About the Show
Bart Buch’s visionary ODE TO WALT WHITMAN is a visually poetic puppet performance that weaves the spirits of two iconic queer poets—Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca—into a contemporary dreamscape. Featuring a live score by acclaimed musician Martin Dosh.
Performed to sold-out audiences at New York City’s HERE Arts Center in 2009 and praised by the Jim Henson Foundation, ODE TO WALT WHITMAN is a tender, surreal journey told without spoken words. Puppets, shadows, projections, and live music craft an intimate dialogue between Whitman’s hopeful vision of America as a land of lovers and comrades, and Lorca’s mournful image of a nation awash in machines and tears.
Set in the unlikely but fitting landscape of an online gay chat, Buch’s silent puppet poem unfolds through hand puppets, bunraku-style grass puppets, shadow play, masks, toy theater, and a butterfly marionette. These layered forms create a rich, multidimensional visual language that speaks where words fall silent.
