+   From Rising Tide Parade, Brooklyn by Great Small Works

John Bell is a puppeteer, scholar, and teacher whose interests combine practice and theory. He started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. Recognized as one of the preeminent historians of puppet theater in the US, he performs, directs, and otherwise collaborates with Great Small Works, a Brooklyn-based theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Art), and edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press). His newest book, American Puppet Modernism, a study of US confrontations with puppet and object theater over the past 150 years, will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in July 2008.



John's activities at the Center in Spring 2008 include his course "Performance, Art, Technology: Practice and Theory," an undergraduate and graduate class offered through the Music and Theater Arts Department. The class will explore the relationships among technology, culture, and performance in different societies at different times in two ways: by reading, discussing, and writing about texts, films, and images; and by creating performances in different media that respond to the techniques and issues raised in the class. The course will culminate with the design, construction, and performance of site-specific elements around the MIT campus as part of Professor Thomas DeFrantz's Dance All Over MIT performances in May.



John is also joining Center people Larissa Harris and Jessica Rylan in the design, construction, and performance of a new Great Small Works toy theater show, Definitely Maybe. Based on the novel of the same name by the acclaimed Soviet science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Definitely Maybe questions the limits of scientific knowledge and discovery in the modern world from the perspective of a handful of Soviet scientists of the 1970s who are all on the verge of important breakthroughs. The mysterious and often surreal ways in which they are all prevented from advancing their work turn out to be the effects the Homeostatic Universe, a vast, undefined force of Nature that insists on maintaining creation-wide entropy. Definitely Maybe poses questions about the limits of modern knowledge and the ecological effects of modern society through a series of fantastic, comic, and spectacular tableaux on a miniature toy theater stage representing a Soviet-era apartment building. The show features set and puppet designs by Isaac Bell, stage construction by Kaolin Kinsey, and special synthesizer effects created by Jessica Rylan.

+   From the Rapture Project.