{"id":108190,"date":"2016-01-08T10:13:03","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T15:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu?p=108190&preview_id=108190"},"modified":"2016-06-14T14:56:27","modified_gmt":"2016-06-14T18:56:27","slug":"dreams-tinged-with-history-in-sandglass-theater-exhibitl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/01\/dreams-tinged-with-history-in-sandglass-theater-exhibitl\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreams Tinged with History in Sandglass Theater Exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two of the most celebrated practitioners of the art of modern puppetry are Eric Bass and Ines Zeller Bass, whose three decades of innovative performance are now on display\u00a0at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in \u201cFrom Thought to Image: 30 Years of Sandglass Theater<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vermont-based Sandglass Theater was launched in 1982, following the couple’s initial collaborations after meeting at a puppetry festival in Germany. In the years since, their work has been recognized six times with the Citation of Excellence from the American Center of the Union Internationale de la Marionette (UNIMA-USA), the highest honor in American puppetry.<\/p>\n

\u201cEric and Ines look upon puppetry in terms of its history around the world as a mature art form,\u201d says John Bell, director of BIMP, associate professor of puppetry in the Department of Dramatic Arts and a historian of puppet arts. \u201cAs this exhibition demonstrates, they\u2019ve gone into a lot of different areas. You\u2019ve got this fascinating mix of different materials to make shows that are always getting at ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"'All<\/a>
‘All Weather Ballads’ (Sandglass Theater). (Ken Best\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"'All<\/a>
‘All Weather Ballads’ (Sandglass Theater). (Richard Termine \u201978 MFA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bell says Sandglass productions center on themes such as\u00a0immigration, social issues, or politics. The current touring production is \u201cD-Generation: an Exaltation of Larks,\u201d which addresses dementia. The company most often use the Bunraku style of Japanese puppet theater, in which a smaller than life-sized puppet is operated by two or three visible puppeteers, a technique that is not often used by American puppet companies. The productions also present stories using a variety of art forms.<\/p>\n

\u201cBringing all those elements together \u2013 Wagner called it Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of art that makes use of many forms of art \u2013 it\u2019s always thought-provoking,\u201d Bell says. “Seeing it here is a good way to see it. You see how it\u2019s inviting you to think.”<\/p>\n

Bell notes that Sandglass Theater productions are characterized by a strong sense of how movement, music, puppets, and text work together, with text as almost a physical element that is inserted and moved around, appearing and disappearing at various times.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like a scripted drama for actors, where everything rests on the text and then the visuals illustrate the text,\u201d he says. \u201cHere it\u2019s a different story; the text is one of a number of elements.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cRichard 3.5\u201d from 2006, for example, the theme of the production focuses on the murders in Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cRichard III,\u201d and the display includes a variety of the implements used in the murders. In the presentation, which is included in a video highlighting Sandglass shows, the use of various techniques is evident through shifting back and forth between a focus on different puppets, the singing of a ballad, and the use of particular text from Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

\"Pilot,<\/a>
Pilot, from ‘Between Sand and Stars,’ which is based on Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry’s ‘The Little Prince.’ (Sandglass Theater, 2005). (Richard Termine \u201978 MFA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Mozart,<\/a>
Mozart, from ‘Between Sand and Stars’ (Sandglass Theater, 2005). (Ken Best\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the presentation of \u201cBetween Sand and Stars\u201d from 2005, the puppeteers found inspiration in the memoir-novel of Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry, The Little Prince,<\/em> to create dramatic tension in the space between puppets on the ground and aerialists above. The puppets from this production include the pilot sprawled on the ground after a crash landing and the composer Mozart, whose music is part of the performance.<\/p>\n

There is also poignancy in the characters from 1990s \u201cInvitations to Heaven,\u201d a part of \u201cThe Heaven Trilogy,\u201d which tells the story of a grandson trying to rescue the memory of his grandparents\u2019 unhappy marriage, which Eric Bass developed from his family\u2019s experience \u2013 the arranged marriage of a couple in a Polish shtetl, or village, who then emigrate to the United States.<\/p>\n

And in the 1997 production \u201cNever Been Anywhere,\u201d the simple but elegant story of life in Vermont circa 1940, based on the writing of Castle Freeman Jr. (Go With Me), two farmhands are sent out to bury a dead draft horse, which is made of logs.<\/p>\n

\"Tableau<\/a>
Tableau from ‘Between Sand and Stars’ (Sandglass Theater, 2005). (Richard Termine \u201978 MFA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the artists\u2019 statement opening the exhibition, the Basses say: \u201cFor us it is interesting to reflect on our evolution. We began by making theater based in dreams, but tinged with a strong sense of the weight of history, and of the importance of memory. We see all of these qualities are still part of our work, but in different ways than they were back in the 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bell describes the couple as \u201cahead of their time,\u201d in using the Bunraku-style tabletop performance technique, noting how many of today\u2019s young puppeteers are following their path.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of young puppeteers are getting into tabletop work, puppeteers from the Puppet Arts program, for example, who are just starting out,\u201d Bell says. \u201cIt\u2019s a sign of the richness of modern American puppet theater that draws from what is essentially the Japanese technique and combines it with this European sense of serious content for puppet theater, and then things like the rootedness in Vermont.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom Thought to Image: 30 Years of Sandglass Theater\u201d continues through April 10 at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, One Royce Circle, Storrs. For more information go to the Institute’s\u00a0website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With European, American, and Japanese elements, the Ballard Museum’s current exhibition embodies the richness of modern puppetry in the U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":107690,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1711,1914],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1918],"class_list":["post-108190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-sfa"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 00:37:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108190"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108203,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108190\/revisions\/108203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/107690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108190"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=108190"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=108190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}