THE CENTER AT WEST PARK
PRESENTS

For eleven weeks in Fall 2022 and eleven weeks in Spring 2023, a cohort of artists will meet to share progress on developing new works of puppet theater with the goal to provide supportive feedback for the artists and a useful but flexible structure for making and sharing work. Each resident artist will develop a single piece over the course of the residency.

The 2023 Object Movement Puppetry Festival will take place over two weeks from March 20 through April 1, 2023, in the Center at West Park’s Sanctuary Space. Each week will feature a different program of four original short pieces 10 to 15 minutes long.

CWP’s 2022/2023 Object Movement Puppetry Residency & Festival is curated by artists Maiko Kikuchi, Rowan Magee, Marcella Murray, and Justin Perkins, and features artists Mery Y.Y. Cheung, Sarah Finn & Karen Loewy Movilla, Amy Liou, Kip Miller, Heather Piper, PlayLab NYC (Kevin P. Hale & Jennifer Linn Wilcox), and Preston Wollner.

2022/2023 OBJECT MOVEMENT COHORT

MERY Y.Y. CHEUNG (she/her/they/them) is a puppeteer, producer, and Arts activist in New York City. Lambchop Suey is her puppetry-infused neo-burlesque persona. Her puppeteer credits include Simon and His Shoes (The Tank), Wendy’s puppets (ArtClass), Bloody Brains in a Jukebox (Coney Island USA), Awkwafina is Nora from Queens episode “Grandma and Chill” (Comedy Central), RATSO web series (Mollie Heckerling), Evolve Puppets’ HOME (The Tank), Puppets Come Home! series (Coney Island USA), an international tour of Pedro Reyes’ Manufacturing Mischief (The Tank), Chinese Theatre Works’ Four Seasons (Flushing Town Hall), Sinking Ship Productions’ Puppet Playlist series (The Tank), Mervyn Millar’s Signs of Life (Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center). Producer credits include the Puppet Spread puppet slam series with Ladies of Mischief (The Tank), puppet short films by the Flatulent Friends, short horror film Rat Meat Chief (Warpaint Pictures), independent feature film Sex, Blood, and Fairy Tales (Royal Blood Productions).

Art Activations include Murmurations (LMCC), Museum Mile with IBEX Puppetry (Metropolitan Museum), Naughty, Bawdy, Puppet Cabaret (International Puppet Fringe), CIUSA Mermaid Parade as featured in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2020, New York School of Burlesque Student Showcase, Summer Street Theater tour (Theater for the New City).

Cheung grew up in a first-generation Chinese American household in Brooklyn, New York speaking Cantonese with her parents and English with her two older brothers. The family placed importance on social achievements and obtaining success, which has influenced her exploration of identity, self-value, sociology, power, and spirituality. Cheung studied photography and painting at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre at SUNY College at Oneonta. In 2016, she participated in the National Puppetry Conference at Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, workshopping marionette construction with puppet master Jim Rose and mechanisms with puppet builder Jim Kroupa the following year. Cheung has served on the Board of Directors for the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York, acting as Corresponding Secretary during the past two years. Recently, she volunteered to assist in the launch of Puppeteers of America Mid-Atlantic/Northeast Regional Festival: Puppet Homecoming 2022.

As this year’s Object Movement Festival artist in residency, Cheung investigates the intersection between puppet and body by unveiling that which has been concealed socially, re-learning ways to practice radical self-love, and exploring the object as mirror. Find @Lambchop.Suey and @sideshowrat on Instagram.

Sarah Finn (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist who creates live performance, video and film. Her work explores mythic narratives set in post-industrial wastelands to investigate humanity’s spiritual and ethical unknowns. Using surreal storytelling, video, physical performance and puppetry, they make worlds where queer and beyond-human futures emerge from modern ruins. Her recent puppet film, Our bodies like dams, premiered at Exponential Festival at The Brick in January 2023, and this Spring she’ll be adapting it as a live performance as a resident artist at Mabou Mines. Her previous work has been seen internationally at the Prague Fringe; FringeArts, Mabou Mines, Movement Research, Hudson Guild Theater, and Dixon Place. They trained at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and got their BA from Sarah Lawrence College. www.sarahkfinn.com @sarah.k.finn

AMY LIOU has one heart, one brain, two eyes, two nostrils, ten fingers, and countless blocked pores.

Got a tongue that doesn’t work very well and a face not so symmetrical.

A shy(?) performer that constantly tries to step out of her comfort zone but falls and dies at the border. (And then revive because in theater everything is possible)

Spent the entire life thinking she is the elegant type but in fact a cartoony character to others.

Gets cold sores on the lip when under stress.

Uses most of her time daydreaming or staring at her plants if no work needs to be done.

In all, just a pretty ordinary person who has an equilibrium hairstyle of a ponytail, or high bun (but did not want to show how lazy she is in her headshot).

Or, you can say:

Amy Liou is a performance artist from Taiwan who enjoys moving on stage and off stage. She started her journey as an actor and continues to create original works with objects and movements. Learned and trained with many teachers, her approach to theater is heavily influenced by Oleg Liptsin, T. Terzopoulos of Attis Theatre, and SITI Company in New York. She is intrigued by the tiny moments happening in our lives that shape emotion and stir thoughts and she celebrates those moments by bringing them on stage. Her greatest achievement would be when someone tells her, “I feel like a different person after watching your show” which she is still working hard to make happen. When not onstage, you’d probably find Amy experimenting with a new cookie recipe or dancing around her plants in her kitchen.

Hmm. Nice to meet you.

KIP MILLER is a writer and editor with a poetry MFA from the University of Michigan. She has published poetry in Indiana Review, West Branch, Cream City Review, and others, and has published an essay in Entropy Magazine. In 2019 she created a one-woman eco-puppetry show at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Originally from Ohio, she currently lives in Brooklyn.

KAREN LOEWY MOVILLA is a Colombian artist based in New York City. Her work celebrates hyper femme aesthetics, female and trans biology, and maligned attributes of “womanhood. Combining digital media, embodiment, spoken word, and puppetry she confronts inherent biases, and oppressive systems. Karen co-created and performed Tia Talk at Paper Kraine, The Tank and Ars Nova’s AntFest 2022.  Karen also designs for films, commercials and theater. Recent credits: The Night Alive (Chain Theatre) and Masha/Maria (dir. Catalina Beltran). She assistant directed Sancocho (Christin Eve Cato). She is a resident at Object Movement Puppetry Festival and a 2021 MFA graduate at Sarah Lawrence College.  @lwykaru

HEATHER PIPER is an interdisciplinary artist located in Brooklyn, NY with work ranging from fine art painting to multimedia puppetry performance. She strives to create thoughtful new mythologies with moments of levity inspired by folklore, science fiction, and the occult. The artist’s journey with puppetry began at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied writing and animation, and became involved with Rough House Puppet theater. In 2013 Heather moved to NYC to intern for the Henson Creature shop and went on to work as a freelance fabricator for Puppet Kitchen, Macy’s window displays, commercials for Viacom, McDonald’s, HBO, independent films, music videos, and more. She has also hosted both in-person and virtual puppet-making workshops with an emphasis on the use of recycled materials.

Heather’s art practice consists of object making, costumes, and fine art painting. She found puppetry to be one of the modes of expression that encapsulated most of her interests. Currently, she works as a scenic painter for film and television through Local 829 and has painted sets for Hamilton, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Gilded Age, And Just Like That, and more.

Playlab NYC Founded in 2008, Kevin P. Hale and Jennifer Linn Wilcox, are dedicated to taking fun way too seriously. Favorites include: Drama of Works PUNCH Puppet Slams Damn It/Frankenstein Place in ROCKY HORROR, Mothra! in GODZILLA, and 4th Circle- Greed in INFERNO; Spirit in the Dark at Coney Island USA; Scar Stuff - An Invitation to the Undertaker at Boo! The Players Theatre Short Play and Musical Festival, Humorously Horrendous Haunted Hideaway at the 20th Annual FringeNYC. Their show, Poe‐Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment has appeared at Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival, Figment, FRIGID New York, FringeNYC, and Puppets & Poets 2014 & 2015. At Playlab NYC, we concoct enjoyably absurd and absurdly enjoyable amusements that engage artists and audiences in the spirit of play. www.playlabnyc.org     Follow us on Instagram:  @playlab_nyc

Jennifer Linn Wilcox (Creator / Performer) has appeared in Evolve Puppet’s Evolution at La Mama’s Puppet Series and various puppet slams with Playlab NYC. She was also a part of the Virtual Coney Island USA’s Mermaid Parade 2020: Tail-a-Thon with her Shadow Mermaid. Jennifer has been a participant of Eugene O’Neill National Puppetry Conference and she is a recent graduate of UCONN’s Puppet Arts Graduate Certificate Program.

Kevin P. Hale (Builder / Performer) is a NYC based multidisciplinary theater artist from Northeastern Ohio. Kevin was a participant in the 2022 Object Movement Puppetry Festival and appeared in Puppets Come Home at Coney Island USA. Kevin has been a participant and a resident company member at the Eugene O’Neill National Puppetry Conference. He most recently appeared at The Puckin' Fuppet Show in Atlanta.

PRESTON WOLLNER started his career as a visual artist in his home borough of Brooklyn. He loved to tell stories but was born with dysgraphia, a learning disability that impedes brain-hand coordination, and as a result was especially adverse to anything involving paper and pen. Sculpture was the medium where he built his confidence, a confidence that spread to other mediums that eventually included the written word. He was inspired by Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, and other artists who highlighted the process by which their art was made. Far from being a source of embarrassment, they presented their struggle as a thing of beauty. Art like this taught Preston the worlds that can be unlocked by learning to be true to yourself.

After high school, Preston moved to Chicago to attend SAIC. There he discovered Butoh dance and stop-motion animation. The latter proved to be a prevailing interest of his and he spent the majority of his time in college studying the strange qualities of the medium and their applications. After college, he co-founded an animation company called BAWSY and worked on several personal and professional stop-motion projects in Chicago including a number of animated shorts for comedian David Huntsberger.

In 2017 Preston moved back to New York City and began with children as a stop-motion animation instructor. Not long after Preston was hired on as a marionettist at the Puppetworks theater. He was delighted to find that his background in animation and dance translated into the medium of live puppet theater and he enjoyed getting an opportunity to interact directly with audiences. Puppetworks has taught Preston invaluable lessons about the live performance space and about the mechanical preparations that create the magic we see on stage.

In the years that followed Preston got other opportunities to work on puppetry projects. He co-created and performed a shadow puppet segment for Netflix’s John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch and manipulated marionettes in a short film called Puppet Man slated for release next year. In 2021 Preston wrote and directed Morgus Bootoux’s Shadow Show a child-friendly horror story that he and others performed at the Puppetworks theater.

Preston hopes to take advantage of the opportunity the Object Movement Residency has given him to hone storytelling techniques in the three-dimensional space. He hopes to learn more about puppet theater from this experience and to provide some thrills and chills for audiences along the way.

2022/2023 OBJECT MOVEMENT CURATORS

MAIKO KIKUCHI received her B.A in Theater Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University, Japan in 2008, her M.F.A in Sculpture from Pratt Institute, in 2012.She is a multidisciplinary artist working in illustration, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, animation and puppetry/ performance. Her object theatre pieces include DAYDREAM TUTORIAL(Work in Progress) as part of Under The Radar Festival 2020 (INCOMING! Program) at The Public Theatre, LaMaMa and FiveMyles Gallery, PINK BUNNY at Japan Society and St.Ann’s Warehouse, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENSE at Dixon Place, NO NEED FOR A NIGHT LIGHT ON A LIGHT NIGHT LIKE TONIGHT at LaMaMa, DAYDREAM ANTHOLOGY at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She is currently in artist residency program at HERE collaborating with Spencer Lott. She presented her visual art works in “Crown Heights Film Festival”, group exhibition“In Time/Out of Place” at Parasol Project(NY), “NO PARKING” at Ca’d’ Oro Gallery(NY), “By Chamber 02” at CITAN (Tokyo), WWW(Tokyo) etc. She has also committed to musicians and bands for creating their music videos both in Japan and U.S.

ROWAN MAGEE is a puppeteer and educator from Troy, NY. He has puppeteered on international tours with Phantom Limb Company, Robin Frohardt, Nick Lehane, and Dan Hurlin, and in New York City for American Opera Projects, Trusty Sidekick, Chris Green, Spencer Lott, and the National Theater in the 2018 Tony Award winning Broadway revival of Angels in America. Rowan operated the reference puppet for the titular character in the upcoming feature film Clifford the Big Red Dog, in theaters Fall 2021. He has designed puppets for The Dalton School, St Mark’s School, and Lincoln Center Education, taught for CO/LAB, Marquis Studios, Manhattan Youth, The Brooklyn New School, and Story Pirates, and he has received a Jim Henson Foundation Grant for his marionette show No 1 Chinese. During the pandemic, Rowan directed puppetry for Yiddish New York 2020, The Dalton School’s Hamlet Project, and is designing puppets for a recent Henson Workshop Grant Recipient: One Night in Winter, by Nekaa Lab/Sachiyo Takahashi.

MARCELLA MURRAY is a New York-based theater artist from Augusta, Georgia. She is a playwright, performer, collaborator, and puppeteer. Murray’s work is heavily inspired by the observed ways in which people tend to segregate and reconnect. Her work tends to focus on themes of identity within a community and forward momentum in the face of trauma. Performances include The Slow Room, a piece directed by Annie Dorsen at Performance Space New York; a workshop of Ocean Filibuster which was co-created by the team Pearl D’Amour (Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl) with composer Sxip Shirey at Abrons Arts Center; I Don’t Want to Interrupt You Guys which was created in collaboration with Leonie Bell and Hyung Seok Jeon during RAP at Mabou Mines ; New Mony created by Maria Camia; and Shoot Don’t Talk at St. Ann’s Warehouse/Puppet Lab created by Andrew Murdock. Along with David Neumann, she recently co-created Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed (Obie Special Citation for Creation and Performance) which opened at Abrons Arts Center, co-produced by Chocolate Factory, in January of 2020.

JUSTIN PERKINS is a puppet artist and performer. Recent puppet performance includes Madama Butterfly at Met Opera (cover), and Hansel and Gretel at Michigan Opera Theater (principal). He has appeared in works by Ping Chong+Company (Alaxsxa|Alaska, LaMama, US tour), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (And Here We Are, National Sawdust), Tom Lee (Shank’s Mare, LaMama, US tour), Lake Simons, Patti Bradshaw, Puppet Cinema, Unitards, imnotlost and more. In 2019, his puppet installation DIANAMAS was developed at Puppet Lab at St Ann's Warehouse. Justin's forthcoming work Unicorn Afterlife is supported by the Jim Henson Foundation and developed through residencies at the Jim Henson Legacy Carriage House and Center at West Park, premieres May 2021 at Dixon Place. He is also the Program Director at New Country Day Camp in Staten Island. http://www.justinaperkins.com

2022/2023 OBJECT MOVEMENT PRODUCTION TEAM

JIM FREEMAN – Resident Builder and Technical AdvisorJim Freeman is a builder, filmmaker and actor based in Brooklyn. He has recently made 3D printed heads and hands for Puppetworks, electronic effects and metalwork for Theodora Skipitaris and Tianding He, and carpentry for Loco 7 and Maiko Kikuchi, among many others. Over the past three years, Jim has has the pleasure of working with Tristan Allen to bring Tin Iso and the Dawn to life. You can see Jim’s films Risen, Flight Therapy, Sea Glass and Delicious on www.eurekajim.org.

Jim has been honored to assist the cohort of the Object Movement Puppet Festival, and is looking forward to collaborating with all these wonderful artists in the future.

Line Producer: Madelyn Paquette
Stage Manager: Amanda Kettell

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

Object Movement Puppetry Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Jim Henson Foundation, and the Puppet Slam Network.