News from the puppetry front

Across the hall from the musicians, Blair’s crew has set up shop, building puppets and building a ‘movement vocabulary’. Theirs is a world of infinite possibilities -- anything can be a puppet, from the most complex bunraku constructions to a simple cutout of a paper snowflake. Below Barbara Whitney builds mock-ups for the Kai and Gerda puppets out of newspaper and masking tape:


As the director, Frank is the bridge between the two worlds – he watches the musicians work and provides input on the script’s development in the rehearsal room and then joins the puppeteers in their studio for preliminary movement work. As the songs have been solidified over the past week, we’ve begun to sketch in some preliminary staging with the actors and puppeteers. Here, Andrew Keltz (Kai) works on a scene with Eric Wetz (shown in the Snow Queen puppet):


Questions? Comments? Leave ‘em here… we’d love to hear from you. Hopefully we’ll have some guest bloggers soon, so let us know if there’s anyone in particular you’d like to hear from (actors, puppeteers, director, stage manager, etc.)