Get ready to make some wood chips and dust as we dive headlong into the dynamic world of puppetry design and wood carving techniques!

This unique workshop will offer students the opportunity to gain basic fluency in traditional European-style hand carving AND power carving techniques.

The week begins with an overview of tools, safety, woodgrain, grips and cuts, with the goal of understanding the mechanics of each tool, our material, and the development of knife skills.
The laboratory will continue with discussions of puppet design topics including technical drawings, the abstract/realism continuum, emotion/tone, the interplay between design and performance, controls, joints, painting, and simple costume patterning.

The workshop is open to beginning and intermediate carvers alike. Some experience with puppet making is helpful, but not necessary.

Space is limited so sign up early to ensure a spot.

The Instructors

Dave Lane is a painter, performer, puppet & mask maker, and one of the original members of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop in Calgary, Alberta. He is the Co-director of the New England Puppet Intensive, a 15-day residential workshop, and Co-producer of the annual Berkshire Lantern Walk in collaboration with the Clark Art Museum.

Dave is a two-time, Jim Henson Foundation grant recipient for his original play “The Chronicles of Rose”, and his silent-clown play “The Painting” was a regional selection at the 2017 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. He is the co-creator of Iinisikimm, a puppet-lantern play celebrating the return of Plains Buffalo to Banff Nation Park in Alberta. The project was supported by a Canada Council New Chapter Grant

Peter Balkwill is also a founding co-Artistic Director of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, as well as founding co-Education/Artistic Director for the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry, and the curator of live performance for the Festival of Animated Objects. Through the arc of his artistic journey Peter has focused primarily on the physical nature of theatre and live performance, with a strong emphasis on the application of puppetry, and how design integrates into the embodied form of expression. Recently he has begun to apply the implication of dance into his work.

Through much of his work, design, and performance Peter has sought to elevate puppetry up to a level of sophistication, moving it past the moniker of children’s entertainment, joining the current renaissance within North America at least, of restoring puppetry to a high-art – a form that is able to address deep, dark, complex and epic themes relevant to people of every walk and any age of life.