Saturday October 21 | 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: Puppet Showplace Theater

Registration

$85; sliding scale $65 & $100
Members receive 15% off
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Registration deadline: October 14

Registration for this workshop has closed.

About the Class

How can hands join together to create stories? In this one-day workshop taught by resident artist Sarah Nolen, we will work with group hand pantomime, and discover a world of expression right in front of us!

We will play in the nonverbal world of gesture, and explore what our hands can do together – breathe together, create creatures, express stories! Touch! Through a series of simple exercises and prompts, this workshop will be an incubator for new ideas, strengthen your group ensemble work, and introduce you to the many expressions of hand puppetry. We’ll be working both on a traditional hand puppet playboard and on a lower tabletop. Be prepared to discover some new characters and to hold many hands!

Puppet Showplace Theater has a rich history of hand puppetry seen over the years through the works of Mary Churchill, Paul Vincent Davis, and Brad Shur. This class will take cues from their efforts, as well as pull inspiration from the handiwork of puppeteers such as Compagnie Yves Joly (France), Hugo & Ines (Peru) & Leo Peterson (Netherlands).

Puppetry style: In the class, students will work with bare hands only to build hand/glove puppetry fundamentals with playful rigor!
Recommended for adults 17+

About the Instructor

Sarah Nolen is a puppeteer and filmmaker originally from Austin, Texas. As Puppet Showplace Theater’s resident artist, she performs regularly for youth and family audiences and teaches puppetry in camps, workshops, residencies, and evening adult classes. Her three original productions, The Fairy Tailor, Judy Saves the Day, and Lisa the Wise, are all available to tour. Sarah recently designed puppets for Wee the People's My Night in the Planetarium, Metropolitan Chorale's The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, and for Suffolk University's Loss of Breath: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe. She is currently directing a production for UNIMA-USA featuring puppeteers from across the North American continent that will be performed in Bali this spring at the World Puppetry Festival.

In addition to her work in puppetry, Sarah is an experienced filmmaker. In 2015, she received the Mister Rogers Memorial Scholarship in support of her television pilot Treeples, a show geared towards empowering girls, which screened at film festivals across the U.S.

Sarah earned her BFA in film from Southern Methodist University, and an MFA in Puppet Arts from the University of Connecticut.