Dear class,

This lecture tonight might be good inspiration for our E14 performance project. Also, the work of Bread and Puppet is amazing if you are not familiar with it. Please attend if you can.

Also, as a reminder here are the two out of class required lectures for this term:

Bill Viola 6:30pm Tuesday, March 10. Room 10-250

Paul Mijksenaar 5pm Monday, March 30. Weisner Room

thanks,

dave

Center for Advanced Visual Studies 265 Massachusetts Ave 3rd Fl N52-390 Cambridge MA 02139 617 253 4415 www.cavs.mit.edu

CAVS Fellow John Bell
Spectacle and the Street: Civic Rituals and Public Space
Tuesday, February 24, 6:30 PM

John Bell discusses his work as a creator of street spectacles with Bread and Puppet Theater, Great Small Works, and the Honk! Festival in Boston, New York, and other cities in North America and Europe. Street spectacle is one of the oldest forms of global performance, in which larger-than-life theatricality combines with urban architecture and public thoroughfare to articulate a community's ideas about politics, religion, and society. How have the rituals of street spectacle functioned in previous centuries, and how might they function in the 21st century?

John Bell is a puppeteer, scholar, and teacher whose interests combine practice and theory. He started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. Recognized as one of the preeminent historians of puppet theater in the US, he performs, directs, and otherwise collaborates with Great Small Works, a Brooklyn-based theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Art), edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press), and is currently working on American Puppet Modernism, a study of US confrontations with puppet and object theater over the past 150 years.