Abstract
Developments in American puppetry that had begun during the early years of the Little Theatre Movement had by 1939 extended to all areas of high and low culture. New types of puppets, or older forms of puppets in new contexts—including those from Asian as well as European traditions—had been seen in avant-garde and mainstream theatre; in political street demonstrations and consumer-oriented street parades; as advertising propaganda in department stores; in scores of Federal Theatre Project productions across the United States; on screen in both experimental and mainstream films; and even in the nascent medium of television. And at Paul McPharlin and Marjorie Batchelders initiative the Puppeteers of America had been founded in 1937, a little than two decades after Ellen Van Volkenburg had invented the word “puppeteer.” The 1939 New York World s Fair, like all world s fairs before it, proved to be a great patron of pup-pet and performing object shows, and this huge performance event marked a noteworthy climax to the growth of modern American puppet and object performance before World War Two.
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Notes
Joseph Philip Cusker, “The World of Tomorrow: The 1939 World’s Fair” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1990) 2.
For a fascinating contemporary account of Worlds Fair performance, see Morton Eustis, “Big Show in Flushing Meadows,” Theatre Arts Monthly 23.7 (July 1939): 566–577.
See also Richard Wurts, The New York World’s Fair in 155 Photographs (New York: Dover, 1977).
Remo Bufano, “The Marionette in the Theater,” The Little Review 11.2 (Winter 1926): 42.
Frank Worth, “Impressions of American Puppetry,” Puppetry 10 (1930): 5.
Ibid.; and Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (Boston, MA: St. Martin’s Press, 1984) 288.
Paul McPharlin, “The Puppet Decade in America,” Puppetry 10 (1939): 3.
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© 2008 John Bell
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Bell, J. (2008). From Sorcery to Science: Remo Bufano and World’s Fair Puppet Theatre. In: American Puppet Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613768_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613768_8
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