We’re Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil, and we’ve been creating together as Evolve Puppets for more than two decades. We do our own original hybrid work, and also design puppetry for other peoples’ productions.
Puppetry is our chosen storytelling medium, though we blend it with traditional theatre techniques, multimedia, manipulation of light and other forms of visual art. Our influences include the down-to-earth magic realism of Thornton Wilder; puppeteer-playwright Ronnie Burkett’s fusion of puppetry and traditional theatre; the dreamscapes of animators Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reininger; films by Agnès Varda and Wim Wenders; and the almost uncanny use of fabric and other materials by dancer-choreographer-lighting designer Loïe Fuller. We’ve worked in a range of styles from bunraku-inspired rod puppets, to blacklight performance, shadow puppetry, toy theatre, 2D cutouts, internally LED-lit characters, soft hand puppets and more.
We explore sizeable ideas, which over the years have ranged from the life-and-death power of light, to the flaws in the American dream. Puppetry allows us to translate the metaphorical into something physical and tangible, to trade a dry debate for an exciting moving tapestry of living beings. We can communicate ideas to an audience in a different way than a realistic presentation, playing on a different part of their brain, another level of their understanding. That way, things that audiences might not want to hear intellectually can be absorbed visually, and still make an impact. It’s a way to get past peoples’ personal walls, and build unity and understanding.
EVOLVE PUPPETS (TANYA KHORDOC & BARRY WEIL) have been fixtures in NYC’s indie theater scene for more than two decades. Their large-scale puppetry-theatre-multimedia play HOME received a Jim Henson Foundation Grant for its development, and was performed at The Tank NYC in 2019. Evolve created the world premiere production of former Czech President Vàclav Havel’s play MOTORMORPHOSIS for UTC61’s Havel Festival at the Ohio Theater in 2006, and were visited backstage by President Havel himself. They created live-video-projected miniatures and models for UTC61’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s CAT’S CRADLE, contributed puppets to Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble’s world premiere of PRINCESS MALEINE at La MaMa, and served as puppetry designers and associate producers for Theater East’s production of DEVIL AND THE DEEP, a musical co-written by Graham Russell of Air Supply. Evolve has also performed many original works (written, designed and directed by Tanya & Barry) including EVOLUTION, SECRETS HISTORY REMEMBERS and THE MOST RADIANT BEAUTY: AN EINSTEINIAN COLLAGE at venues that include HERE, La MaMa, St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Brick, Dixon Place and The Puppeteers of America National Festival. They have been seen across NYC and Vermont in the political parody THE WIZARD OF OUNCES (written by contemporary “Land of Oz” author Edward Einhorn), and have led puppetry and performance workshops for organizations like Girl Be Heard.
Learn More: http://www.evolvepuppets.com