Tag Archives: Brookland Artspace

Preview: Puppet Lobby #6

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The dinosaurs are coming! We are thrilled to be welcoming not one, not two, but THREE fabulous puppet builders to our first Puppet Lobby of the fall. What do they have in common? They’ve all built dinosaur puppets, for very different projects. Francisco Benavides created a mammoth for an immersive theater experience in Baltimore, Matt McGee built a family of dinosaurs for the American classic The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, and Ingrid Crepeau invented a whole cast of different dinos for her popular children’s show DinoRock. The Puppet Lobby is free and open to everyone and starts at 8:00pm on Monday, October 15 at the Brookland Artspace Lofts’ Selman Gallery.  Come hear about these puppeteers and their research process, designs, successes and failures as they created these prehistoric creatures!

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Ingrid Crepeau models one of her dino heads with Michele Valeri.

Preview: Puppet Lobby #2

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By Cecilia Cackley

Our next Puppet Lobby event is scheduled for Monday, November 6 at 7pm. We hope you’ll join us at the Brookland Artspace Lofts for some great conversation and community-building. We are excited to start talking about a subject our company has been interested in from the beginning–stop-motion animation using puppets. 

Stop-motion animation has a long history of artists using puppets very effectively from Jan Svankmajer to the Brothers Quay. At the Puppet Lobby we will hear from local artists Hamida Khatri and Noa Heyne about their experiences studying stop-motion at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). 

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Art installation by Hamida Khatri

Hamida Khatri works in a variety of mediums — from figurative drawings, to photography, to sculptural puppets, to animation. As well as an artist, she is also a writer, curator, arts educator, community activist, and a creative arts therapist. We were lucky enough to screen her stop-motion short film, Mom & Me as part of our Puppet SlamNation back in September. 

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Sculpture by Noa Heyne.

Noa Heyne holds an MFA in Sculpture from MICA and has also studied in New York, Italy and Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and she will have an installation in CulturalDC’s Space4 mobile gallery next year. 

In addition to a presentation on stop-motion animation, this Puppet Lobby will also include a conversation between Cecilia Cackley and Nina Budabin McQuown, both Wit’s End Puppets company members, about the challenges of writing plays specifically for puppets. Whether you are a puppeteer yourself or an eager audience member, the Puppet Lobby will give you a chance to ask questions, meet artists and find out more about this infinitely varied art form. See you on November 6th! 

 

Announcing The Puppet Lobby!

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In comparison to other art forms, the puppetry world is quite small. There aren’t hundreds of museums devoted to it, or dozens of performance spaces presenting it nearly every week of the year. Many puppeteers work solo, and only see their fellow puppet artists at festivals–when they have the resources and time to travel.

In an effort to foster community and knowledge, we have decided to try and create a regular space for puppeteers to gather and learn from each other in Washington, DC. We are calling this series of conversations The Puppet Lobby, as they will take place in the Selman Gallery that is the lobby of the Brookland Artspace Lofts. Our first conversation will be Monday, September 18 at 7pm and we hope you will join us for what is sure to be a fun, informative evening.

We have two great speakers for this first edition of The Puppet Lobby; master puppeteer Ingrid Crepeau and our own Genna Beth Davidson. Ingrid is a longtime resident of the Washington area and has built puppets for a wide variety of theaters including her own children’s theater company DinoRock. On Monday she will speak about building body puppets and mascots, an expertise she provides to just about every professional DC sports team. For more about Ingrid Crepeau, this Washington Post article is a great read. Genna Beth will be talking about Selkie, the main puppet in the second part of our work-in-progress show Malevolent Creatures. Selkie is a character who has to change between being human and being a seal, and Genna Beth is in the midst of figuring out how to make that happen.