The main female character in one puppetry tradition gets, often literally, the short end of the stick: During Punch and Judy shows, Judy endures not only domestic drudgery but also the vicious blows of her husband’s cudgel.
But what if Judy — and a host of real women who rarely get the spotlight — were to rise up and take center stage at a major arts event?
That’s the promise of the fourth International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which opens on Wednesday afternoon and runs through Sunday at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Comprising more than 50 plays and programs, the celebration includes Sarah Nolen’s feminist adaptation, “Judy Punches Back,” as well as other theater productions, workshops, art exhibitions, film screenings and discussions, most of them focusing on this year’s festival theme: women in puppetry.
“Let’s have Judy be the star of the show,” Nolen, who is based in Waltham, Mass., said in a video interview, describing “Judy Punches Back.” “It was 2018 when I was developing it, so #MeToo was flourishing.” In Nolen’s largely nonviolent version, when Punch continually demands that his wife make him a sandwich, Judy delivers his just deserts.
Although Nolen’s show welcomes children, many festival productions are far from kid stuff. Jocelyn Mah’s “Right Hand Woman,” a Canadian project, addresses the female experience with characters that include Nurse Speculum, Aida IUD and a huge talking tampon. “Mujeres a cuatro manos” (“Women at Four Hands”), from the Mexican company Teatro Naku Mx, explores subjects including solitude, body image and aging. The Belgian performer Rosalie Neal’s “Empusa Abelha,” a dark, wordless solo, evokes queen bees and praying mantises as Neal portrays a creature undergoing metamorphosis.
“I was inspired by the inherent clownish nature of insects, their improbable bodies and behaviors,” she said in a video interview. Neal said she hoped audiences would leave her show “kind of locked into the strange.”
Manuel Antonio Morán, who founded the festival in 2018 as a biennial — the pandemic and the Clemente’s continuing renovation have prevented strict adherence to that schedule — said he appreciated puppetry’s “freaky and interesting” nature. But, as the event’s artistic director, he also emphasizes the accessibility of this handmade medium, calling it “one of the few popular art forms that are left” in an interview last week at the center. Supported by the Clemente and produced by Morán’s agency, Grupo Morán, and the Latino theater he founded, Teatro SEA, the festival emphasizes diversity and affordability. (More than half the events are free, and the ticket price for others is $25; a full schedule is on the festival website.)
“As long as I’m a producer and we’re a Latino-led organization, we want to highlight the underrepresented,” Morán said.
That has meant dedicating two large festival exhibitions, on view through Aug. 30, to trailblazing women in puppetry. “Theodora Skipitares: Performing Objects — Four Decades of Abundant Ingenuity” is a building-wide retrospective of Skipitares’s often avant-garde work as a downtown artist and theater director. Curated by Nina Felshin and designed by Matt Sorensen, the installation displays pieces ranging from doll-like puppets used in the miniature tableaus of “Micropolis” (1982) to the gigantic heads worn by cast members in “The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker” (2020).
Puppetry “can do wonders with scale,” Skipitares said as her designs were being unpacked.
“It’s almost a playwriting tool,” she added, “because you can make something very powerful, very scary,” or, if the object is tiny, “you can make it very emotionally empathic.”
The exhibition “Scattered Happy Memories of Puppet Friends by a 93-Year-Old,” curated by Sorensen, features photographs documenting the long career of the puppeteer, collector and executive Nancy Staub, who helped establish the Worlds of Puppetry Museum at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta and worked with the master puppeteer Jim Henson to organize the 1980 World Puppetry Festival. Unlike Henson, Staub never became a household name, but, she said in a video interview, she found puppetry more welcoming than acting, her original goal.
“I would have directors say, ‘Honey, don’t try to act — just stand there and look pretty,’ and that’s not what I wanted,” she said, adding, “Puppetry is perfect, because you can be anything you want.”
And say anything you want, Morán noted, observing that “puppetry is political. Period.” For this festival he has revived and expanded his own bilingual show from 2009, “¡Viva Pinocho!,” a reimagining of the Pinocchio story in which the title character crosses the border from Mexico to the United States. Though it was created for children, the show explores adult themes of immigration and assimilation.
Politics also fascinate Skipitares. A puppet slam on Friday night that’s centered on women will include an excerpt from her latest production, “Footnotes,” a testament to, among other things, the political impact of walking. It features a performer, Jane Catherine Shaw, operating a huge puppet foot.
“I’m definitely attracted to political material,” Skipitares said. But her objectives extend further, reflecting the aims of the festival itself. She wants her work, she added, “to be glamorous and glorious and really beautiful, too.”
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