New York City
Celebrating its 10th anniversary season, The Lab is St. Ann’s Warehouse’s experimental haven for artists developing interdisciplinary projects for
puppet and object theater. Under the direction of Dan Hurlin and David Neumann, participating artists and their collaborators meet weekly over nine months to develop projects, share puppetry elements and other design and technical ideas, discuss plot structure and character development, and work on narrative. Moderated critical discussion follows each group presentation.
Every spring, St. Ann’s Warehouse presents Labapalooza!, a Mini-Festival of
New Puppet Theater from The Lab, showcasing the works developed over the
year.
PARTICIPANTS:
Program A
Toni Schlesinger’s Talk Show is not only a product of the Lab, but also a celebration of it. Written and performed by Schlesinger and directed by Dan Hurlin, the show consists of provocative, one-on-one, Charlie Rose-style interviews with famous puppets from ten years of Labapalooza!
Milk is a digital toy theater piece that explores the role of milk as it relates to the American Dream and themes from the Book of Genesis.
Joe B. McCarthy’s Part II is an excerpt from a larger theater piece about
healing; it combines performance, design and puppetry to tell a story about
things that lie underneath and change our lives forever.
In Paradise and the Age of Exploration, Noe Kidder and Mark Gallay employ the play of light and sound to bring a landscape to life.
Also featured in Program A are Billy Burns’ Hobo No-No and Florence by Luis de Robles Tentindo and Laurel Dugan.
Program B:
Toni Schlesinger’s Talk Show
Dear Mme. is a marionette play that takes place inside the torso of a writer who rewrites his own life story.
Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man is inspired by Lorca’s puppet plays and irreverently explores the poetic inner world of the
Spanish Punch with puppetry and music.
Enrico Way’s The Living Laboratory Presents: Radiate! Ruminate! Rejoice! is about working class American girls that were central characters in a staggering series of events that brought indefinite science to the forefront
during the first World War.
White Elephant is a series of vignettes that use movement, puppetry, and music to playfully revisit childhood and adulthood discoveries of life, death, and thereafter.
Also on Program B is Joseph Silovsky¹s The Jester of Tonga.