EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
30 September 2008
Center for Puppetry Arts Wins Microsoft Education Award
Permanent collection available online September 30
Washington — The Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta has been delighting children and adults ever since Kermit the Frog and the late Jim Henson of Muppet fame cut the ribbon in 1978 at its official opening.
The founder and president of the center, Vincent Anthony, himself a puppeteer, was at that time head of the American branch of the international puppetry organization Union International de la Marionnette, the oldest theater organization in the world, which is now headquartered at the center. Every four years the association has an international festival in a different country. The festival was held in the United States in 1980, and Anthony had fiscal responsibility for the project.
“I saw the potential for something incredible,” Anthony said. “We took over the entire Kennedy Center [in Washington], and we had performances all over the Kennedy Center. We had two major exhibits in Washington — one at the Corcoran [Gallery of Art] and one at the Smithsonian. We curated puppets from all over the world, and we had an education component at the Kennedy Center as well. So that gave me the idea — because I didn’t want that to go away. I wanted the United States to have the ability to entertain the world’s artists and to celebrate the puppetry field through looking at objects.”
The Center for Puppetry Arts has won many awards: it has 12 times won puppetry’s highest award, the Citation of Excellence; it has repeatedly been chosen as one of MSN.com’s top-10 children’s museums in the United States; and, among other honors, it was named a laureate of the 2008 Microsoft Education Award on September 9.
The center’s interactive museum features hands-on fun with more than 350 ancient and modern puppets from around the world, while the center’s permanent collection comprises more than 1,000 puppets.
“If someone wants to see what puppetry was like, is like in their region, we have it,” Anthony said. “The center is global in nature, and someone coming from another country can connect very easily with their culture, or understand another culture.”
“We wanted to put a magnifying glass over the field globally and to look at all of it on an ongoing basis, which is what we’ve done for 30 years. We wanted to highlight every aspect of the field that we possibly could — that’s the reason the word ‘center’ is in our title.”
Create-A-Puppet Workshops are available for children from kindergarten through grade 12 on such topics as “Cultural Awareness through International Puppetry.” Workshops for preschool children have been offered since 1995. Adult education classes in puppetry started in 1997.
The center attracts more than 350,000 visitors each year to its workshops, puppet shows and exhibits.
In the Family Series, the center’s company of puppeteers presents original adaptations of such classic stories as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Pirate Mermaid.”
The New Directions Series is geared toward adults with, for example, the Xperimental Puppetry Theater presenting mature content and employing everything from marionettes to robots and masked dancers.
The center’s Microsoft Education Award is one of the 2008 Tech Awards, a program of The Tech Museum of Innovation to recognize global innovators who are applying technology to benefit humanity and spark global change. The award recognizes the center’s distance learning program for improving education quality for rural and low-income communities, as well as those with special needs, by delivering arts lessons through interactive videoconferencing.
In a sample interactive video class on the center’s Web site, one of the center’s teachers leads a class through the construction and manipulation of their own puppets, which can then be used to explore topics from the biology of butterflies to rainforest ecology.
The center is one of the few arts or performing arts museums to provide classes via videoconferencing. For school districts facing serious budgetary constraints, interactive videoconferencing is an excellent way to provide students with hands-on experience in the arts.
Anthony said he has a vision: “total access to the center from any part of the globe.”
He sees “tremendous potential” globally for virtual tours, interactive programming and distance learning. “I want to eventually have all of what we do available on a regular basis on our Web site — which means you can go in, you can look at a performance taking place, you can go to the distance learning studio and see what’s happening there,” Anthony said.
More than 130,000 students in 43 states and three foreign countries have participated in the center’s distance learning programs.
On September 30, the center launched its permanent collection online.
The Henson family announced in 2007 that it was choosing the center as the home for their definitive collection of Jim Henson’s creations — somewhere between 500 and 700 puppets, props, scenic elements, posters, sketches, drawings, films and videos. The collection will be housed in a newly proposed Jim Henson Wing, to be included in the center’s new museum space, scheduled to open in 2011 in Atlanta.
“We have a huge challenge ahead of us,” Anthony said. “We are going to be looking for a lot of people who would be willing to help us in making this a reality.”
To see more photos of the center’s puppets and activities, see this photo gallery on America.gov.
For more information about the Center for Puppetry Arts or to view its online collection, visit the center’s Web site.
Photo Gallery: The Center for Puppetry Arts