Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium
The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium
The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium brings together practicing Festival artists with scholars to consider the intersection of puppetry with other disciplines and ideas. Before 1912, the year the Little Theater of Chicago was founded in the historic Fine Arts Building, the term “puppeteer” did not even exist. Little Theater director Ellen Van Volkenburg needed a program credit for the actors she had trained to manipulate marionettes while speaking the text of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she coined the word “puppeteer.” That marked the dawn of the movement that has brought us to the rich art form now practiced around the world. This year's Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium will feature Festival Artists on four different artist panels discussing the materiality of the puppet in both theory and practice. It also features book talks by puppet scholars of four new U.S. publications released this year.
Talking Stuff: The Materiality of the Puppet
Presented by the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, sponsored by UNIMA-USA
All Events at Located at: Fine Arts Building Little Studio, 7th Floor, 410 S. Michigan Ave.
FREE and open to the public (see dates and times below)
This year’s Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium will feature Festival Artists on four different artist panels discussing the materiality of the puppet in both theory and practice. It also features book talks by puppet scholars of four new U.S. publications released this year. Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher, Manuel DeLanda calls for a new materialism noting that by splitting the supposedly indivisible atom, modern physics has demolished the tangible solidity on which Aristotle defined the “real.” Taking “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance,” as performing objects in anthropologist and folklorist Frank Proschan’s terms, the theme of the Symposium series will move from materialism to material performance, to material characters, to the actual material of the puppet asking, what is it made of and how is it made while looking at what the design and the materials enable object performance to express about material existence.Artist Panel Discussions
Book Talks
Talks by puppet scholars of four new U.S. publications released this year.
Friday, January 19: at 5 pm
Author Colette Searls: A Galaxy of Things: The Power of Puppets and Masks in Star Wars and Beyond
Tuesday, January 23: at 5 pm
Author Dr. Paulette Richards: Object Performance in the Black Atlantic
Friday, January 26: at 4:30 pm
Author Dr. Claudia Orenstein: Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects
Saturday, January 27: at 4:30 pm
Authors Dr. Claudia Orenstein & Tim Cusack: Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects
