Becoming Modern Traces Puppetry's U.S. Evolution

Biographies of the 20th century puppeteers in the latest exhibition at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry roll off John Bell's tongue almost as easily as he recounts his own professional history.

Dan Hurlin is a dancer from New Hampshire who fell into puppetry through the post-modern dance world of the 1980s in New York City.

Los Angeles native Bob Baker grew up doing puppet shows for the kids in his neighborhood and went on to do stop-motion and live puppet animation in Hollywood.

Janie Geiser studied art at the University of Georgia and later worked at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta before moving to New York City and contributing a feminist perspective to the experimental theater scene in the late 20th century.

In an hour-long conversation, Bell, the Ballard Institute's director, ranges across decades of U.S. puppetry history, talking about how people like Basil Milovsoroff and Larry Reed tapped experiences with traditional Russian and Indonesian puppetry for their own projects here.

He shares that Charles Ludlam's work was a precursor to today's drag shows, and that Sandy Spieler's In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre seeks to connect the very Minneapolis neighborhoods where George Floyd and Renée Good were killed.

That's not to forget Peter Schumann, who started the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont in the early 1960s as an activist troupe and influenced the future of a young college student interested in acting but struggling on stage.

Yes, that English major who liked the idea of performing was Bell. He says he was taken by the "masks and puppets and pieces of cloth" the Bread and Puppet artists performed with and was a member of the group for 10 years before moving into academia in the Boston area before arriving at UConn.

"Sometimes I think puppetry is so ubiquitous it's become invisible," Bell says. "Puppetry and object performance and mask performance is all around us - just look at Jonathan the Husky at an athletic event. In political demonstrations, there are puppets. In advertising, there are puppets. The most successful film series of our time are filled with puppets: 'Star Wars,' 'Indiana Jones,' and 'Jurassic Park.'"

Evolution Into Serious Art

One wouldn't be wrong to suggest the Ballard Institute's latest exhibition, "Becoming Modern: U.S. Puppetry in the 20th Century," is an appropriate curatorial bow for Bell, who is retiring as the museum's director Sept. 1.

The show offers visitors the opportunity to muse on the morphing of live theater puppetry in this country from a place of entertainment into a house of art. It also gives Bell the chance to reflect on his influences and more than five decades of contributions.

Puppetry in North America dates to the religious ceremonies of Indigenous people who used masks and sculptures in their rituals, he explains. Only, because those objects didn't look like the traditional European hand, marionette, string, or shadow puppets, they weren't referred to as puppets until recently.

Those more common European styles arrived here as people crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries and brought with them the classic Punch and Judy shows they enjoyed at home. The 19th century brought technological advances like photography and mechanical performances to the world of puppetry, which spurred massive change throughout the 1900s, most notably filmmaking.

"By the early 20th century, people in the U.S. theater world wanted the same kind of deep theatrical tradition of Europe - Shakespeare in England, Moliere in France - because at that time in the U.S., we had mostly light entertainment. Broadway was just a lot of dancers."

Bell says there was an itch to develop the U.S. theater into a place of serious artmaking.

Dramatists Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell took the call, giving way to the likes of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Bell says. Puppetry followed the wave, seeking to shed its status here as low-class entertainment and build a reputation as an art form connected to the rich histories of China, Indonesia, and Japan.

Much of Exhibition is Being Donated

Among the work on display in "Becoming Modern" is an "Egyptian Tomb Scene" from Theodora Skipitares, who came into puppetry in the 1970s as an artist making small sculptures of herself, Bell says. As soon as movement was added to those sculptures, they entered the world of puppetry.

The tomb scene is from the show "Underground," he continues, in which Skipitares considers what life is like under the ground: average people in circa-1950 fallout shelters, radical activists who go off-the-grid, and, of course, Egyptians who buried their dead in elaborate ways.

"She did not train with a marionette performer or a traditional hand puppet performer, and instead put it together herself, not as an apprentice to an established puppeteer which is a global tradition, but coming at it from a different angle," he says of Skipitares.

That's in contrast to someone like Brad Brewer, who discovered puppetry as a young boy and cultivated that interest as a student at the Pratt Institute in New York City, later studying the craft under well-known puppeteers Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

His work, Bell says, centers on Black history, and in part features a group of crows, dubbed the Crowtations, that would deliver renditions of Motown music for passersby in New York City's Central Park. The Crowtations went on to tour nationally and internationally.

"Crowtations Toy Theater" is on display in "Becoming Modern," alongside Brewer's "Slave Auctioneer" from his show, "Lewis Latimer: Renaissance Man."

Bell says "Lewis Latimer" was a Smithsonian Institute-commissioned show about Latimer, a scientist who worked with Thomas Edison on the development of the lightbulb. In researching Latimer's story, Brewer learned that his mother was a slave who escaped to the north with her husband and Latimer's father, a free Black man.

Brewer urged the Smithsonian, Bell continues, to include the detail in the show, thus was born the part of "Slave Auctioneer."

These and most of the other puppets in "Becoming Modern" are in various stages of being donated to the Ballard Institute, Bell says, to augment the museum's collection, which already is in the thousands. That's why works from Frank Ballard – himself a significant contributor to 20th century puppetry – aren't in the show: much of his work already belongs to the museum.

"UConn is a center of puppetry, and our students are doing amazing work to reinvent their puppetry for television and live theater to express ideas and experiences happening today," Bell says. "They're part of this recent history of people from decades ago who also thought about how puppetry can respond to contemporary situations."

People like Eric Bass considered the stages of a woman's life in his feminist-forward show "Sand," while Robert Anton used his skills as a theater designer to create small puppets from his miniature models, going on to perform experimental puppetry in New York and Europe in the 1970s.

Amy Trompetter worked with the activist Bread and Puppet Theater before breaking out on her own with the Redwing Blackbird Theater and showcasing her version of the opera, "The Barber of Seville."

Puppeteers Zuni Maud and Nat Norbert Buchholz brought puppetry to the Yiddish community in New York City, producing first-of-its-kind work that examined the life of Jews.

A far cry from light entertainment.

Creating Character and a Career

Bell says he became interested in puppetry as a college student when he saw a Bread and Puppet Theater performance, which at the time was offering shows in protest of the Vietnam War. Because he was interested in acting but didn't feel wholly comfortable doing it, performing through another medium was attractive.

"Acting was very much inner focused," he says. "You were supposed to look into your inner experience and come up with emotion memory. With Bread and Puppet, it was about working with these masks and puppets and pieces of cloth. I liked the idea of working with the outside world and not only within me to create a character."

From 1975 to 1985, Bell was a member of the troupe, touring Europe and meeting his eventual wife, Trudi Cohen, from among its ranks. In the mid-1970s, he says, Bread and Puppet settled in Glover, Vermont, on a farm and in a circa-1860s barn.

That's where Bell got his first taste of what working in a museum might be like, he says.

Inside that architecturally beautiful structure, the troupe constructed a do-it-yourself museum and organized the two-day festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, that featured a puppet circus, sideshows, and pageants, he says.

During a sabbatical from Bread and Puppet years later, Bell says he headed to graduate school at Columbia University to learn about puppet theater history in places like Italy, North Africa, and Poland, places he'd visited with Bread and Puppet.

"At the time, there wasn't much puppet theater history being offered, but the first theater professor in the United States was at Columbia and he was interested in puppets," Bell says. "So, I pieced together my own version of puppetry studies as part of my doctoral work and then tried, for better or worse, to be a professor."

He worked at Emerson College for a bit before learning about a new initiative at UConn to honor Frank Ballard with an institute and museum. Bell successfully applied for the then-part time position of director, filling the rest of his worktime with a fellowship at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. After five years, Bell came on at UConn full time as institute director and associate professor in the dramatic arts department's Puppet Arts program.

"We moved to this location in Downtown Storrs in 2014 and created the position that Emily Wicks now holds of manager of operations and collections," he says of the museum. "She and I have done over 30 exhibitions here. We also started doing puppet slams, puppet forums to talk about the history and practice of puppetry, regular performances in our wonderful theater here, and connected with Mansfield to take part in Celebrate Mansfield.

"I tried to bring the UConn community and general public into the world of puppetry and expose people to what's out there, what's coming up, and why puppetry has been so important for so many cultures over many centuries," he continues. "Helping people to see puppetry's richness in history is interesting to me. I hope that's continued somehow in work at the Ballard Institute."

"Becoming Modern: U.S. Puppetry in the 20th Century" is on display through October at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Downtown Storrs.