PhysFestNYC Workshop: Assembling Ourselves through Movement and Puppetry

Assembling Ourselves through Movement and Puppetry led by Jessica Grindstaff of Phantom Limb Company 

Participants will have the opportunity to workshop with Phantom Limb Company to find/create relationships between a mock-up life size reindeer puppet and a dancer’s body. We will conduct the workshop just as we would a rehearsal with prompts and questions to find possible relationships that we can devise as a group to tell a story of the loss of symbiosis and migratory pathways. Where does the puppet begin and the person end or vice versa… Focusing on energy exchange, collaborative movement and generosity as we find new languages together.

Jessica Grindstaff is a New York City-based visual artist, playwright, director and co-founder of Phantom Limb Company. For the past decade, Jessica has created a trilogy exploring humans’ relationship to nature or the environment. This work has taken her to Antarctica, on an expedition to discover the oldest living tree in the world and finally to Fukushima, where the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown of 2011 have devastated a tremendous area of Northern Japan to this day. Her work in theatre is collaborative, image based and intuitive, using a collage like approach while centering on the intersection of puppetry, movement and storytelling.

Phantom Limb Company (PLC), New York City-based, creates iconic stories that are built on an intersection of innovation, social change and visual art, with a particular focus on the climate emergency and environmental injustice. Collaging puppetry, movement, multi-media storytelling and design, this unique integration of social impact and aesthetic is essential to their work.

They are truth seekers, storytellers and deep believers in the power of collaboration to inspire engagement and action.

They are best known for The Environmental Trilogy, developed over the course of a decade for Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival.

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PhysFestNYC is a community-focused festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theaters. As an annual gathering, provides space for practitioners, audiences, and the physical-theater-curious to share in presented works, diverse workshop offerings, and community-building events.

Broken Box Mime Theater's mission is to activate the imagination of our audiences, contemporize the art of mime, and remind us all of the power of simple storytelling.