Conway Symphony Orchestra to present puppet-theater production

Adam Frank, University of Central Arkansas Honors College professor, shows one of the shadow puppets — The Mexican Pumpkin representing the Day of the Dead — that will be featured in The Halloween Tree. UCA student Adrienne Thompson is the lead artist of a team that has created more than 100 shadow puppets for the upcoming production.
Adam Frank, University of Central Arkansas Honors College professor, shows one of the shadow puppets — The Mexican Pumpkin representing the Day of the Dead — that will be featured in The Halloween Tree. UCA student Adrienne Thompson is the lead artist of a team that has created more than 100 shadow puppets for the upcoming production.

CONWAY — Three entities are collaborating to bring a Halloween-themed puppet-theater performance to audiences.

The Conway Symphony Orchestra, the University of Central Arkansas Schedler Honors College and the El Zócalo Immigrant Resource Center will present a puppet-theater adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1972 fantasy novel The

Halloween Tree in two performances in Conway and one in Little Rock.

Directed by UCA Honors College faculty member Adam Frank, with live orchestra music directed by Israel Getzov, music director and conductor of the Conway Symphony Orchestra, The Halloween Tree uses shadow puppetry and three-dimensional puppets to tell the story of three children trying to save their friend on Halloween night.

“As the children chase Pip through time to ancient Egypt, Stonehenge, Notre Dame and Mexico, they learn about the ways we understand the borderland between life and death throughout history,” said Frank, who specializes in Asian studies, anthropology and performance studies at UCA.

UCA student Adrienne Thompson is the lead artist for the shadow puppets, which number more than 100. These shadow puppets are projected onto a screen by a team of two puppeteers, each working on one of two projectors.

Frank said The Halloween Tree, performed with permission of Don Congdon Associates Inc., is “suitable for children 8 and up and will appeal to both adult and young audiences.”

Performances will be presented at 8 p.m. Oct. 7 and 8 in UCA’s newly renovated

McCastlain Hall Ballroom, just west of UCA’s main entrance on Donaghey Avenue. Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for the general public and are available in advance through the Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall box office, (501) 450-3265 in the Conway area, toll free at (866) 810-0012, or online at tickets.uca.edu/conway-series. Tickets also will be available at the door. Seating is general admission and limited; advance purchase is recommended.

A pay-what-you-can performance will be held at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27 at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theatre, 100 River Market Ave. in Little Rock. A $10 donation is suggested. Proceeds will benefit El Zócalo to support its efforts in developing educational, entrepreneurial and support services for immigrants.

Frank said that to celebrate the beginning of the holiday season, a crafts marketplace will precede the Oct. 27 performance at 6:30 p.m. The marketplace will feature handmade crafts and clothing items created by independent, central Arkansas immigrant artisans.

Four composers have created original music for The Halloween Tree. The composers include Paul Dickinson of Conway, associate professor of composition and music theory at UCA; Karen Griebling of Conway, professor of music (music theory, composition, viola and world music) at Hendrix College; Michael

Pagan of Ottawa, Kansas, adjunct professor of applied piano and applied jazz piano at Ottawa University; and Cory Winters of Fort Smith, a UCA graduate who studied composition under Dickinson.

“It is really a collaborative effort,” Getzov said. “Adam has taken his puppet troupe to create the characters, and Paul [Dickinson] and his friends have created original music for the orchestra to perform.

“Adam [Frank] had this vision, and we are helping him realize that vision,” Getzov said, adding that CSO’s general manager, Vicki Crockett, had a big part in coordinating the production.

Dickinson said the presentation of The Halloween Tree was Frank’s idea.

“He approached Izzy [Getzov] about doing the music, and then Izzy contacted me about writing the music,” Dickinson said. “I had never seen a shadow puppet show before, so I had to figure out how music would work with that. I have done a film score before, but never anything for a ballet or dance.

“I figured this would be more like a ballet than a film, so that’s how we proceeded. I reached out to some other composers I knew. We began writing the music in the spring but did most of it this summer. Adam seems pleased with what we have done.

“There are different locations in the story, so we have different kinds of music supplied by different composers. I acted as the lead composer; the others sent their music to me, and I put it all together. Even though we worked separately, we reference each other’s work, so it flows smoothly.”

Dickinson said the composers wrote the music for a small chamber ensemble that includes 14 musicians.

Griebling said she was assigned the Ravine, Egypt and Notre Dame scenes.

“In addition, I supplied a leitmotif (a recurring bit of melody associated with a particular person, idea or situation) for Pipkin/Pip that was used by some of the others to unify the music,” she said.

She said it was not particularly difficult to work independently while writing music that eventually would be put together with other composers’ music.

“Since this is such an episodic piece, it doesn’t really need to be in one style or use just one technique,” Griebling said. “I think of the score for the Lord of the Rings trilogy where each group of characters — hobbits, orcs, ents, dwarfs, elves, etc. — has theme music that is uniquely associated with them as similar. In fact, that actually makes it easier — it’s harder for one person to come up with so many different styles of music than for composers to ‘divide and conquer’ in this situation.”

Frank reached out to others at UCA for additional help, including Holly Laws, UCA associate professor of art, who built the 3-D puppets.

UCA student Adrienne Thompson is the lead artist for the shadow puppets, which number more than 100. These shadow puppets are projected onto a screen by a team of two puppeteers, each working on one of two projectors.

Ashleigh Plastiras, also a student at UCA, is the stage manager for the production, which has a total of 11 cast members.

Frank also reached outside the UCA community on the project by designating El Zócalo as the benefactor of the Oct. 27 performance.

Valerie Christensen of Conway, who earned a degree in Spanish at UCA and is now an unclassified graduate student, serves as the client services manager for El Zócalo, which, she said, assists immigrants in a variety of ways. For more information on El Zócalo, visit the www.zocalocenter.com or call (501) 301-4652.

Supported by grants from the UCA Foundation, the Arkansas Arts Council and the Mid-America Arts Alliance, as well as support from the UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication and the Schedler Honors College, The Halloween Tree project also includes a series of puppetry workshops. Led by Puppeteers of America President Jan Wolfe of Little Rock and Jim Henson Fellowship-winner Katie Campbell, also of Little Rock, college students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and at UCA are being trained to share puppetry and storytelling skills with underserved communities in central Arkansas. For more information on the puppetry workshops, contact El Zócalo Executive Director Kelsey Lam at LRImmigrantCenter@gmail.com.

“The Halloween Tree has provided a unique opportunity for UCA to collaborate with two very community-oriented organizations: the Conway Symphony and the El Zócalo Immigrant Resource Center,” Frank said. “From the introduction of the story to the creation of the music and puppetry, to the organization of the puppetry workshops, this has been a truly collaborative effort and a great way to connect arts with underserved communities in Arkansas. Our hope is that the project will involve those communities both as audience members and, through the puppetry workshops, as art makers.”

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