Laura Barger

The gifted puppeteer-dancers – Kristen Kammermeyer, Brendan McMahon, Justin Perkins, Rachael Shane – were barefoot and dressed in black; they moved with graceful economy of movement and made themselves into a fantastic combination of invisibility and magisterial artistry. They manipulated more than two dozen every-day-object puppets in gorgeous worlds of sky for birds, water for fish, field and forest for all sorts of creatures large and small. All these animals – made of sticks, brooms, mops, feather-dusters, cardboard-cut-outs, fabric scraps, familiar bits of this-and-that, and unexpected parts of who-knows-what – were right there in front of us. They leapt and loped, swooped and soared; they teased and pleased, tested, tormented and befriended each other and the narrator; they made each person in the audience – old and young, big and little – feel individually included in the menagerie's movements. [more]