Nothing Really Matters, by Abigail Baird
This one-woman show combines puppetry, aerial work, and digital animation about confronting fear of the thing you need the most.
Apprpopriate for all ages.
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA in Puppet Arts.
Abigail Baird is a creative and tenacious arts educator, director, animator and acrobatic-actor. As a physical storyteller, she transforms puppetry, animation and aerial acrobatics into engaging and electric theatrical performances. Her work explore the potential relationships between objects, people and digital media. By physically interacting with puppets and large-scale projected animations, she builds symbiotic relationships that breathe life into digital media. Grounded in 20 years of exhaustive study and practice, she aims to further this methodology for physical storytelling with digital media/animation, puppetry and performers, ultimately influencing the rising field of media theater towards human relatability.
FROM ABAGAIL:
While honing my talents in toy theater and shadow puppetry, I have reached across disciplines into the Digital Media and Visual Arts departments to learn two-dimensional and stop-motion animation. I am developing techniques for performing with live-cue software and multidimensional surface projection.
Blending techniques developed through Aerial Animation with skills acquired at UConn, my MFA thesis project is a nonverbal, aerial acrobatic and physical theater performance featuring puppetry, stop motion and digital animation. This one woman show titled, Nothing Really Matters, explores the alchemy of these various modalities through an engaging story about a woman who self-shames her need for rest while wrestling with her internal relationship to productivity. Representing my investment in this and future projects, the set is intentionally designed around my own portable aerial rig and projection screen.
I aim to draw parallels between movement principles from animation, puppetry, and physical theater to harmonize them into universally relatable, multimedia performances using projection mapping and live-que software.
