An Evening of Crankies
featuring Katherine Fahey & Dan Van Allen (The Lantern Sisters) with Boston-based artists
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
December 9, 2019 (Monday) | 7:30pm
Tickets: $16.00 General / $12.00 Puppets at Night Members
Join us for an evening of hand-cranked stories and songs performed by Baltimore’s celebrated Katherine Fahey in concert with Boston-based guests. Using intricately crafted scrolling panoramas called “crankies,” Fahey's crankies tell of myths from far-off lands, as well as hidden “down home” family secrets. One will have you swimming the depths of ancient oceans, while the next will have you laughing in the face of death itself. The work combines paper-cut silhouettes, collage, and illustration with spoken words, poetry, and live music. Don’t miss this intimate and inspiring evening celebrating the power of analog art! Recommended for adults and teens.
ABOUT THE Artists:
Katherine Fahey is a papercut artist, shadow puppeteer, designer, and performer. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (BA in sculpture), she’s a candid and thoughtful artist equipped with a storyteller’s voice and meticulous craftsmanship. Katherine has created shadow puppet and papercut artwork for music videos for Baltimore musicians including Wye Oak and Ellen Cherry. Three of Katherine’s shadow puppet videos have been in film festivals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and one at the Atlanta Film Festival. Katherine has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has twice performed at the National Puppetry Festival. She was commissioned by The Peabody School of Music to create new shows and recently created her largest and longest piece for The Yorktown Jamestown foundation’s new museum. This piece will be featured in a film and will remain in the permanent collection of the museum. Katherine’s work continues to grow and evolve with the sophistication of her papercut artwork, storytelling, and shadow puppetry techniques. When not making artwork, she teaches yoga and meditation.
“The Good Oak” by Lindsey Wagner & Kate Sokol, performed with Bodywave
Inspired by Aldo Leopold's philosophies on nature and deep time, co-producers Lindsey Wagner and Kate Sokol adapted one of Leopold's essays, "The Good Oak," into a shadow puppetry performance. This cranky casts dynamic silhouettes while moving through the social and environmental history of one ancient tree. The performance is narrated and performed with live music and effects by members of Bodywave (Lindsey Wagner, Marc Davenport, Becca Smith and Tim Mudarri). This piece was developed as part of “Shadow Puppetry Production Lab” at Puppet Showplace Theater in Spring 2017.
“Oda a las Cosas” (Ode to Common Things) by John Bell and Trudi Cohen, Great Small Works
Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Oda a las Cosas” is a cranky-and-live music tribute to the familiar objects of everyday life.
Trudi Cohen and John Bell are theater makers, puppeteers, festival organizers, musicians, and founding members of Great Small Works, a visual theater collective created in 1995 in New York City, whose six members share roots in Bread and Puppet Theater. Great Small Works’ mission is to draw on folk, puppet, avant-garde and popular theater traditions to address contemporary issues. Its members are now dispersed, with outposts in Brooklyn, Montreal, and Cambridge, MA. Bell and Cohen anchor the New England base in Massachusetts.
