[Image description: There is a graphic of a theatre stage on a background that is pink and purple gradient. The stage is light blue with yellow curtains and pink frames. On top is dark blue text that reads “puppetry workshop”. Hanging on the frames is white text stylized like strings that reads “No Strings Attached”. Below that is yellow text that reads “March 2nd-4th, March 7th - 9th”.]
No Strings Attached
Puppetry Workshop
Who are we underneath this flesh? Is there a shape that reflects our individual essence? Is there an essence to the disability identity?
Through puppetry, we’ll identify new ways to cultivate stories rooted in the lived experience of disability and learn how to include puppetry arts as a means of self-expression. We will explore what puppetry has to offer as a way to reflect and integrate the disability experience.
Collaborating with shadow puppetry artists Chloe Ziner and Jessica Gabriel from Mind of a Snail and Crispi Lord from Wide Open Theatre, this FREE workshop hopes to explore the possibility of embodying the disability experience through creation and animation of puppets.
The workshops will explore how puppets can represent your disability, such as how it may be animated by someone living with quadriplegia, and what puppetry offers to a puppeteer with blindness.
Disability is part of the range of the human condition and experience. It’s complex, it’s diverse, and it both enriches and complicates notions of theatre aesthetics.
Along the lines of identity questioning and stereotype smashing, we’ll explore who we are and the shapes our identities may take.
Registration is now open for this FREE workshop!
Join us for the morning and/or afternoon sessions of our 6-day puppetry workshop in March with No Strings Attached and set your inner puppeteer free!
Workshop Dates
March 2nd to March 4th – and – March 7th to March 9th
Morning (Storytelling): 10am – 1pm
Afternoon (Puppet Fabrication): 2pm – 5pm
Location
Centre for Peace
1825 W 16th Ave, Vancouver, BC, V6J 2M3
This space is wheelchair accessible. For most of the workshop we will be working in the ‘rec’ type room in the basement where we can play and build. It is accessible via an elevator.
COVID Protocols
As per Realwheels policy, all students and facilitators will be required to show proof of double vaccination. We will also require everyone to wear masks throughout the workshop (we will have KN95s available for those who wish to use them).
Meet the facilitators
Mind of a Snail
Chloe Ziner & Jessica Gabriel
Since 2003, Chloé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel have been developing a multilayered style of visual storytelling using overhead projectors as their main light source. Their performances play at the intersection of puppetry, visual arts, clowning & music. As artistic collaborators, they are interested in exploring beyond the boundaries of traditional theatre, and creating magical immersive experiences for their audiences. Mind of a Snail’s shadow theatre is like an early animation created live before your eyes.
Mind of a Snail has created customized work for many organizations, including Vancouver Art Gallery, Telus World of Science, Persephone Theatre, The NOW Society, UpinTheAir Theatre, Van Dusen Gardens, and Pacific Rim Whale Festival to name a few. Mind of a Snail has performed in arts festivals across Canada, highlights include Winterlab (Victoria), Summerworks (Toronto), rEvolver (Vancouver), Casteliers (Montreal), FIAMS (Saguenay) and (S)hiver Arts Festival (Yukon). In the spring of 2017 they toured their show “Caws & Effect” to the International Festival of the Arts in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2019 “Caws & Effect” was presented at the Puppeteers of America National Festival in Minneapolis, MN.
Mind of a Snail’s show, “Multiple Organism” won a 2018 Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, Critic’s Choice for Innovation. Multiple Organism won the Artistic Risk Award, CULTCH-ivating the Fringe Award, Critic’s Choice and Pick of the Fringe at Vancouver Fringe in 2017; it was also awarded “Best English Production” by Centaur Theatre at Montreal Fringe in 2019. Mind of a Snail was nominated for Outstanding Projection Design at the SATAwards in Saskatoon for their work in Persephone Theatre’s production of “Matchstick”. Their show “Against Gravity” was presented as part of the Summerworks National Series in 2014.
Wide Open Theatre
Crispi Lord
Crispi studied theatre at the University of Saskatchewan and then at the Dell Arte International School of Physical Theatre. She is the Artistic Director and Head Puppet Wrangler at Wide Open Children’s theatre. Crispi brings 20 years experience as a puppetry artist working in Theatre for Young Audiences, during which time she has also trained hundreds of people to become puppeteers.
Having worked with Dancing Sky Theatre as a physical theatre/ensemble artist, Shakespeare on The Saskatchewan as puppet designer and choreographer of Titus A. Puppet Revenge, and Persephone theatre as puppet builder for Little Shop of Horrors, Crispi is an in-demand, working artist who writes, produces, performs, and designs and builds puppets. She has designed and built over 300 puppets in multiple puppetry styles including tabletop and hand puppets. She is also a shadow puppet artist and recently complicated 250 feet of hand painted Crankie theatre.
Her knowledge of the form extends to hand puppetry, shadow puppetry, rod puppetry, table top puppetry and giant puppetry. Mastery of her form is matched only by her enthusiasm to continually explore its inexhaustible range of expression. Crispi has prodigious experience leading creative processes, working from the seed of an idea to its full fruition to performance. She possesses an innate understanding of how puppetry can be the catalyst to explore the stories that play out inside our minds, as well as do what is physically impossible.