Baa, baa black sheep puppets

Fourth Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival

Events through Oct. 25

Brew…

Fourth Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival

Events through Oct. 25

Brew House SPACE 101

2100 Mary St., South Side

(412) 381-7767

From a long, dark and rainy deserted alley, covered with cracks, an eerie green light shone dimly in the distance. Further down, muffled voices grew audible and the green light glared out of a small open door, revealing a stage from the side of a large, old brick building.

Around the corner, a giant puppet with disconcerting, bulging eyes stared down at me as I entered the crowded Brew House SPACE 101 Gallery into the Opening Gala of the Fourth Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival Friday night.

Since 1999, the Brew House, an artist collective located on the South Side, members of the Industrial Arts Co-op and artist volunteers from the Pittsburgh area have presented the Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival. Each year, puppet and experimental performance troupes from around the country come to challenge and continue traditional art forms in performances for adults and children at the Brew House.

“Part of our mission is not only to provide a venue that houses local regional and national acts to give people, but also to look for more interesting and challenging puppet acts,” said Suzanne Pace, a producer for the festival.

This year’s featured artist, Blair Thomas, will be returning from Chicago to perform the premiere of a new and original piece, “The Poet, the Puppet, and the Prisoner.” Thomas adapted his full-length solo piece from a series of short stories by Federico Garcia Lorca to depict four stages of life on a revolving stage. Each stage is performed with a different style of puppetry, culminating in Thomas taking on all roles in a “merry-go-round of theatrical purgatory,” simultaneously combining technical and artistic mastery.

During the festival, Thomas will also instruct interested students and educators in the community on the solo artist’s conceptualization and development of a piece in conjunction with community partnerships.

The gallery exhibit at the Brew House this year features installations of puppets and sets by Mark Fox, an internationally recognized artist, puppeteer and co-founder of Saw Theatre, a performance group based in Cincinnati. Fox’s installations offer dark fragments of visions of humanity, shown through distorted figures shadowed and dwarfed by ominous staircases and lattices, at once comic, pathetic and beautiful.

The festival also gives many local artists an opportunity to perform. This year, Cheryl Capezzuti’s giant lint puppets hold a dance contest hosted by “Vic Lint,” in which the audience becomes the judge. Capezutti’s act is a collaboration of artists, including director/writer Kellee Van Aken. Contestants include Betty Press, Febreeze and others.

“Right now, I’m interested in the concept of finding the light in a mundane ritual,” Capezzuti said. You can’t get much more levity than a giant disco-dancing lint puppet with big, floppy purple ponytails.

Another local artist, Icky Apparatus, takes a different direction with his Rotten Tooth Puppet Troupe. Apparatus created “The Landlord and the Witch,” drawing inspiration from historical Russian artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, and incorporating them as characters that face eviction from their landlord in depressed, pre-Revolutionary Moscow. Baba Yaga, a sometimes good, sometimes bad witch from Russian folk tales, has also been incorporated into the story to come to the artist’s rescue.

“I try to figure out how they made their art – that was very beautiful – but ended up working in this sterile environment – how they kept their heads up,” said Apparatus about his inspiration from Rodchenko and Stepanova.

Returning to the Black Sheep for its second year, The Black Cherry Puppet Theater is performing “Writer’s Block,” and for children, “Billy Goats Gruff-kin,” using traditional marionettes and theater in miniature.

Co-directors of Black Cherry, Michael Lamason and Bill Haas, have been in puppetry for more than 20 years and are currently in the process of building their own theater in Baltimore.

“We started when we were students at the Maryland Institute College of Arts to make money over the summer,” Lamason said. “We kind of got seduced by the medium.”

“Writer’s Block,” is an original piece written by Haas about a writer trying to find inspiration.

Puppetry “can’t fit into a stadium,” local artist Phat Man Dee said. It works pretty well at the Brew House, however.

The Fourth Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival is a venue where international, national and local artists challenge what puppetry can be, often providing comic release and thought-provoking entertainment.

All tickets can be purchased through Pro Arts at (412) 394-3353.