How to get to ‘Sesame Street’
UConn’s one-of-a-kind puppetry school shows students the strings
Off the main UConn Storrs campus, in a complex surrounded by dilapidated buildings with broken windows, spray-painted graffiti and overgrown plants curling around their facades, students in UConn’s Puppet Arts Program piece together marionettes with paper mache and strings.
UConn’s program has 10 undergraduate and 12 graduate students pursuing a puppet arts major, and five pursuing a minor, according to program director Bart Roccoberton — enrollment in the program usually fluctuates between 18 and 25 students, and that’s on purpose. Roccoberton wants to give each student their own workspace at the Puppet Arts Complex on UConn’s Depot Campus in Storrs.
The buildings were once part of the Mansfield Training School and
Hospital, a facility that was opened in 1917 and aimed to teach those with developmental disabilities. However, the training school was ultimately shuttered in 1993 after lawsuits that complained about the facility’s poor conditions, according to the CT State Library. The area was transferred to UConn in the hopes it could be developed, according to the town of Mansfield.
The building that became the Puppet Arts Complex complex received a $1.5 million renovation and opened for puppetry programs in 2002. Roccoberton admits that students were scared to go to the building at first, but he managed to lure them in by having a cookout.
“When I first went over to look at this building that had been offered, I went, ‘Oh, my God.’ But then I realized, no, this is going to be OK ... they’re going to do something for us,” Roccoberton said. “Our first night out there, I announced that I would grill some chicken and some pineapple and we’ll sit here and eat, and basically break bread together over a new facility. And then I arranged for a couple of performances that were hysterical. We sat in the building laughing.”
The building is now filled with hundreds of puppets from fuzzy Muppet-style puppets to those inspired by cultures from around the world. One exit is guarded by a puppet of the Greek god Poseidon, created from EPE foam and weighing less than 10 pounds, while a 10-foot-tall white polar bear used in a university of production of William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” stands by another. Hallways are lined with molds of faces that students created.
Roccoberton’s classroom houses Dragon (at least her head and tail) and Gingerbread Man from “Shrek: The Musical,” and even a puppet version of himself, which he uses to teach his students the fundamentals of how they operate.
“We’re not in a program that teaches only ( Jim) Henson style; there is one class that we do this in front of TV cameras. A lot of the young kids come in only knowing about the Muppets and I say, look around. How many Muppets do you see here?,” Roccoberton said.
But speaking of Jim Henson, the famed puppeteer behind “Sesame Street” and “The Muppets,” lived in Connecticut for with his wife Jane during what can be described as his “experimental” years. Jane Henson once donated $100,000 to to UConn puppetry program create a scholarship fund.
In a studio in the complex, puppets hang from the shelves — some complete and some a work in progress. At all hours of the day, students can be found in the workspace painting and fine tuning their creations. In a nearby room, called the “puppet lab,” a wooden face and hand tower over sewing machines. If students need materials, a nearby supply
room has bins filled with different colored fabrics and a nearby lab room is filled with paint.
For Hamden native Jennifer Barnhart, who graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in acting with a concentration in puppetry, her experience in the Puppet Arts Program helped her stand out amongst “around 10,000 other tall, deepvoiced actresses in New York City.” Barnhart stressed that the relationships she formed with others in UConn’s puppet community, like Tim Lagasse and Heather Asch, were instrumental in her career. She said the pair recommended her for roles, including on PBS’ “Between the Lions,” on which she played Cleo, a lioness puppet that aims to promote early reading, for around 10 years. She has also performed characters such as Zoe, Maggie Cadabby and Granny Bird on “Sesame Street.” Barnhart occasionally visits the university to connect with newer students.
“If it were not for the things that I learned at the Puppet Arts Program and if were not for the relationships that I fostered there, that ended up opening doors for me in the professional world, I would not be able to make my living as a performing artist. It was just the perfect blend of everything that I loved to do,” Barnhart said.
Because TV shoots typically only last a few weeks, she has to find other job opportunities to cover the rest of the year. She noted that many opportunities come from word of mouth in the puppet world. Aside from children’s TV shows, Barnhart has been able to bring her talents to the Broadway stage in the 2003 musical comedy “Avenue Q.” In the musical, she performs several characters including a yellow Bad Idea Bear, for which she changes her voice to a higher pitch and gleefully recommends potentially disastrous ideas.
Barnhart said the program helped her become more confident in her own skin. As a “tall young woman,” she said that there were moments when she felt uncomfortable as an actress and she could be “a little stiff.” However, using puppets gave her a better understanding of the fluidity of motion and she was able to incorporate some of those elements into her own acting.
“As I was exploring how something moved outside of me, all of those things were able to sort of become integrated into my physicality. I like to say that my studies in puppetry made me a better actor and my studies as an actor made me a better puppeteer,” Barnhart said.
The founding of the UConn puppetry school
The UConn Puppet Arts Program’s founder, the late Frank Ballard, had been fascinated by puppets ever since his aunt Margaret took him to a puppet show at age 5, his obituary reads. His family continued to be instrumental in supporting his hobby, with his aunt helping him craft puppets and his father helping build stages for his performances. The puppeteer performed his first puppet show, a rendition of “The Three Little Pigs,” in front of a stuffed toy penguin named Pal Alfred and some of his family.
Ballard first came to UConn in 1956 as the set designer and technical director of the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre; he wouldn’t teach his first puppetry class until 1964 as part of the school’s new drama graduate program. Before long, Ballard’s puppetry courses had so much interest the university had to limit enrollment because it lacked space and staff; the classes were often taught out of the basement of the M. Estella Sprague Residence Hall.
When UConn’s graduate school was looking to expand in 1965, Ballard was given the chance to establish a master of fine arts in puppet arts — the first graduate program of its kind in the United States. Three years later, he and his students staged the university’s first fulllength puppet production, “The Mikado,” a comedic opera set in Japan. During the production, puppets with expressive painted faces wearing Japanese kimono robes took the stage at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre. Later that year, the Puppet Arts Program established a bachelor’s of fine arts degree and a master’s of
arts degree. It now also offers a minor degree in puppet arts as well as an online graduate certificate.
UConn currently has more puppetry degrees than any other university in the country. The only other institution offering a similar bachelor’s program is West Virginia University, however, its degree has been recommended to be discontinued and merged into its theater major, the Pittsburg-Post Gazette reported in August.
Aside from teaching puppetry courses, Ballard worked to advocate for the art form during his time at UConn. In 1972, he spoke in front of the United Nations General Assembly about the cultural elements of puppetry in the United States, his obituary reads. After his retirement in 1989, Ballard received a letter from thenPresident George H. W. Bush thanking him for his contribution to the arts, according to his obituary.
Since the Puppet Arts Program’s founding, more than 250 students have graduated with various Puppet Arts degrees, including Roccoberton, who holds a master’s degree in puppet arts. He was originally interested in attending UConn for its MFA in Lighting Design but said he was convinced by Ballard that the Puppet Arts Program would help him build the skills he was looking for.
After Ballard retired, Roccoberton said there was fear that the program was “done.” Roccoberton, who was working for the O’Neill Center in Waterford at the time, said that he tried to do what he could to help save the program, including rallying the puppetry community to send letters of support for UConn to state officials, and some students even brought puppets to the Connecticut State Capitol. The university decided to give the program another chance.
Roccoberton wasn’t planning on taking Ballard’s job but said a friend at the school put in an application to the search committee without his knowledge. He was hesitant to interview at first, but he thought about his mentors, like German puppeteer Albrecht Roser, whom he helped bring to UConn to teach for a semester, and Margo Rose, a puppeteer known for touring with her husband Rufus Rose.
“Something that Albrecht Roser and Margo Rose knew about me that I didn’t know about myself was that my purpose in this field is to teach and connect. I got back, and I was working with the students and it was feeling so good. And I guess I never left. Here I am in my 33rd year,” Roccoberton said.
While Roccoberton added that the puppet shows he helped create in the program as a student were “beautiful,” he wanted something that he had more creative influence over. That desire for more freedom led him and a group of others to found the Pandemonium Puppet Company in 1976, a group that toured across the Northeast between Washington, D.C. and Montreal for several years. Now Roccoberton encourages his students to “develop their own voice.”
“We try to get the kids to work with as many tools and materials as possible,” Roccoberton said. “They have access to the building 24/7, so if they get an idea for a class project at three o’clock in the morning, they can run in here and get fabrics.”
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in downtown Storrs
The program has drawn students from across the world, including Rahul Koonathara, a 12th-generation shadow puppeteer from Kerala, India. While the physics major’s family encouraged him away