Looking for something new and different to do for a date or a family outing? Come to the Puppet Variety Show I’ll be MC-ing this Saturday at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem.
The Great Puppet Follies – Puppet Variety Show
Saturday, April 10, 2010
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
$5 adults, $3 Children (ages 3 – 11)
SCERA Center for the Arts
745 South State Street, Orem, UT 84058
Tickets can be purchased at the SCERA ticket office or online at http://www.scera.org
As many of you know, one of my many projects is the Maxed Out Puppet Comedy Troupe. We perform fairly frequently throughout Utah Country, and will be performing for the annual Puppetry Festival at the Salt lake County Library on Saturday, March 7 at 2:30 p.m.
We are also members of the Puppetry Arts Guild of Utah which hosts an annual puppetry workshop in April where you can learn all about puppets, puppet making, puppet performance, and see performances by puppeteers from all over Utah.
The Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe, based at the University of Missouri, will be performing at the Pardoe Theatre at Brigham Young University in Provo, on January 16th and 17th.
Bunraku is an amazing form of traditional Japanese Puppetry, more properly called ningyō jōruri.
Martin Holman, is the coordinator of the Japanese studies program at University of Missouri and the director of the troupe. He studied Japanese at BYU, and is the first non-Japanese to ever be trained in and perform ningyō jōruri in Japan.
Holman contacted us through our Utah Puppetry website. ” We are, to my knowledge, the only troupe outside Japan that performs traditional Japanese puppetry,” he said. He wanted to clarify that he was slightly misquoted in the BYU press release.
The annual Timpanogos Storytelling Festival is this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in Orem, Utah. Woot!
If you have never attended this fabulous event, you really should check it out. My family and I have been attending every year for the last seven years or so and it is awesome. Many of the stories we have heard at past festivals have remained with us for years.
This year, the festival is featuring another great group of professional storytellers, including Kevin Kling, from NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
Among the local entertainers, my puppetry troupe, Maxed Out Pupptery will be performing again as the pre-show for the Friday evening “Bedtime Stories” event at the beautiful Mt. Timpanogos Park up provo Canyon from 5:30pm to 6:20pm.
As a little incentive to visit our puppetry troupe’s new website, here is the first of our puppet videos :
The Hardware Store. – A hardware store clerk meets a very persistent customer.
Enjoy.
The 18th annual Timpanogos Storytelling Festival starts tomorrow, August 30th in Orem, Utah and continues through Saturday, September 1st.
The storytelling festival is absolutely awesome! If you have never been, and can be in Utah County this week, it really is worth checking out.
Every year, they invite ten or so of the most accomplished national and even international storytellers to come to Utah to teach workshops and perform for the festival. The festival is well known among professional storytellers, and each year the tellers comment on how impressive the event is when compared to similar events nation wide. Thousands of people attend.
Sorry for the lapse in blog postings during the last couple of weeks. Blogging is but one of my time-wasting endeavors. As many of you know, another is Puppetry.
My cousin Rus Wilson, his wife Kelly, my close friend Sean Healy, my wife Chastity, and I founded the Maxed Out Puppetry – Puppet Comedy Troupe nearly a decade ago while still students and recent graduates of Brigham Young University. Since then we have performed at museums, libraries, festivals, parties, churches, and many other venues, primarily in Utah County, but also as far north as the Davis County Library in Layton and as far south as Filmore.
Since then we have been joined by additional puppeteers: Caitlin Shirts, Patrick Svensson, and David Wilson.
We are very excited to present our brand-spanking-new website:
