The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut will present the grand opening of its new exhibition Obstreperous Puppets: The Puppeteers Cooperative on Thursday, June 22, 2017 at 5:00 p.m., with refreshments served at 5:00 p.m. and a free tour beginning at 5:30 p.m. All events will take place at the Ballard Institute, located at 1 Royce Circle in Storrs Center. "We are very happy that Sara Peattie has curated this exhibition for the Ballard Institute," Ballard Director John Bell said, "and excited to see all these amazing puppets of different sizes and shapes brought together after years of performances in communities all over the Northeast." This exhibition will be on display through Sunday, October 8, 2017.
Co-founded by Sara Peattie and George Konnoff in 1976, the Boston-based Puppeteers Cooperative is one of the most prolific, yet un-acclaimed, puppet companies in New England. Peattie, Konnoff, and their colleagues have designed and built puppets with community groups for pageants and celebrations across the United States, including Boston's famed First Night, the Downtown Mansfield Festival in Storrs. Many of these creations are also available to the general public through the Puppeteers Cooperative's Puppet Free Library, located in the basement of Boston's Emmanuel Church. "Puppeteers secretly suspect that their puppets have lives of their own," Peattie comments, "and these puppets really do. Because they are in the Puppet Free Library, they wander off, go places I don’t know about or that I can’t get entrance to, and come back with human thanks, or even on occasion reappear with no explanation, somewhat battered and smelling oddly, to resume their places in my life, but to be greeted on the street as old friends by people who are strangers to me."
Peattie's Obstreperous Puppets exhibition at the Ballard Institute will include a walk-through forest of giant flowers, fern banners, and animal puppets from Puppeteers Cooperative pageants; toy theater shows; city spirits and giant animals; and an immersive puppet sea, inhabited by big blue faces, blue dragons, and illuminated fishes reading a Book of the Sea. The June 22 exhibition opening will also feature Peattie's masked character Ms. Mouse, who, according to the curator, "will knit and greet visitors wordlessly, and sometimes show them around the exhibition." Ms. Mouse's Art Emporium will also be part of the exhibition, offering puppets, flags, masks, and cheap art.
For more information, contact: Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at (860)486-8580 or bimp@uconn.edu