2022 Scholarship Recipient Maïté Agopian reflects on her experience

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thanks to Bernd Academy, I am learning to make and tune my instruments to sparkle some joy around. 

For all the hardship Covid brought, while it isolated many, it did open some of my world, giving me the sudden opportunities to learn from many puppeteers, and “meet” a worldwide online community from the comfort of my little alaskan cabin. Bernd Ogrodnick first Academy Class was such an opportunity. I could take the time to learn from a master puppeteer in Iceland how to transform my little workshop into a partial woodshop, how to make wooden puppets from scratch, how to use some tools I was so afraid to touch before, and how to get over performance fear, all on my own good time. Over a year and a half, I started to truly understand how to make various kinds of wooden puppets through repetition, time, well documented lessons, and our monthly facebook Q&A, gaining not only craftmanships but also confidence. 


With Bernd’s new Mastermind Program (AMP), I can continue to learn in this rhythm that works so well for me, as classes are intertwine with my regular life and projects. This year I'll focus on tuning my instrument and steadily grow into a more "rounded" puppeteer. I continue to learn from a community of engaged puppeteers who are willing to share their doubts and concerns as much as their accomplishments. This program as a whole helps to feel connected and spark joy, while being very professional, which is what for me puppetry is all about.

Nancy Staub Publications Award-winning book now in paperback!

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The Nancy Staub Publications Award-winning book The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America by Jo Ann Cavallo has just been released in paperback edition.

This study reconstructs the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City, provides translations of eight selected plays and 270 extant summaries, and offers comparative analyses uncovering how Agrippino Manteo’s scripts creatively adapt Italian Renaissance chivalric poems and nineteenth-century prose compilations.

Praise
We are fortunate indeed that the Manteo family has preserved written scripts of Italian puppet theater in America and that Jo Ann Cavallo is able to provide a context in the history of literature for what was performed daily for the Italian community on the streets of New York in the 1920s and 1930s.

—Professor Charles Ross, Purdue University, USA

This work will be of interest to students of Sicilian culture and of the art of puppetry, as well as to scholars of narratology, intrigued by the appeal of storytelling as such.

—Arthuriana

About the Author
Jo Ann Cavallo (Ph.D., Yale, 1987), Professor of Italian at Columbia University, has published widely on Italian chivalric epic, including The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto and The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure.

About Anthem Press
Anthem Press is a leading medium-sized independent academic, professional and trade publisher in established and emerging social sciences, business/law and humanities fields of study with a strong international and interdisciplinary focus.