{"id":9970,"date":"2019-01-13T19:57:20","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T00:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=9970"},"modified":"2019-01-14T06:47:31","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T11:47:31","slug":"living-objects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/01\/13\/living-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Is There An African American Puppetry?\u2019 Exhibit Surveys An Often Overlooked Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIs there an African American puppetry? That\u2019s the question we\u2019re trying to answer with this exhibit,\u201d says John Bell, director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where the exhibition \u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry\u201d<\/a> runs from Oct. 25, 2018, to April 7, 2019. They\u2019ll also be hosting the \u201cLiving Objects Festival and Symposium\u201d<\/a> from Feb. 7 to 10.<\/p>\n

The answer is yes, definitely, of course. As part of the exhibition, Bell says, \u201cWe\u2019re making a directory of African American puppeteers and there are a lot of them, all over the country. They\u2019re there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Tarish<\/a>
Tarish \u201cJeghetto\u201d Pipkins.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But the theater world in the United States tends to be very White, and with puppetry that\u2019s even more so. Racism often suppresses or obscures African American arts, which can make Black puppetry feel invisible.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to be used to being the only Black person in the room,\u201d North Carolina puppeteer Tarish \u201cJeghetto\u201d Pipkins<\/a>, one of the artists featured in the exhibition and symposium, told me when he performed in Boston in November. \u201cBlack culture doesn\u2019t embrace puppetry. \u2026 Especially in the South, it\u2019s more like superstition, moving objects, just the fear of voodoo dolls. Seriously, people just see that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u201cLiving<\/a>
\u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry\u201d at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cLiving Objects\u201d is a rare institutional effort to survey African American puppetry\u2014perhaps the first since a 1990s exhibition at Atlanta\u2019s Center for Puppetry Arts. It assembles puppets, performing objects and masks by more than 20 puppeteers from the late 19th century to today.<\/p>\n

Paulette Richards, an Atlanta-based teaching artist who co-curated \u201cLiving Objects\u201d with Bell, writes: \u201cSince their arrival in the Americas, African people have animated objects in a rich variety of forms and contexts. Despite the prohibition by slaveholders on the creation of figurative objects reflecting an African-derived worldview, African Americans nevertheless animated objects to represent their experiences and identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfrican American puppetry happens in doll culture and different types of visual art and, for example, the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians make fantastic costumes that really link back to African performance,\u201d Bell says.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiving Objects\u201d traces a history beginning with 19th century jig dolls (rod puppets with legs that danced upon a board performers bounced up and down) and ventriloquism. John W. Cooper (1873-1966), the exhibition reports, found license to \u201ctalk back\u201d and even \u201cput words in the White man\u2019s mouth\u201d by throwing his voice into White dummies. Richard Sanfield and Willie Tyler were among the African American performers who brought Black voices to the style. Bell says, \u201cVentriloquism became an interesting cross-racial performance technique.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ralph<\/a>
Ralph Chess\u00e9’s Emperor Jones (left) and Witch Doctor from his 1920s and ’30s \u201cThe Emperor Jones.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Featured artist Ralph Chess\u00e9 suppressed his Creole heritage and African American roots when he left his childhood New Orleans for San Francisco. In the Bay Area in the 1920s and, again, for the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s, he produced a marionette version of Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s play \u201cThe Emperor Jones.\u201d In the 1950s, he created and performed marionettes for \u201cThe Wonderful World of Brother Buzz,\u201d an educational television program that ran for 17 years on KPIX, KTVU, and KGO in the San Francisco Bay area and also appeared nationally on the Cox and Westinghouse broadcasting networks. It was \u201can educational show about respecting the earth,\u201d Bell says, and \u201can important early television show with puppets.\u201d<\/p>\n

African American puppeteers have performed puppetry about the history of the diaspora, about slavery, about racism and race. Maine artist Ashley Bryan<\/a> has made puppets to tell African stories. The exhibition includes a Frederick Douglass puppet from the Puerto Rican troupe Papel Machete\u2019s 2009 and 2015 shows about racism in America. The show also features a life-sized puppet of Judith Jamison, the star dancer and later artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, that was build by Nehprii Amenii for a tribute to Jamison when she stepped down.<\/p>\n

\"Nehprii<\/a>
Nehprii Amenii’s Judith Jamison puppet (left) in \u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of African American puppeteers who don\u2019t necessarily take as their subject the Black experience,\u201d Bell says. Their work can be world famous even if the nature of puppetry can obscure their contributions\u2014for example, Mark Ruffin, who helped design and build \u201cSesame Street\u201d\u2019s Mr. Snuffleupagus, and Kevin Clash, who performed Elmo and helped re-energize the television show (before he left over allegations of sexual impropriety).<\/p>\n

Bruce Cannon, artistic director of Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre, is African American, but one might not guess it from the New York company\u2019s repertoire of European fairy tales. During the symposium, he\u2019ll perform \u201cHarlem River Drive, Magic of Music,\u201d celebrating the history and diversity of New York\u2019s iconic Black neighborhood.<\/p>\n

The festival and symposium<\/a> will also feature performances of ventriloquism and gospel puppetry, plus talks on \u201cPuppetry and African American History,\u201d \u201cAfro-Diasporic Storytelling and Culture,\u201d and \u201cRepresentations and Appropriations of Blackness.\u201d<\/p>\n

All together, \u201cLiving Objects,\u201d as the organizers write, aims to \u201credefine our sense of American puppet history.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pictured at top:\u00a0Ventriloquist David Liebe Hart will perform at the \u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry Festival and Symposium.\u201d (Photo: Chad Cooper)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Ventriloquist<\/a>
Ventriloquist Megan Piphus will perform at the \u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry Festival and Symposium.\u201d (Photo: David Teran)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIs there an African American puppetry? That\u2019s the question we\u2019re trying to answer with this exhibit,\u201d says John Bell, director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where the exhibition \u201cLiving Objects: African American Puppetry\u201d runs from Oct. 25, 2018, to April 7, 2019. They\u2019ll also be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[504,505,123,503],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9970"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9970"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9986,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9970\/revisions\/9986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}