Magische Pferde

Just spotted this: a book I illustrated recently, Magic Hoofbeats, translated into German. Language rights have been bought for a couple of my other books, but this is the first time I've actually seen one of them with translated text.

James Mars

Going back even further: me playing the Parson in a still from a video of a shadow/toy puppet show, James Mars, directed by Bob Bresnick, built by Leslie Weinberg, the brilliant husband and wife team of Puppetsweat. They trained me as a replacement dancer/puppeteer for this two person show with narrator in 2004, and performed 5 shows, in Springfield, MA, and Portsmouth, NH. I cannot express how much I loved doing this. Though I've been on the outskirts of theater all my life, this was my first time as a performer.

Der Signal

Der Signal, the second show I did with Puppetsweat, made the New York Times when we performed it live with the Tactus ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music. A big production with 7 puppeteers, and a big theater with a big audience. Pretty exciting stuff for a farm girl.

Terra Mirabila

Backtracking to May/June: Terra Mirabila, a spectacular of light, laser, music, dance, water and fire. A one hour show put on by the Projects2K group in a working granite quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut. I got recruited to join the movement/shadow team directed by Joyce DiLauro of the Starship Dance Theater. And it became my debut as a fire performer too. This was pretty much my life for 6 weeks, I miss the place and the people very much. A photo of the giant 60 foot sail-screen raised during a pre-set. (For an idea of the big-ness of this place, that is Joyce sitting on a rock, and her husband Raphael is the tiny dot on the dock under the sail.) And our luxurious dressing room, #26.

Terra Mirabila

A promotional photo of Terra, duel shadows of me doing my flag poi thing. A lot of this show was so similar to what I learned with Puppetsweat for James Mars, but the polar opposite as far as scale. James Mars is tiny tiny, Terra was big big!

Terra Mirabila

How cool! My debut as a fire twirler makes the local entertainment paper. From the same paper, beautiful photos of us as monks in the boat, and as the 3 graces on the docks under the sail.

fire spin / ice spin

Between scanning and uploading all the snowflakes by dozens of talented children's book artists for the Robert's Snow project, I managed to do one of my own too. I couldn't decide between my two favourite preoccupations, ice skating and fire spinning, so I did both and it turns out they compliment each other better than expected. I have an obsession with making things spin, and spinning myself-- not surprising for a lover of Rumi and wishful whirling dervish.

wednesday spin

Photos from the CT Poi weekly spin, behind IONs in Middletown, Connecticut. Joe, Scott, and Matt with fire poi.

mask making

Elizabeth and Margie

The Elm Shakespeare Company is doing Romeo and Juliet this year. I'm the chauffeur, but tonight I joined costume designer Elizabeth and the Andreassi family in an art party, to make 14 masks for the opening ball scene of the play. We did it, mostly, in one evening of wine and cookies.

first blog

A blog. This may or may not be a good idea. But it's worth a try. I'm into all kinds of things lately, thought this might be a better place to show it off than my web site. So here goes.