Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Hip Pocket Theatre’s 3rd annual Cowtown Puppetry Festival starts this week

By Shawn Parikh

From September 3-16, Hip Pocket Theatre will be presenting their 3rd annual Cowtown Puppetry Festival with the title of The Lost Garden Party. The festival consists of two weeks of evening puppet workshops for all ages which will culminate in performances on September 14th - 16th at 7 p.m. prior to performances of The Doggies and the Kitty at 8:15 p.m. To participate, all you have to do is fill out a form online and submit it.

Two internationally-acclaimed puppeteers, Erin Orr and Chis Green, will be helping everyone learn the craft. Erin Orr is a professional puppeteer and storyteller with a background in experimental theatre and dance, who designs, builds, directs and sometimes performs her own puppet shows, incorporating shadow puppetry, marionettes, Bunraku-style puppets, animation and toy theatre. She has collaborated frequently with Chris Green, taking her to Bulgaria, Taiwan and most importantly to Texas. She is also currently working with The Skirball Cultural Center in LA, adapting folktales to create a narrative structure for a new gallery dedicated to universal flood myths.

Chris Green began his puppet work in Austin, Texas after co-founding the Kambing Na Isang Pa-a Shadow Play Theatre in 1996. Since then, he has contributed original works to performance and dance festivals all over the world - with the Spiral Q Puppet Theater in Philadelphia, the renowned Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, in residence in Woodstock School in Uttaranchal, India, with local Tibetan refugee children. He worked with Basil Twist in re-staging Respighi's La Bella Dormente nel Bosco for its U.S. premiere at the Spoleto and Lincoln Center Festivals, 2005. Most recently, he completed hundreds of fanciful animal puppets and figures for the exhibit Noah's Ark at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

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