I developed 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.
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.
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.
Lighthouse Test- Puppet Lab March 2024
Father Prototype Test #1 March 2024
