![]() Even the design of the Miriam puppet is distinct, for the figure is collapsible and painted to look like a porcelain doll. Wansker’s creation addresses trauma and survival through art, and she hopes the audience finds healing and recovery through the story. By the end, though, Miriam breaks free from the pain that is burying her. Eventually, she begins to sink into the ground, yet she cannot dig herself out. She stands with a shovel and protects all that she has left every single day. Amid her grief, all that she can bring herself to do is guard the remains of her house, which is just a façade. In the work, a woman named Miriam loses her home and family in a war. I woke up one morning and I wrote this story.” “My project is a folk story about the day my grandmother passed away a couple years ago,” she said. Her live piece “Miriam Unleashed” was inspired by a story she wrote about her grandmother. Rachel Wansker, an Alliance Theatre teaching artist, also has a project in this year’s show. Occasionally, the pieces in XPT can be deeply personal. I had people building things out of cardboard with me, building puppets with me, rehearsing with me and getting into the flow of things.” This project, I was back in an environment with people. Because of COVID and time I needed after college, all the animations I did were one-person jobs, me hunched in a corner in the dark, moving paper very slowly. ![]() “This year, the most growth I’ve had is working collaboratively again. “Every XPT I’ve done has been a fundamental growing experience,” she said. Quinn said she didn’t realize how much she’d missed collaborating during the pandemic, which caused the cancellation of XPT in 20. “Having it done through puppetry, where it literally exists in the real world onstage as a tangible object, that couldn’t be done with just a filmed version of the piece.” “Doing this as just a stop-motion film would’ve been nice, but breaking that fourth wall, having the puppet come out and exist in two different spaces, was the core appeal of the idea to me,” she said. “The first-time showing is happening at the Center for Puppetry Arts, and it’s being presented with a live musical performance from a pianist because it’s an old-timey film.”įrom there, she said the story gets much crazier, with characters jumping out of the film to interact with the music. “It’s set up to be this long-lost black and white German expressionist short film from the 1920s that was found in a beat-up film canister in the bottom of an archive,” she said. This year, Keira Quinn, a SCAD-educated filmmaker who first contributed to XPT in 2016, will present her stop-motion animated film “Politergeist.” It involves a ghost cat, an old lady and even some live performance music elements that break the “fourth wall” of the film in surprising ways. Still, this method of creation, where showrunners try to create film and stage projects on a shoestring budget in a few months, can lead to some rather inventive work. “I run into this situation all the time where people don’t have certain things done on time, according to the timeline we have set for the show, or not knowing what to do when someone drops out,” Tilton said. ![]() The program director said the scope of the work and time involved with staging XPT sometimes surprises the volunteers. Those willing to take on the challenge receive a small grant of about $450 to help finance their projects, and volunteers interested in learning about puppetry, regardless of experience level, step in to help stage the show. “Some people don’t have that experience, whether they’re an actor or puppeteer, to put on their own show. “What’s interesting about it is the fact that we are so open to bring people in who just have an interest in the idea of putting on their own show,” Tilton said. ![]()
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