Eric Bass, Addressing Social Injustice with Puppetry 11/6/17

“The Puppet as 'Other': How Sandglass Theater Addresses Social Injustice"

Eric Bass presents clips from Sandglass’ five most recent show and collaborations, to explore and discuss the quite different ways in which the theater company has done this. Over the last decade, Sandglass Theater’s work has moved deeper and deeper into themes of social justice. As a puppet theater, Sandglass has opened discourse about these issues in ways that are specific to their art form. The puppet represents a being that is always “other” than the human world that animates it. As such, it is a metaphor for many stories of marginalization.

Eric Bass is the Co-Founding Artistic Director of Sandglass, and has worked for 30 years as a director, playwright, performer and mask and puppet maker. In 1982, Mr. Bass founded Sandglass Theater in Munich, Germany, with his wife, Ines Zeller Bass. As a director, Eric has worked in America, Australia, Poland, and Finland, as well as the United States. In 2010, Eric received the Vermont Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts. Eric is currently touring in the Sandglass production of D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks, a piece about people with dementia. This talk accompanies a week-long on-campus residency based on Sandglass Theater’s production of “Babylon” which “looks at the relationship of refugees to their homelands, lost and new, and the conflicts that exist within American communities to which they have fled.”