Place (no) Place
Place (no) Place performances on Saturday June 23rd and Sunday June 24th 2018 at the NYS Puppet Festival.
Tom Lee – and his wife Lisa Gonzales, will be performing a puppetry/dance piece called place (no) place – an exploration of place and memory – for the New York State Puppet Festival. Lee shared with the Owl some about their experiences in the world of puppetry and performance , and what it means to be a part of this inaugural event.
I am a designer, director and puppet artist who grew up in Hawai’i and am now based in Chicago. My mother, Marilyn, is originally from Schenectady, New York. Growing up in Hawai’i, I was exposed to many Asian performing traditions including Indonesian shadow puppetry and Japanese Bunraku puppetry. I went to Carnegie Mellon University to study acting and went to New York after graduation. It was there that I discovered an entire community of artists involved in creating puppetry for adult audiences, a pursuit that seemed to combine my love for performing and design in a perfect way. Since then, I have made my career designing directing and performing puppetry. I have appeared on Broadway with the life size horse puppets of War Horse and at the Metropolitan Opera performing puppetry for Madama Butterfly. But I am particularly excited about the NYS Puppet Festival because it will bring some very interesting work to communities and audiences outside of the metropolitan U.S. I am also so pleased that my teacher, Japanese Master Puppeteer Koryu Nishikawa V, will be part of the festival. He is remarkable traditional artist who practices cart puppetry, a fascinating and unique form of puppetry that folks in Wyoming County will be simply astounded by. In addition, I will be presenting a short children’s shadow show entitled “Tomte” about a small gnome who watches over the people and animals on a small, secluded farm.
Lisa and I are bringing a show entitled Place (no) Place, a two person performance combining dance, puppetry and video. We set out to explore place andmemory using our family histories in Louisiana and Hawai’i as a starting point. These places are undergoing intense physical and cultural transformation in the space of a few generations due to the environmental and societal forces unleashed by the human species. Why hold onto them at all? Why cling to the complexity of places and their memories, both joyful and painful? We invite the audience to bring their own memories of the places they grew up to our performance.
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Lisa Gonzales is a dance maker, performer, and associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. Interested in the complex array of meanings revealed by bodies in relationship to environment, Gonzales’ work often investigates some aspect of the power and frailty inherent in humanness. She has shown her work at DTW in New York, The Dance Center of Columbia College and Links Hall in Chicago, Lu-Ling Theater in Taipei, the Dostoyevsky Theater in St. Petersburg Russia, in Helsinki, Finland, and in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Gonzales is co-founder of The Architects, a dance collective dedicated to the performance of improvisation.
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Tom Lee is a puppet artist, designer and director. His work explores the synthesis of manipulated objects, miniatures and figures with the language of film and animation. His work includes puppetry for the stage adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Shank’s Mare, a collaboration with Japanese fifth generation master puppeteer Koryu Nishikawa V.
His puppetry performance includes Hiroshima Maiden, Disfarmer & Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed (Dan Hurlin), War Horse (Broadway), Madama Butterfly (Metropolitan Opera), Petrushka & Le Grand Macabre (NY Philharmonic).