In March 2009, I was the recipient of funding from the Student Council at California Institute for the Arts for my workshop production of Bride of Wildenstein – The Musical. In Bride of Wildenstein – The Musical, an aging socialite grows fur and claws to recapture the attention of her philandering game hunter husband.
In Bride of Wildenstein – The Musical, an aging socialite grows fur and claws to recapture her philandering game hunter husband’s attention. Using puppets and masks to augment the body, this solo cabaret performance playfully unpacks desire and the contagion of identity with songs that examine the making of a monstrosity.
The weird and tragic love story wildly reimagines tabloid accounts of the real-life “cat woman”, Jocelyn Wildenstein. As the protagonist’s marriage dissolves, she begins to reinvent herself through drastic measures. But biomedical and surgical procedures to become more feline only heighten her sense of estrangement and embolden her quest to find a fiercer sense of self.
CalArts teaches artists to develop the skills and personal drive to reach their creative potential, question received ideas and expand forms of knowledge and experience in the world.
The Cotsen Center for Puppetry and Arts
[The Cotsen Center for Puppetry and Arts is an] American teaching laboratory for contemporary puppetry and performing objects, a Center within the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, [CA]. The Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts was founded in 1998. In 2012, the Center’s courses and focus on puppetry were folded into the overall curriculum of the CalArts School of Theater, where puppet and object theatre remain an important focus and a critical interdisciplinary presence within the Institute.
CalArts, situated 30 miles.. from Los Angeles, was founded as an art school generously supported by Walt and Roy O. Disney in 1961. By 1971, the school offered degrees in art, dance, film (animation), and theatre. Housed in the School of Theater, the puppetry program was established in 1998 with the goal of making the most creative developments in contemporary puppetry available to the students across the Institute’s six schools.
The Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts was created to offer a framework for practical training, artistic innovation, aesthetic inquiry and interdisciplinary investigation. In keeping with the evolution of puppetry through the integration of different art forms, CalArts strives to combine puppet theatre with the use of new technologies and emerging forms and practices that cut across traditional boundaries. These principles continue in the newly integrated puppetry courses, which are open to all students from across the Institute. Students can take a single course as an elective, or a series of courses, creating a focus in puppetry, which includes opportunities to create and produce original work..
World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts
SUPPORT
Bride of Wildenstein was developed at CalArts and the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center with funding from The Durfee Foundation and Ibex Puppetry.
