Project Budget

Grant Request

Title:

Artists:

Description:

Miniature Curiosa

St. Petersburg FL

Zach Dorn

ScissorsHaunted by a movie he saw as a child, one man recreates his childhood in miniature, traveling to the edge of hisfabricated universe and beyond in an attempt to capture the boy he was before the film.

$8,000

$3,000

Scissors (In-Progress. August, 2016), Birds of America (October, 2013), Moon City (June, 2015)

Scissors: Zach Dorn, director/puppet designer/puppeteer; Murphi Cook, playwright/puppeteer.Birds of America: Zach Dorn, director/puppet designer; Murphi Cook, playwright/lead live-projection puppeteer; Amy Portalanger, puppeteer/lead shadow puppeteer; Amy DiPlacido, puppeteer;Tim Sherman, puppeteer.Moon City: Zach Dorn, director/puppeteer/miniature puppet designer; Murphi Cook,playwright/table-top rod puppet designer/puppeteer

Excerpt from recent in-progress work on Scissors and excerpts from Miniature Curiosa's productionsBirds of America and Moon City.

813.843.3722

121 1/2 15th Ave N.33704

zedorn@gmail.comminiaturecuriosa.com

VIDEO SAMPLE

CONTACT

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SMART FAIR INC501 (c)(3):

2015 Seed - An ExcruciatinglyOrdinary Toy Theater Show

PAST GRANTS AWARDED

WORKSHOP

The Jim Henson Foundation Grant Application

Miniature Curiosa ⬧ Scissors ⬧ Project Description

You’re surrounded by junk. Precariously stacked cigar boxes hover above your head. Cardboard landscapes weave in-between audience members as medicine cabinets and dresser drawers obscure your vision. As the lights dim, this junk transforms into a miniature city. Your eyes drift to the shadow puppets dancing inside tiny windows while matchbox cars swerve through traffic; just as you accept the booming metropolis that surrounds you as the set for this puppet production, a displaced astronaut emerges and unleashes the terror inside. This is Scissors. And this is one man’s nightmare.

Scissors is a multi-media puppetry project that places the audience inside a miniature city fabricated from found materials. The puppet production utilizes toy theater, live-projection puppetry, animation, shadows, and automatons to tell the story of a man haunted by a movie he saw as a child. Recreating his childhood in miniature scale, he travels to the edge of his fabricated universe and beyond trying to capture the boy he was before the film. However, he soon finds that monsters lurk at every corner, and there can be no escape once you’ve witnessed the 1991 cinematic flop Scissors.

Exploring themes of childhood fear, nostalgia, and the inconsistency of memory, the aesthetics of the piece seeks to mirror the protagonist’s quest for his lost childhood. The miniature city will be at once familiar and unfamiliar – streets lined with tin junk and other common relics from the past, slightly altered, yet hardly hiding their former lives. Sending live-feeding cameras through the tiny set, the vignettes will then be projected in cinematic fashion, further transforming the insignificant into the epic. For the live actors onstage, the space will be intentionally minimal, with scenes unfolding inside mechanical puppet stages attached to their bodies and in boxes positioned throughout the space.

This workshop comes during an exciting time for Miniature Curiosa. Director Zach Dorn received the inaugural Julie Taymor World Theatre Fellowship in May 2016, and will spend the next year in Japan studying alongside Yasuko Senda, a leading expert in karakuri ningyo, or traditional Japanese automata, as well as contemporary theatre makers such as Kuro Tanino and Toshiba Okada. This yearlong immersion will offer Dorn insight into mechanical puppetry and robotics for the stage, and enhance the range of techniques employed in future Miniature Curiosa productions.

However, it will be impossible to successfully execute the intricate set or new methods of puppetry without the opportunity to test our ideas out in a funded workshop. Funding from the Henson Foundation will allow us to build miniatures, a wearable mechanical puppet stage, and experiment with ways of creating a celestial universe by live projecting objects on manipulated spherical shapes. These pieces are critical to both the experience of the spectacle and our overall development as a puppetry group, as we extend our abilities as puppeteers and combine traditional mechanics with new forms of media, such as live projection and animation.

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The Jim Henson Foundation Grant Application

Miniature Curiosa ⬧ Scissors ⬧ Project Budget

* If Miniature Curiosa does not secure additional funding, The Jim Henson Foundation’s Workshop Grant will go directly to Set Construction/Design ($2150), Puppet Materials ($500), and a stipend for a videographer ($350).

Income

Jim Henson Foundation Workshop Grant

Requested 3000

Creative Pinellas Grant, 2017* Requested 3500

Total 6500

Expenses

Materials Performance

Set 2000 Rehearsal Space 500

Puppet 500 Videographer 350

Lighting 250

Equipment Total 6500

Digital Camera 250

Video Cabling 75

Mics 300

Audio Mixer 250

Audio Cabling 75

Stipends

Director 250

Scene Designer 650

Puppeteer / Actor 1 250

Puppeteer / Actor 2 250

Puppeteer / Actor 3 250

Promotion

Printing 300

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The Jim Henson Foundation Grant Application

Miniature Curiosa ⬧ Scissors ⬧ Artist Description

Murphi Cook loves to play. Most recently she played with Magik Theatre in San Antonio where she developed and starred in Red, an eighties spin on the a classic tale for young audiences. She was recognized as a promising emerging female playwright at the 2014 Great Plains Theatre Conference and awarded the StageWrite honorarium for her play Birds of America. Together, with puppeteer Zach Dorn, she develops traveling spectacles for the multimedia puppetry troupe, Miniature Curiosa. These productions include Moon City (2015 Piccolo Spoleto Festival), Tonight A Clown Will Travel Time (2014 Out of the Loop Festival, Piccolo Spoleto, Nationwide tour), Luna Park Project (2013 Sprout Fund recipient), and Puppet Photo Booth (2012 Awesome Pittsburgh). Although she often writes shows for Miniature Curiosa to perform she has also written plays that she does not star in: Diablerie (2012 Carnegie Mellon New Works Series), Blood Red Sky (2012 Theatre Masters), Sea Wife (2011 Last Frontier Theatre Festival), Hole in the Head (2011 Great Plains Theatre Festival, University of Connecticut), and Nothing Says Happy Like (2010 Strike 38 Productions). She holds an M.F.A in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. 

Zach Dorn is a graduate from The University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts program. Recently, he toured his one-man puppet spectacle, An Excruciatingly Ordinary Toy Theater Show, through The United States. The production received Best Puppet Show at the 2016 San Diego Fringe and a Jim Henson Foundation Seed Award. Dorn’s work as a theater-maker has also been recognized by The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. In 2016, he was selected by Julie Taymor as one of the inaugural recipients of The World Theater Fellowship for Young Directors. As part of this fellowship, he will study traditional Japanese mechanical puppetry, karakuri ningyo, in Nagoya, Japan. In 2017, he will mentor with Kishida Prize for Drama awardees Toshiki Okada and Kuro Tanino in Tokyo, Japan.

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The Jim Henson Foundation Grant Application

Miniature Curiosa ⬧ Scissors ⬧ Company Description

Like unruly children, Miniature Curiosa’s ideas rebel against traditional performance techniques. Our spectacles ignore conventional barriers zigzagging across theatre, puppetry, performance art, and installation. We celebrate the inherent theatricality of art’s misfits: haunted houses, amusement rides, Lucha Libre, horror movies, cartoons, and Holiday window displays. We also seek to eliminate the hierarchy of traditional theatre roles; actors operate their own tech while technicians are actors. We invite video game designers, historians, and robots to contribute and play active roles in the creation process. 

In this celebration of spectacle and removal of any rulebook, our work becomes inherently multidisciplinary. We ultimately seek to find for our audiences that necessary something long lost since childhood: wonder. We tie this together with the mission: 

Miniature Curiosa explores the underbelly of childhood nostalgia with the disappointed eyeballs of adulthood. Through low-fi technology, puppetry, toy theater, live-projection, and non-linear

storytelling, Miniature Curiosa presents fast-moving, fast-talking, sometimes malfunctioning, live-action comic books. This is not the theater. This is the living room of an overzealous magician who

doesn't know any tricks.

Most recently, Miniature Curiosa was touted as “one of the most exciting arrivals on the arts scene in recent memory” by the San Antonio Express News after they collaborated with Magik Theatre on Red, a spin on the classic Little Red Riding Hood told through the lens of John Hughes. Prior to that, Moon City was hailed by Paul Bowers of Charleston’s City Paper as one of the “most daring and inventive” shows the Piccolo Spoleto Festival had seen in years, saying, “It's like Tim Burton befriended Tom Waits as a child and taught him to make home movies with dolls and play sets… Miniature Curiosa has created something at once nostalgic and deeply disenchanted. It's a whimsical trifle and a hellish vision.”

Previous productions include Tonight A Clown Will Travel Time (2014 Out of the Loop Festival, Piccolo Spoleto, Nationwide tour), Birds of America (New Hazlett CSA participant 2013) Luna Park Project (2013 Sprout Fund recipient), and Puppet Photo Booth (2012 Awesome Pittsburgh).

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