Puppetry from GHFT

The company works in a range of world puppetry styles and often invent hybrid forms that fit the intention of the show. Often the puppeteers are visible to the audience or interactive with the puppets. Styles include work for adults and children, featuring Tabletop, Body Puppetry, Hand and Rod, Tiny Puppets, Rod Marionette, Shadow, and Object Puppetry.

The Orchid Flotilla features a woman living alone on a floating island of plastic, sometime in a distant future. The culture that disposed of the plastic is long gone, but the human trait of ingenuity persists in this woman who adapts 20th century garbage to sustain herself. Themes of biomimicry run throughout, as the woman’s life parallels the life cycle of the orchid in both natural and supernatural ways.

Climate Connections/ Walkabout Refugee Puppets is an ongoing project by Glass Half Full Theatre to create walkabout performances featuring climate refugee stories. Representing people from all over the globe whose lives have been affected by climate change, these puppet characters interact with people on the street to create instant, private theatrical moments in order to broaden participants understanding of the human impacts of Climate Change.

Drawdown at The Global Arena demostrates solutions for climate change as WWE-style wrestlers battle one another for limited funding and support. Cheer for your favorite: “Alternative Energy,” “Carbon Capture,” “Mad Cow,” “Rubberman,” and “The Resourcerer.” Can they overlook their differences and band together to defeat their arch nemesis, Mz. Extinction?

Polly Mermaid: Apocalypse Wow: When rogue particle physicist Dr. Deborah Degudere tries to “solve” Earth’s garbage disposal problem by zapping plastic into outer space, she accidently zaps Polly Mermaid, a mutant mermaid from a future time of sentient plastic, into her lab. Deborah and Polly save each other (and all of humanity) from themselves in this adult sci-fi eco-fable.

Once There Were Six Seasons invites audiences to travel the globe and explore the impact of climate change on cultures. Puppeteers recreate our rapidly changing planet using recycled objects and textiles, from string and paper to recycled Styrofoam packing shapes, as rainclouds and river valleys, farmland and icebergs, diamond mine workers, polar bears, and islands sinking into the sea.

Simple Sundries takes a darkly comic look at the commodification of culture in Austin, Texas and the displacement of people and animals to feed Austin’s “progress.”

The Austin Puppet Incident is an annual two day festival featuring live acts of puppetry for adult audiences since 2011 in Austin, Texas. The Incident is a joint venture of Glass Half Full Theatre and Trouble Puppet Theatre Company.

Cenicienta: A Bilingual Cinderella Story tackles culture, heritage, and the power of language. Belinda is a modern Mexican-American girl who dreams of becoming a poet like her hero Gary Soto. Ignored by her stepfamily and left alone in the basement to prepare for the party upstairs, Belinda uses her imagination and considerable sense of self to re-enact the story of Cinderella through Object Theater (puppetry with everyday objects). She makes discoveries about her own capacity and self-worth as a person, artist, and member of her familia.

Don Quixote de La Redo spotlights the hallmarks of Glass Half Full Theatre’s Lecoq-based approach to performance: wry humor and inventive use of actor as scenery and puppeteer as character, with Beckett-esque use of physical language and shifts in scale between tiny puppets, human actors, and large-scale puppets. The show explores the modern realities and imagined consequences of life in the borderlands between two cultures whose fortunes have shifted.

FupDuck is an original puppetry performance for Adults and Also Children who Already Know the F Word, accompanied by live Old Time Americana Music by The White Ghost Shivers. FupDuck is an adaptation of the novela Fup, by Jim Dodge, an anti-authoritarian fable about life, death, whiskey, ducks, and the untamed spirit of the West.

Las Aventuras de Enoughie features two bilingual kids named Esme and Hector, and one magical creature named Enoughie. Together, they take an incredible to journey to figure out who they are and how they belong. Along the way, they learn the power of kindness and how to embrace the differences in all of us.

"Trash Talks with Polly Mermaid" features a plastic mermaid from that place called "Away." You know, that place where you throw your garbage when you throw it "away" . . . Ok, You're right. There is no place called "Away." So, when you are "throwing trash away," you are actually putting it SOMEWHERE. That's where Polly is from.

El Cucuy features undocumented siblings living in Texas in the apartment of their twenty-something tía. In the midst of sweeping ICE raids, the older brother, Yoyo, draws on the Latino tradition of telling terrifying stories to children to illicit good behavior. Teenaged Yoyo employs these Cucuy/ Llorona/ Lechuza stories to train his 12 year old sister Xiomara how to avoid being intercepted by immigration agents of ICE.

Trash Talks with Polly Mermaid featuring Polly and her friend, Basurana, who used comedy and optimism to counter global environmental dilemmas.

“Puppetry is a rigorous art form that uses movement, timing, spatial relativity, scale, breath, and gravity to create a sense of visceral recognition in the gut of the audience. They can be beasts and spirits, inanimate forms made animate, ideas made manifest. They make use of scale in a way humans cannot; they can be large in one scene and tiny in the next, which effectively changes the dimensions of the stage. Puppets can fly, breathe underwater, grow onstage; they can vanish. They can be publicly incinerated, internally lit, transparent, and show that they have “no heart” by literally carving out the absence of a heart in their figure. They make costume changes in a flash (two different identical puppets). They evade the stereotypes of the traditional actor. A tiny female puppeteer can perform a giant puppet; an aging puppeteer can play a young hero. They are a democratic, constantly evolving, revolutionary art form that can take many shapes and forms and tell stories that are whimsical, or demonic, or profound.”

-Caroline Reck, for Howl Round Theatre Commons