Great Small Works’ Online Toy Teater Festivals


“Isolating Together” By Stephen Kaplin A


t the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in February, we at Great Small Works (GSW) found ourselves, like all performing art- ists around the globe, at a


terrible impasse—hunkered down in our separate homes in four different cities and two countries, desperately wanting to engage in some creative action. How was it possible to reach out to friends, colleagues, and audiences and give expression to the strange cultural moment of fear, uncertainty, and isolation we were all going through? From our earliest days in the post-punk East Village, we consid- ered our work a means of creative collective action and network- ing. Our commitment grows out of our six members’ personal beliefs and activism, as well as our strong connections to Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater. We’ve learned to marshal whatever frugal resources and limited time together we had toward devising ambitious events (such as the long-running Spa- ghetti Dinners) that could draw together in celebration a wide and diverse community of friends, supporters, and collaborators. This is what we wanted to create for the weird situation of quarantine, economic chaos, and social distanc- ing the pandemic has caused. So when Trudi Cohen floated the idea of producing an online International Toy Theater Festival, and Mark Sussman sug- gested the name “Isolating Together,” we were off and running. The Toy Theater Festival platform was an obvious choice in many ways. We had been using toy theater as a medium for our original work from our earliest days. We


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had also produced and hosted 10 Interna- tional Toy Theater Festivals over a period of about 20 years at various venues in Manhattan (Theater for the New City, Los Kabayitos Puppet Theater, and HERE Arts Center) and Brooklyn (St. Ann’s Ware- house). Each of these festivals brought together scores of artists and performing groups. In addition to showcasing multiple programs of wildly divergent performance styles for audiences of all ages, the festivals


Greatest Smallest Parades, which featured homemade miniature floats and raucous brass bands.


Poster for Isolating Together: International Toy Theater Festival. Photo courtesy of Great Small Works.


featured curated exhibitions of toy the- ater works, workshops, lectures, films, and symposia. The last three festivals, produced at St. Ann’s Warehouse, were especially ambitious. They used many performance venues, expanded exhibition spaces, and even spilled out into the waterfront parks and cobbled streets of DUMBO with


But could these complex, multifaceted festival events be translated into the nar- row confines of a laptop Zoom meeting for- mat? Fortunately, toy theater performance, which relies heavily on the “compressed power of the miniature” to great dramatic effect, fits fairly easily into the tight frame of the computer screen. Also, although the living presence of the per- former may be lost, the clarity and immediacy of toy theater’s flat, graphic imagery is actually heightened when viewed on a small computer screen. Trudi’s vision guided the production process. It had to happen fast. She wrote in early March to previous festival participants and posted announcements to our social media networks. The assign- ment was not terribly daunt- ing: a three-minute show (plus or minus) in a completely accessible and flexible me- dium. Artists were requested to respect the formal require- ments of traditional toy theater (flat figures within a miniature proscenium stage), but the acceptance process was entirely open. Nobody was chastised for “breaking the box” or going 3D. In a short time, responses were over-


whelming. There were too many to fit into a single program. Rather than turn people away, and to keep the program running time down to a reasonable length, a second evening of shows was added.


The next task was translating what had originally been a cabaret-style event onto social media platforms, none of which


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