International Puppetry Museum

INTERNATIONAL PUPPETRY MUSEUM

formerly The Conservatory of Puppetry Arts (COPA)

1062 N. Fair Oaks Avenue - Pasadena, CA 91103 - telephone: 626-296-1536 | e-mail

Puppets & Pursestrings

PASADENA Weekly

Puppets and Purse Strings
The local puppetry scene struggles to survive amid a renaissance of the art form
By Christina Schweighofer 03/21/2013

Adrian Rose Leonard was 13 when Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, died in 1990. The event rattled her world. Raised in Johnson City, Tenn., Leonard could not remember a time without The Muppets and “Sesame Street,” and all she had ever wanted as a girl was to work for Henson.

After Henson’s death, Leonard tried sculpting, drama, theater and painting; she attended film school in Nashville and “kind of got into film.” But when “The Lion King” came to Nashville seven years ago, the young woman realized that people were still making a living in puppetry and that she could be one of them. Since then, Leonard has been a professional puppeteer, most recently as a member of The Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles.

Puppetry is enjoying a renaissance in the United States, especially among the generation of people who were raised on Henson’s TV shows in the 1970s. Puppets are featured in movies and commercials and, with the production of the musical “Warhorse,” they have made it to Broadway fame. LA, with its film industry, is one of the art form’s hubs. But the puppetry community is fragmented and underfunded.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, located in a graffiti-rich neighborhood north of downtown LA, has been hanging on by a string for years. And the International Puppetry Museum in Pasadena, with close to 6,000 marionettes, hand and finger puppets, rod puppets, show posters, books on puppetry and other ephemeral items, is gradually moving its collection out of state. If the relocation to the Northwest Puppet Center in Seattle, Wash., goes as planned, Southern California will have lost the collection by mid 2014.

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Luman Coad

Luman Coad’s first major position was director of the Storybook Puppet Theater, Children’s Fairyland, Oakland, CA. He and his wife and partner, Arlyn moved to Canada in 1966 and co-founded Coad Canada Puppets.The couple quickly established an enviable reputation for their productions and began touring the world -frequently under sponsorship of the Canadian Foreign Affairs. They won numerous awards including eight Citations of Excellence in the Art of Puppetry from the American Center of UNIMA, plus the President’s and the Trustees’ Awards of the Puppeteers of America.

In 1987 the Coads established Charlemagne Press to redress the lack of books on
advanced level puppetry. Some thirty titles are currently available.

When Arlyn died in 1999, Luman continued to perform and create new productions.
He established The Arlyn Award, a world-wide search for truly outstanding design in the puppet theatre. Every puppeteer, anywhere in the world, is eligible to enter. The Arlyn Award is judged every two years and eligible productions must be premiered within the qualifying time period.

Arlyn Award Society
     2012-13 Competition
     c/o 4348 Coastview Drive
     Garden Bay, BC
     V0N 1S1 Canada

Last year, after fifty-one years of performing, Coad rang down the stage curtain and plans to devote the rest of his life to passing the hard-earned knowledge to the next generation of puppeteers.

He has generously offered to edit the book on the life of Alan Cook, sponsored by the International Puppetry Museum. It will include interviews with Alan as well as many photographs of puppets he collected.

Donations for this project are gratefully accepted.

In celebration of Alan’s 80th birthday, IPM is publishing a book of photographic highlights from his vast collection. Alan’s colorful stories of the lives of the represented North American puppeteers, as well as historical details of each figure, will accompany the photographs. A brief background on the collection’s history and future will also be included. With quality photographs, this first-class publication will be a book every puppeteer will want to own.

To produce a quality publication, we will need the services of a professional photographer, an editor, a layout artist, plus a firm to print and bind the book. This require funds which IPM does not have available. And so we are asking for your financial help.

DMITRI CARTER AND THE NORTHWEST PUPPET CENTER

Dmitri Carter has been performing professionally as a puppeteer since childhood and currently serves a Development Director and Associate Artist for Seattle’s internationally acclaimed Northwest Puppet Center, established in 1986 by his parents, Chris and Stephen Carter.. During second and third grade, Dmitri lived in Romania and traveled throughout Europe picking up foreign languages and learning cultural traditions. Upon returning to Seattle, he attended Summit Alternative School where he and a few fellow students established the still successful potter program. At 16 Dmitri went on to attend college through the recently established Running Start program resulting in combined high school and college graduation, both with honors. In college, he served a term on student government and served on the tenure committee for professor of cultural anthropology and ethnic studies.

In 2003, Union Internationale de la Marionette awarded Dmitri one of only two International Scholarship Awards to conduct research in China on the ancient tradition of marionettes. In addition to fundraising, Dmitri also conducts research, curates exhibitions, teaches educational programs, writes articles, documents a variety of puppetry techniques with video and photography, designs publicity materials and still performs regularly. In 2002, Dmitri participated in the pilot session of “Technology Strategies for Nonprofit Leaders” after which NPower, one of the nation’s leading technology focused nonprofits, invited him to serve on the Advisory Committee.

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BOOK COLLECTION FROM RUSSEL SHANK

Towards the end of last year, IPM received a number of cartons of books related to puppetry from a lady named Susan Twist. She told us that her father had been a librarian at U.C.L.A. He was very interested in books on puppetry and had amassed quite a few volumes, some of them quite old and rare. Her family was removing his possessions from his home as he had passed away. She did not want to give the books to the Good Will and thought they would be of use to IPM. As we started to catalog the books, it became clear that we did not have the name of the collector. Although we looked through many of the volumes, there was no clue about who he was.

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GRANT

We have been offered matching grant for the first $1,000.00 in donations made within the next four months. Make your donation really count by filling out the pledge on the left. Your contribution will therefore be doubled!

Your pledge will ensure Alan’s life-long devotion to preserving our heritage is treasured by puppeteers everywhere. There could be no finer tribute than helping to make his collection a resource to the entire puppet world.

Mail Checks to:

International Puppetry Museum
702 The Strand
Hermosa Beach, CA 90254