Puppetry festival pulls strings at UConn this week

Puppeteers from around the world began descending on the University of Connecticut at Storrs on Monday to participate in a week long festival of all things puppet.

The National Puppetry Festival, a biennial event of the Puppeteers of America, includes 20 puppet shows, six other exhibitions, more than 30 professional workshops and a puppet-filled parade through downtown Storrs.

The event is at UConn for the first time since 1970 to help mark the 50th anniversary of the school’s Puppet Arts program, which was founded by the late puppeteer Frank Ballard. It is one of just three programs in the United States offering degrees in puppetry.

More than 500 puppeteers from12 nations are expected to attend, including Carroll Spinney, the man behind characters such as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on TV’s “Sesame Street.”

Spinney, who lives just 20 miles away in Woodstock, got his big break at a similar festival in the 1960s, said Bart Roccoberton, director of both UConn’s Puppet Arts program and the festival.

“It’s a place for connections,” he said. “Jim Henson came to a national festival, saw Carroll do a show that failed miserably, went backstage and told him, ‘I like what youwere trying to do there, come talk tome.’ The rest is history.”

Another Sesame Street star, Sonia Manzano, who played Maria on the show for 44 years, will co-host a puppet variety show, “Late Night with Eugene O’Neill,” on Friday night. There are free daily puppet workshops for kids, who will create sea-creature puppets out of found objects such as soda bottles and milk jugs.

The festival also will have a more serious side, with panel discussions on issues such as how to use puppets in therapy or law enforcement when children have been through sexual assaults or other trauma.

The festival will not be without controversy. It includes a performance of “White Like Me: a Honky Dory Puppet Show,” which U.S. Sen John McCain, R-Ariz., singled out in May while blasting the use of a $30,000 National Endowment of the Arts grant to help fund a puppet festival in Vermont.

UConn is receiving about $10,000 fromthe NEA, according to organizers.

The festival will culminate on Saturday with a puppet parade through Storrs and a fair outside the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry.