tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/233819480 2008-08-07 07:09:14 -0400 some videos to not <p>AUR, the robotic desk lamp, was used in a unique human-robot stage performance. This video shows clips from the play and describes the hybrid control software used to puppeteer the robot.</p><p>Music: "The Rain Got Bounced" by <a href="http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/9813" target="_blank">TimeVibes </a></p> 165 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/233788580 2008-11-26 12:31:30 -0500 some videos to not Highlight reel from a unique human-robot stage performance including two human actors and AUR, the robotic desk lamp. 70 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/233766000 2009-06-27 02:56:26 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies John Bell discusses his work as a creator of street spectacles with Bread and Puppet Theater, Great Small Works, and the Honk! Festival in Boston, New York, and other cities in North America and Europe. Street spectacle is one of the oldest forms of global performance, in which larger-than-life theatricality combines with urban architecture and public thoroughfare to articulate a community's ideas about politics, religion, and society. How have the rituals of street spectacle functioned in previous centuries, and how might they function in the 21st century? John Bell is a puppeteer, scholar, and teacher whose interests combine practice and theory. He started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. Recognized as one of the preeminent historians of puppet theater in the US, he performs, directs, and otherwise collaborates with Great Small Works, a Brooklyn-based theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Art), edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press), and is currently working on American Puppet Modernism, a study of US confrontations with puppet and object theater over the past 150 years. 4579 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/233731500 2009-07-09 19:16:21 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies “Let's Put On a Puppet Show!” is an afternoon event revolving around puppetry scheduled for Friday April 6. The event will be open to the public at large. Participants can make their own puppets (led by professional puppeteers, Tuckers' Tales); hear lectures by prominent contributors to the puppet field; and produce an improvisational puppet show of their own. The Center has invited John Bell, artist and co-founder of Great Small Works; Linda Norden, curator of the American Pavilion for the 2005 Venice Biennale and curator of Pierre Huyghe's 2004 "puppet opera"(featuring a puppet of Linda); Karen Zasloff, artist and shadow-puppeteer; and other special guests. “Let's Put on a Puppet Show” brings together artists, curators, and puppeteers to explore the ways puppets and puppet theater have functioned within contemporary art and society. + Tuckers' Tales Puppet Theater, the Performing division of Puppet Perceptions, Inc., is a Philadelphia area based performing company founded in 1981. Co-directors Marianne and Tom Tucker have performed at puppet, folk, ethnic and street festivals, and at craft fairs, shopping centers, theaters and schools around the country.Audiences from small children to senior citizens have enjoyed the variety of styles skillfully displayed in their interesting programs. Tom and Marianne Tucker also teach workshops in puppetry and construct puppets by special order. John Bell started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. After earning his Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University, he began teaching at the college level, and is presently an assistant professor of performing arts at Emerson College. He is a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater group Great Small Works, with whom he performs and directs. He is a Contributing Editor to both TDR and Puppetry International and the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Arts) and editor of Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press). Karen Zasloff is an artist, puppeteer and educator. For the past ten years she has designed, built and performed original shows in museums, theaters and public spaces in New York City, Massachusetts and Vermont. These have included PS1 Contemporary Art Center, St. Ann’s Warehouse, PS122, Here Arts Center and the Ontological Theater. Outdoor performances have included several summers in the States and abroad with The Bread and Puppet Theater and Chicago’s RedMoon Theater, and a project on Staten Island for the New York City Housing Authority. Her drawings are currently featured in the documentary, Banished, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. She studied Design for Stage and Film at the Tisch School of the Arts, and is now studying performance at the Gallatin School at NYU. She has taught English, Art and Drama for many years in New York City public schools and community centers. Linda Norden is a curator and occasional writer on contemporary art. Though puppetry is not a specialization per se, she was responsible, together with Artforum senior editor Scott Rothkopf, for the production of Pierre Huyghe's 2004 film, "This is not a time for dreaming," an allegorical fable that drew heavily on the multiple metaphortical implications of the marionette to explore the fate of commissions and creative experiment within the university in particular and institutions more generally. Hired in 1998 to help establish the first department of contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums, Norden worked to build both programming and the museum's fledgling contemporary art collection. As Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, she curated Ed Ruscha's "Course of Empire" with the Whitney Museum's Donna DeSalvo, which was reconcieved for the Whitney in the fall of that year. Future projects include advising on the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the UK-wide exhibition of emerging artists titled "New Contemporaries." + This program is organized by Joe Zane, artist, director of production at the Center, and lecturer at MIT’s Visual Art Program. “(Puppet) Show!” is generously supported by the MIT Arts Council. Special thanks to the Puppet Showplace Theatre, the Visual Art Program @ MIT, Joe Gibbons, Ingrid Schaffner, and Michael Smith. 5959 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/233708400 2009-07-12 15:45:43 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies JENNY ROMAINE has worked extensively as a puppeteer, performer and director with the Bread & Puppet Theater , Janie Geiser and Co., Amy Trompetter, Ninth Street Theater, and OBIE winning Great Small Works , of which she is a founding member. She is the musical director of Jennifer Miller's OBIE/Bessie Award winning outdoor traveling CIRCUS AMOK. Romaine’s recent directorial projects include the Richard Pryor Trunk Show with Sundree productions, the Spectacle of the Rising Tide Procession for the River to River Festival, NYC, The Betty Boop Suite with Trumpet Princess Susan Watts and animator mornography, and Happy Norouz from Lesser Panda with the performance band Lesser Panda. She also recently returned from a 2-month trip to India (led by Bond Street Theater) where she participated in an international tour and skills exchange project with street performers from Northern and Southern India, as well as Afghanistan. Romaine conceived and directed Great Small Works’ Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, a critically acclaimed adaptation of the classic Yiddish text in collaboration with Song Diva Adrienne Cooper, composer Frank London of the Klezmatics, and designers Alessandra Nichols and Clare Dolan. Romaine creates curriculum and community based spectacles with youth and adults, which she often directs. Some collaborators have included the Lesbian Avengers, The Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School, El Puente Academy, Island Academy (Rikers Island Youth Prison), Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, The Fifth Avenue Committee, EBC Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, and Wesleyan University. Romaine has committed over two decades to the cultivation of new Yiddish culture, theater, and community based performance art.** Collaborating with an intergenerational posse of artists, she draws on diverse Yiddish primary source material to create new art with contemporary meaning. Recent projects include The Sukkos Mob, an ambulatory crew of Yiddish-Iranian spectacle singers; An Answer on the Day You Call: A Rain Dance for the DUMBO Arts Festival; Kids and Yiddish, the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater’s hit family show; Electric Menorah, a shadow puppet light show for clubs in collaboration with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring including the new film A Blue Mime Khanike featuring Stephen Kaplin, Frank London's Klezmer Brass All Stars, Sam Wilson , mornography, and Michael Winograd’s Infection, The White Pajamas, a hand painted ethnography in the form of a paper theater show with Canadian memory painter Mayer Kirshenblatt and Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; The Ballad of 1914: on Conscription and the Draft with Sarah Gordon and Susan Leviton; and numerous Purim Shpiln (spectacular masquerade balls) the Radical Jew Crew. 5390