{"id":173117,"date":"2021-05-26T07:15:42","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T11:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=173117"},"modified":"2021-05-25T11:05:33","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T15:05:33","slug":"unima-cites-roccoberton-as-chancellor-of-puppetry-education-for-global-influence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/05\/unima-cites-roccoberton-as-chancellor-of-puppetry-education-for-global-influence\/","title":{"rendered":"UNIMA Cites Roccoberton as ‘Chancellor of Puppetry Education’ for Global Influence"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

In 1972, President Richard Nixon made a historic eight-day trip to Beijing to establish diplomatic relations with the People\u2019s Republic of China, accompanied by a group of American officials that included National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. One of the outcomes from the trip was the beginning of economic and cultural exchanges between the two nations.<\/p>\r\n

In 1994, Bart Roccoberton Jr. \u201990 MFA, head of the UConn Puppet Arts program, traveled to China accompanied by one of his creations, Mumford Maxwell Mole, as part of a U.S. Information Service cultural tour. Throughout his visit, his Chinese hosts were attracted to the puppet, cradling it like a baby.

\u201cWe kept hearing the phrase \u2018Da Bizi\u2019 anytime they talked about us. I learned that translated into \u2018Big Nose,\u2019 which was their word for foreigner,\u201d Roccoberton says. \u201cThe mole puppet was the incarnate Da Bizi. We decided the television project we would eventually develop would have Mumford as a central character.\u201d

The visit ultimately led to China becoming a member of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette, known as UNIMA, the international puppetry organization based in France and affiliated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 2012, the UNIMA Congress, the international puppetry festival, was hosted by China.<\/p>\r\n

\"\"
Roccoberton, center, along with Chinese puppeteers during his 1994 trip to China (courtesy of Bart Roccoberton).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Roccoberton\u2019s role in China establishing an UNIMA national center is only one aspect of the international puppetry work that led to UNIMA-USA presenting him with a Special Citation as \u201cNorth America\u2019s Chancellor of Puppetry Education and Training for the Twenty-First Century.\u201d

UNIMA-USA has annually recognized the best performances in puppetry arts since 1975 with its Citation of Excellence \u2013 UConn puppeteers have received six over the years \u2013 but its Special Citations are awarded to \u201cindividuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the organization and to puppetry.\u201d

The citation says Roccoberton \u201chas served the field of puppetry with indefatigable energy, perseverance, skilled leadership and exquisite craftsmanship\u2026 espousing an international perspective with an openness and love for all forms of puppetry\u2026developing new audiences for puppetry.\u201d

\u201cThe choice of the word chancellor was to show his bridge of education and for building the careers of puppeteers in the U.S. and beyond,\u201d says Kathy Foley, president of UNIMA-USA\u2019s board of directors. \u201cBart did a lot of international work that put American puppetry in places it had not been before. The Special Citation category is for people who over a long period of time have been contributing both artistically, in service, and usually in representation of what American puppetry is about to the wider world.\u201d

Roccoberton is the twelfth recipient of a Special Citation. Among previous recipients are: Mollie Falkenstein, first General Secretary of UNIMA-USA; Jim Henson, best known for the Muppets and Sesame Street; Nancy Lohman Staub, creator of the landmark exhibit “Puppets: Art and Entertainment” for the 1980 UNIMA World Puppetry Festival; and Albrecht Roser, leading German puppeteer and teacher of puppetry arts recognized as a pioneer in establishing puppetry as an art form internationally.

\u201cI\u2019m honored. These are people I respect,\u201d Roccoberton says of the recognition by UNIMA-USA that places him in the company of the major influences in his field. \u201cThe richness of what I do is the success of my students. American puppetry is gleaned from all traditions around the world.\u201d

As a graduate student, Roccoberton helped to bring Roser to Storrs as a visiting professor, where the two became lifelong colleagues. He adopted Roser\u2019s technique of using paper sculpture as the starting point to making facial features and body parts in puppets, which has influenced UConn puppeteers for more than three decades. Roccoberton was a founding director of the Institute of Professional Puppetry Arts and now is Director of Production for the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O\u2019Neill Theater Center, where he invited international puppeteers to attend the conference and lead workshops. After working with Hua Hua Zhang \u201900 MFA during his first trip to China, where she was a member of the China Puppet Arts Troupe of Beijing, he recruited her to the graduate program in puppet arts at UConn.

Roccoberton says that, early in his leadership of the Puppet Arts program, when University administrators asked faculty to include additional multicultural elements in their curriculum, he sent the syllabus for his shadow theater class, in which students study the history of that form of puppetry, starting in China and moving on to Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Greece, Turkey, France, and Germany.

\u201cBart has always had an international perspective on puppetry,\u201d says Andrew Periale, editor of UNIMA\u2019s \u201cPuppetry International Magazine\u201d and a former member of Roccoberton\u2019s Pandemonium Puppets troupe. \u201cBart has had, and continues to have, an impact on the lives and careers of hundreds of aspiring puppeteers. Certainly he had an impact on mine.\u201d

Adds Vincent Anthony, founder of the Center for Puppetry Arts and general secretary for UNIMA-USA: \u201cBart has been the guiding light of our scholarship program. This has been very instrumental in allowing puppeteers to gain much needed knowledge from top teachers for years. He single-handedly recruited the China puppeteers to join as a group, creating the Chinese UNIMA Center. This opened a floodgate of Asian countries to join UNIMA.\u201d

Roccoberton says his students are interested in taking advantage of new technologies and materials in building their puppets, even as it continues to be a \u201chands-on art form.\u201d

\u201cI\u2019m constantly learning. I think my students are ahead of me in those areas,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a company called Smooth-On that makes endless produces in urethanes and silicones. My students are very interested in that. We are setting up projects for them to make, but they still have to learn how to make plaster molds. They need to know the foundations and from there they can move on to work with all these different materials. We\u2019re preparing the next generation of puppeteers. Hopefully, they will be able to take the foundations that we\u2019ve created and move on. I have to be smart enough to help guide them.\u201d<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From China to Storrs, recognizing the international scope of Roccoberton’s influence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":173317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1711,88,1914,2235,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1918],"class_list":["post-173117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-global-affairs","category-sfa","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 20:03:00","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\/173117","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=173117"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173391,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173117\/revisions\/173391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/173317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173117"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=173117"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=173117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}