The Bushwick Starr and Alphabet Arts Host 5th Annual Puppets & Poets Festival This Weekend

Number five is ALIVE! Artists and audiences will explore the relationship between two of the world's oldest and most diversely practiced art forms at Puppets & Poets, a festival celebrating poetry, puppetry, and collaborative hybrid art. To honor the festival's fifth anniversary, Alphabet Arts is bringing back some of the best "puppet poems" from past festivals to be presented alongside plenty of new surprises. The festival features exciting, eclectic performances by puppeteers, poets, musicians, actors, and other artists from NYC, Texas, and California in a cabaret program for mature audiences and a matinee program for all ages. A few highlights of the cabaret program include: puppet performances bringing to life the poetry of Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe; a toy theater performed via live web feed from a bedroom in San Antonio; ukulele haiku-odes by San Francisco poet/musician Annie Bacon; an Adrienne Rich-inspired feminist performance using live plants as puppets; and a speech in defense of glitz and gluttony by the city of Las Vegas itself. The matinee program is free and family-friendly, featuring a musical puppet adventure by Urban Stages called Blown Away by Poetry and interactive activities like sing-alongs and puppet-making.

Featured Artists include: Annie Bacon, Ren Carrillo, Zach Dorn, Jonathan Ellers, Rima Fand, Kevin Hale, Kirsten Kammermeyer, Jamie Moore, Jeremy Mulder, Erin Orr, Liz Parker, Shayna Strype, Rachel Sullivan, Storm Thomas, Zeb L. West, and Olander "Big O" Wilson

Production Team: Amber West (Artistic Director), Neelam Vaswani (Production Manager), Jay Maury (Tech Titan)

Location: The Bushwick Starr theater: 207 Starr Street, Brooklyn, NY [between Irving and Wyckoff]

Directions:

Via Subway take the L Train to Jefferson Street, exit at Starr Street, walk against traffic on Starr, and the theater is 3/4 of a block on the right.

For detailed driving directions visit: www.thebushwickstarr.org/DIRECTIONS

Tickets to evening cabaret are $18.00 at www.thebushwickstarr.org