Open Eye Theatre Announces the Relaunch of Puppet Lab

Open Eye Theatre recently announced the return of Puppet Lab, the Twin Cities’ celebrated incubator program for emerging puppet and mask artists. Two new co-artistic directors and four residency artists will participate in Puppet Lab this year. Projects will be workshopped during the spring and summer, and the program will culminate in a two-week festival of public performances at Open Eye Theatre in August 2022.

The Puppet Lab program, created by Alison Heimstead in 2010 for In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, has transitioned to Open Eye. Puppet Lab will continue to establish a formalized process for emerging puppet and mask theater artists to advance their artistic development – to test and create new works within a supportive and challenging workshop environment. This program gives artists the time and space to test ideas, learn from others, and receive and respond to critical feedback. Puppet Lab seeks to nurture exploratory, experimental, and innovative performance, and is interested in ideas that work within traditional forms as well as projects that are new in every way.

Oanh Vu and Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra join Open Eye’s leadership team as Co-Artistic Directors of Puppet Lab. The Artistic Directors will work as a team to coordinate and facilitate the artistic activities of Puppet Lab.

Four residency artists will workshop their projects this year: Dominique Herskind, Mary Plaster, Liping Vong, and Amoke Kubat. This new cohort of puppetry artists will fill the Open Eye workshops with their creative explorations and have their finished works professionally produced in a two-week festival of public performances in August.

“I am deeply honored that Puppet Lab’s founder, the visionary Alison Heimstead, has invited Open Eye to continue the program, and that the Jerome Foundation has continued their generous support,” says Joel Sass, Open Eye Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director. “And I could not be more excited for Oanh Vu and Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra to join the Open Eye leadership team!”

“I am thrilled to see that Puppet Lab is continuing with such brilliant leaders!” said Alison Heimstead, founder of Puppet Lab. “Rebekah and Oanh are incredible artists and they will be strong, compassionate and critical leaders for this lab experience for many new and experimental voices in puppetry. Puppet Lab is in good hands!”

Artist Bios/Statements

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra (she/her, Maya-Lenca tribal citizen)

Rebekah is a Twin Cities-based interdisciplinary artist, musician (Lady Xøk), dancer, curator, writer, actor, puppeteer, teaching artist, and culture bearer whose work is rooted in Indigenous Futurisms. A curator of many performances, festivals, community events, panels, she is also a 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow whose visual interdisciplinary performance work has been developed with Red Eye Theatre, New Native Theatre, Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop, Catalyst Arts, and ArtShanty. Most recently she performed live at the La MaMa Puppet Fest in New York City.

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Oanh Vu (she/her) 

Oanh is an artist and educator who first encountered puppetry through Monkeybear's Harmolodic Workshop’s puppetry intensive and mentorship program. Since then, puppetry has become her passion as I’ve transitioned into a career as a puppeteer. Oanh has trained with master puppeteers through the Chicago Puppet Festival,Tom Lee, Rough House Puppets, the O'Neill National Puppetry Conference and Manual Cinema. Locally, Oanh has created and collaborated on a wealth of new puppet works that have been shown across the Twin Cities. As an educator, Oanh has worked for 13 years with the Science Museum of Minnesota.

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Dominique Herskind (she/her/they/them)

“I really enjoy mixing humor with existential dread and exploring the corporeal nature of our existence. Humor is a good narrative tool to use to tackle heavy topics, because laughter breaks down our barriers and lets us be more open to different thoughts and opinions. That’s the beauty of puppets, too: puppets allow the viewer to see the world reflected back to them through another lens. My project follows a puppet whose mind/consciousness is severed from its body. The mind can’t get the body to do what it wants, and the body can’t make the mind do what it needs. How can the body and mind be unified to keep its soul, the center for creativity, from dying? Puppetry allows life to be exaggerated, and I can’t think of a better medium to showcase the detachment of the mind and body.”

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Amoke Awele Kubat (she/her)

“As an emerging artist at 72 years, I have few peers (creative and personal). It is my intent to continue to grow as an artist and as a human being. My mind is sharp. My creativity is like gamma rays. My strongest talents are curiosity and the alchemy of process. I’m not afraid of trial and error, having younger mentors, or leaping into the void of creation. To develop a performance for Puppet Lab, I see myself as a "puppet", and animating the "stuff" found in an old lady’s purse! Using a variety of puppets and masks, an old woman remembers significant moments in her life. We see and hear simple stories as she removes and examines items from her purse. I will be exploring the journey of aging that does not end in dismissal and isolation and death. It is a journey that highlights each chapter of human experiences: child, teen, adult, elder, ancestor and descendant.”

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Mary Plaster (she/they)

“I’m so excited to be part of Puppet Lab because this in-person (not virtual!), supportive, intensive group process–focused on immediate, specific performance goals–is something I’ve never experienced in a lifetime of art and giant puppet making. As a visual artist, the last two years abruptly halted my paid work; displays in art galleries were also shut down due to COVID-19 concerns. Plunged into this sudden stillness I took a hard inventory of my life’s arc and realized it was imperative to use the time to make tangible steps towards long-held objectives of developing smaller, more intimate storytelling. Much of my life’s work supports environmental activism. The project I plan on workshopping for Puppet Lab 2022 is a portion of a longer, dark fairytale I have just started developing. It will explore creatures and grand elements of nature as a call to return to the outdoors, to care for and defend wild places.”

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Liping Vong (she/they)

“With puppetry, anything goes—puppets can be magical and inhabit wild worlds and defy physics that other other performance art forms are tied to. I hope to take advantage of Puppet Lab’s collaborative process and feedback style to dive out of my comfort zone of performing and to develop and nurture my writing skills for puppetry. These explorations are new and important to me because I am a child of refugees from Laos, and my family is ethnically Chinese. Because my sisters and I grew up in small-town-turned-sprawling-suburb Iowa, in a predominantly white community, Chinese myths, folktales, other stories, and traditions didn’t quite make their way to me. Creating a body of work that honors these tales from my heritage is a long-time goal of mine. I also hope that learning about these stories will lead me to other tales.”