ongoing practice is based on a shared interest and exploration of where fine art, puppetry, performance art, circus, dance, film, and mixed media intersect. They perform nationally and internationally out of a multiplicity of venues such as La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, where the company resides. ACC specializes in inclusive multimedia performances that encourage difficult discussions and foster community through local theater, Street Parades, and national tours.
A giant puppet is a puppet which is tall enough to be easily visible to a street crowd while being manipulated by puppeteers, on the same level. It is therefore most suitable for processions, street theatre and performance art, although some large theatrical animations can be used for the same purpose. Giant puppets are usually articulated and made from a lightweight material. Some are manipulated by puppeteers using rods, strings, stilts, other mechanisms, or a combination of these. Giant puppets have been used worldwide for street entertainment, celebrations or other purposes from ancient times, and they continue in use and in development today. Of the traditional giant rod puppets, the Chinese dragon New Year puppet is "perhaps the most recognized form of the parade puppet". Of the most recent examples, Royal de Luxe of France has produced a notable set of giant string puppets.
Paperhand Puppet Intervention is a puppet theatre company based in Saxapahaw, North Carolina and founded in 1998 by Donovan Zimmerman and Jan Burger. Frequently performing outdoors, the group performs original stories inspired by the relationship between the natural world and humanity. The stories include messages of social commentary and activism especially regarding conservation and race.