UPDATE
Call for participants: NO PUPPETRY EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!

FREE Activist Puppet Workshops at SUNY New Paltz SUB 401-405 December 1-2. Join Redwing Blackbird Theater in making a parade and puppet shows based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Performances will coincide with Noam Chomsky’s visit to SUNY New Paltz on December 4, 2011. Because Howard Zinn’s writing predicts and analyzes the conditions leading up to the national and global Occupy Wall Street movement, we’ll be making connections to current events, as well.

12/1 Thurs. SUB 401-405 SUNY New Paltz
11AM-1 PM block printing on fabric workshop
2-4 PM printing cont. plus hand-puppet making workshop
4-6 PM hand-puppet costuming workshop

12/2 Fri. SUB 401-405 SUNY New Paltz
12 NOON-2 PM cantastoria( sung picture stories) painting workshop
2-4 PM rehearsal of 99% cantastoria and hand puppet shows

FREE Howard Zinn films plus big puppet-making workshop December 2-3
Puppet workshop & films at Redwing Blackbird Theater, 413 Main St. Rosendale
12/2 Fri. 7 PM film and discussion “The People Speak”
12/3 Sat. 2 -6 PM big puppet workshop & “Revolt of the Guards” parade rehearsal
7 PM film and discussion “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

12/4 Sun. 2 PM prepare puppets and signs in the Quad, in front of Old Main Bldg.
3PM parade goes from the Quad to Lecture Center 100
3:30 PM outdoor shows based on Zinn and OWS, Lecture Center 100
4 PM Noam Chomsky on the legacy of Howard Zinn, Lecture Center 100

Check here for updates or email amy.trompetter@gmail.com.

Redwing Blackbird joins OWS Poughkeepsie for a Parade and Puppet Show on Nov.12 at noon.

All welcome to a “Reverse the Corporate Coup” parade and “Hallelujah!” puppet show rehearsal Nov.11 at 6 PM at Redwing Blackbird Theater, 413 Main St. Rosendale, NY.

http://occupypoughkeepsie.org/

Golden Cockerel Poster, Casa Italiana, NYC, 2009

Big King/Little King

Amy Trompetter has designed a new adaptation, inspired by Natalia Goncharova’s splendid neoprimitive designs for the 1914 Ballets Russes production of The Golden Cockerel, Rimsky-Korsakov’s last operatic masterpiece.  Giant puppets create the exotic landscapes of the composer’s cautionary tale about the misuse of political power.

For this production, composer Raphael Mostel has arranged a new score from Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, and Catharine Nepomnyaschy has created a new text, based on the beloved fairytale in verse by the poet Alexander Pushkin.

Cockerel crows

Wedding Procession -Golden Cockerel

    

What Links a Human Being to Heaven -an interview in Novaya Gazetta, Moscow 9/20/2007

excerpts…”October,7th is the first anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s demise.  The mystery play “Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya” will be performed for the first time in a church in Manhattan.  The composer, Alexander Bakshi told us about the future Requiem.

The wonderful artist, Amy Trompetter, an American disciple of Tadeush Kantor, suggested the idea for this work.  After a conversation with her I thoight for a long time about why this call came from New York, not from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Perm–but from New York City.  I thought about Anna…really, even without her don’t they know that murder is wrong?  They know…but they know even better that while it is wrong, in some exceptional cases it is allowed.  And even necessary.  This absolute relativity of everything –in my opinion there is nothing worse in modern Russia.

By the standard of any canon, Anna was one of the righteous.  A banner.  Yet there was no army behind it.

And then I understood that the Devil will also have to play his solo part in this mystery play.  He will articulate the rational, weighed and verified arguments of the majority.

/>”Perhaps the basic prinicple is always preserved:  …to raise the fever of the soul to a desperate high until a crisis is reached!  Everything that is happeniing on the stage is only a tool used to tie a knot in the spectator’s soul –and resolve it.  The real performance is performed in the heart of the spectator.”

“The plot is cannonical: the transfer of the soul to heaven.  The forty-days-long posthumous journey, which tallies the grand total of a lifetime.  In orthodoxy it is called “afflictions.”

Amy Trompetter’s objects are the hazy signs of everything that a soul encounters on its way.

[insert link to Requiem music]

“The score is almost trying to scrape into accord the sounds left after the world as been blown up.  There are so few of them left that the harmony disintegrates into dust.

Exhibit in Pittsburgh, First Night, 2009

Punch and Judy – performed with skirt as stage on 5 continents from 1971 to present

Amy Trompetter’s Punch and Judy

The wicked humor of Amy’s hand puppet show, based on English tradition and New York anarchy, has stormed five continents over twenty years and is famed for a large shirt that lifts over the head and transforms into a stage.

Norman Frisch says: Amy Trompetter’s “Punch and Judy” is one of the best — ever — the best!

and she rarely performs it….not to be missed!!  1-26-05

[video from DeeDee to be inserted here]

For bookings contact Amy Trompetter: amy.trompetter@gmail.com

Early Punch and Judy with Andy Trompetter and Blackbird Theater in 1971

Early street performances in Boston, 1971