I am developing Fish Sermon as a 2023-24 participant of Chicago Puppet Lab, run by the Chicago Puppet Festival. The scene follows a mermaid pastor giving a riveting sermon utilizing dance, shadow puppets, and music to enrapture the church congregation. A dancer will be performing in a backpack puppet of a reverse mermaid.
The program accepts 6-8 artists or artist groups for a 8-month, in person laboratory process led by Puppet Lab Co-Directors: Tom Lee and Grace Needlman. Lab artists participate in weekly meetings where artists share, discuss, meet deadlines, and learn from one-another’s work as well as from expert guest artists.
Why A Puppet Ballet?
When I was a child, being a ballerina was my first dream. As it is the fantasy of many femme children. In modern times, ‘The Ballerina’, and ‘Disney Princesses’ provide the most extreme expression of femininity in our culture. To children who are still developing their sense of self it allows them something to latch onto. At about four years old, girls feel the need to express their gender binary in the most extreme way in order to be perceived as female. Ballet is seen as one of the highest of feminine art forms, one where one’s body is transformed as an instrument of ultimate grace and beauty. The desire to embody the feminine ideal; ballet. Which comes with its own history of exploitation, racism, exclusion. Ballet works as the perfect medium to express the attempt to embody girlhood.
The juxtaposition and inclusion of puppetry transforms the art of ballet, reshaping the lines of the body, the arches of movement now reinvented. Due to the reshaping and transformation of the body through the puppet. The creation of entirely new possibilities of movement, that is not conducive to the understanding of the preordained presentation of ballet. This transformation, this existence, is the black femme experience.
This project closely stemmed from my most recent project; an original rendition of The Little Mermaid, reimagining and presenting the mermaid as a simple fish with legs. I am still entranced by core themes and challenges in the original story.
Lighthouse Test- Puppet Lab March 2024
Father Prototype Test #1 March 2024
