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