I got this email from a puppeteer friend this week. Sophia’s company best known for building the puppets seen in the yearly New York City Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. If you have some extra cash and are looking for a truly incredible way to spend a vacation this summer, this is the trip for you.
8th ANNUAL PUPPETRY WORKSHOP IN THE ITALIAN ALPS
Learn to create large-scale puppets and other visual elements for site-specific community pageant in close collaboration with local residents of a small hamlet in the Italian Alps. The project creates new works each year for the event, drawing on oral histories, local folklore, and regional agrarian rituals. After 8 years, the festival and workshop are still going strong, and are now a much anticipated neo-tradition in the Maira Valley. Beyond the basic workshop in pageant-building, the week includes Occitan step-dancing sessions, trips to nearby Medieval churches and cheese farms, and other unpredictable wonders. The gourmet meals (3/day) are prepared with local “Slow Food” produce.
- Families/children welcome
- No Italian language or puppetry experience required.
- The workshop is conducted in English, and we speak Italian and French as well.
You can learn more through the Processional Arts Workshop website here.
