Ode to Walt Whitman, a tender, silent puppet poem uncovers a dialogue between Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca. Within the context of an online gay chat room, their poetic dialogue contrasts Whitman’s America, a nation full of lovers and comrades, with what Garcia Lorca sees, an America inundated with machines and tears.

Hand puppets, a butterfly marionette, masks, grass bunraku puppets, toy theater, shadows and video projections depict Whitman and Garcia Lorca chased through a surreal and tragic landscape. Live organic electronica by Martin Dosh accompanies the scene.

This intricate work reveals and updates conversations between Whitman and Garcia Lorca, extending their metaphors into the postmodern gay world. This puppet ode hearkens for a remembrance and realization of Whitman’s love and Whitman’s dreams of America.

• Bart Buch- creator, puppeteer
• Adam Collignon- puppeteer
• Ramon Cordes- puppeteer
• Martin Dosh- composer/musician
• Kevin Long- puppeteer

In collaboration with D. Blake Love

We all live in the Mortal City. Much of our life, it is an aching, chilled, stiff, ill-protected, fragile, complicated place. We fight off the chill and aches as best we can. We brave ice storms to go on blind dates and eat spaghetti while wrapped in blankets inside the body of the city. We use tools to compensate and create a spark, find warmth, keep warm. Puppets are tools we use, simple tools that mirror us creating the spark. Cities are elaborate tool sets in which we all go about trying to strike a spark, keep the spark alive, and pay our rent. Here we are in a room in the middle of this city.

Inspired by Dar William’s song of the same title, Mortal City also uses music and imagery to create a poem of a city that feels, breathes, gives and takes. We explore creating this city live – its music, its infrastructure, its lights, its characters, its periwinkle skies. Our process has been an exploration of the richness of having two creators/performers, and we’ve sought to stay true, to the simplicity, sustainability, and elegance of two-ness in our collaborative process and in our show. As two non-professional musicians, the creating and performing of music has been a challenging, vulnerable, and fun step for the both of us. We invested a lot of time in exploring sound, and invested all of our materials budget on a piano and looping pedal.

We have worked together on many puppet projects over the past few years but Mortal City is our first show created in partnership. We aimed to find the strength of Mortal City in full collaboration and feel very pleased to have authentically achieved this goal. We feel our ideas, images, music, and aesthetics layered in a cozy way. Thank you to HOBT’s new Puppet Lab program for providing a warm, supportive Petri dish to grow within. -Bart Buch and D. Blake Love, performed at Heart of the Beast in March, 2011

Artemis Hunts Winter’s Heart explores the mythology of the Greek goddess, Artemis through bunraku puppetry and large-scale projection of manipulated video and shadows.

Performed at Heart of the Beast’s “For the Love of Puppets Cabaret”, February, 2010.

In collaboration with Masanari Kawahara.

This event commemorated the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to honor the people that perished in these bombings and in all wars. The ceremonial performance will feature floating lanterns, large lantern puppets, movie-screen-sized shadow puppetry, a children’s Butoh troupe, large video projection onto Powderhorn Island and live acoustic/electronic music. Peace Day Lantern Ceremony will be based on the ancient lantern ceremonies celebrated in many Asian countries, and will honor the intent with which the ceremony is currently celebrated in Japan.

Since the world’s first atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the lantern ceremony has taken on a new meaning in Japan. Japan’s Buddhists believe the souls of their ancestors visit them every year; they put out lanterns to guide the spirits, and when the visit ends the lanterns are set adrift to light the souls’ path back to heaven.

Now every year on August 6, the lantern ceremony not only commemorates those who died in the world’s first two nuclear attacks, it also honors all those killed in past wars and is an expression of hope that nuclear weapons will never be used again.

Performed in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, August 2009, 2010.

This multiple-evening shadow projection piece employs Turkish shadow theatre placed in new territory, modern day Minneapolis.
Visual language, shadow puppetry, video and live music combine in this outdoor performance. The narrative unfolds over 3 evenings each night at a different location in Minneapolis. April, 2010

Created by:

• Minneapolis Art On Wheels Residents, Kyle Loven & Bart Buch
• Minneapolis Art On Wheels Research Assistants, Andrea Steudel & Sinan Goknur

140 million years ago, angiosperms (flowers) mysteriously appeared on the earth and started stitching together a rapid-growing, colorful tapestry of life that made us possible. How Flowers Changed the World is a silent toy theatre puppet show accompanied by classical and experimental guitar music that shows us cosmic and old-fashioned vignettes of a flower powered universe.

Performed in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Minneapolis for the 100th anniversary of the garden.

Created by Bart Buch, performed with Adam Collignon, music by Tim Cronin and Reed Aubin.