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 S.B. Parks’ parents didn’t know it at the time, but she was born a puppeteer in Yuma Colorado. From early musical and sewing training to her first professional acting job in Denver upon graduation from high school, the foundation was laid. S.B. worked as an intern for Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis and produced her first solo show in her late grandmother’s basement before buckling down to a liberal arts education at the University of Colorado. Her B.A. degree in theatre specialized in costume design and construction; her hallmark design project was The Laramie Project in her junior year. College summers were spent in Guatemala learning Spanish, in Colorado as a crafts artisan for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and in New York City working for Blue Man Group Productions. S.B. has since worked as a touring performer and puppet builder for Tears of Joy Theatre in Portland, Oregon, and as a first hand in the Opera Colorado costume shop. She has also had the pleasure to work with puppeteer Betsy Tobin’s Now or Never Theatre where she found a mentor. S.B. has built, adapted, marketed, and performed a new puppet show for child audiences for two years: The Magic Flute and Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi. She revived Rikki Tikki for an abbreviated tour in the summer of 2007 due to her involvement in the O’Neill Puppetry Conference in Waterford, CT. S.B. moved to Storrs, CT in August 2005 to begin a master’s degree in Puppet Arts. UCONN is one of a handful of puppetry degree-granting programs in the world. In Fall 2006 S.B. created a giant rolling pumpkin shadow show—a commissioned work—for the Village Halloween Parade in New York. Also in Fall 2006 She performed a shadow performance based on Chekov’s short story A Dreadful Night in NYC for the Carnival of Samhain, a puppet cabaret at the Abrons Art Center in the Lower East Side. In Spring 2007, along with classmate Keri Lewis, S.B. co-created another giant shadow show, this time in a giant dress performed at UCONN’s Take Back the Night rally. S.B. has worked for the past year and a half producing her MFA thesis show Meet the Samsas with her friend and collaborator Mary Gragen Rogers. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis the show was developed in the emerging artist program at the O’Neill Puppetry Conference, during a three week workshop period at UCONN, and finally culminated in a performance that closed at Connecticut Repertory Theatre April 6, 2008. The piece is a synergy of marionettes, video, and stop motion animation portraying the family from Kafka’s story as if they were indentured in a reality television show. “Puppetry is a medium in which scale and shape, color, light and shadow become a different kind of syntax. Puppetry is more than movement, more than object. It is energy—not only a crossroads of disciplines, but also of time and space.” |
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