Intensive FST Puppetry Workshop at Ko Festival
Image-Object-Puppet Creating a Poetic Theater
FST’s Artistic Director John Farrell has been invited to lead a puppetry workshop in August as part of the 24th annual Ko Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts. John will lead participants in an exploration of various forms of puppetry as they discover what it means to embody metaphor in performance.
Participants will begin working with basic materials, then proceed to objects, and finally construct their own bunraku style puppets. After learning the basic principles of animation, participants will work in small groups to devise increasingly ambitious and complex gestural “scripts” as they explore thematic arcs such as Life/Death/Resurrection. Throughout the workshop, John will interweave poetry with the puppetry, encouraging participants to play with the relationship between the literary and visual metaphors inherent in these two forms. The workshop will culminate in a sharing of devised work and participants will leave with their bunraku puppet and a sense of how this method of creating theater can be incorporated into their own practice.
The workshop will take place August 3-8, 2015 from 10:00-4:00 on the campus of Amherst College.
To find out more about Ko Festival and register for the workshop visit their website: http://kofest.com/john-farrell-image-object-puppet-workshop/