Duke’s arts initiative is taking students into new worlds of creativity. This past spring, faculty designer/puppeteer Torry Bend, with help from a Jim Henson Foundation grant, involved students from Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Pratt School of Engineering along with award-winning local playwright Howard Craft to create an original piece of theater called “Dreaming.” The project was the first Theater Studies mainstage production class to focus on puppetry.
“This semester we are learning to be comfortable with not knowing all the answers at the beginning, so we can let the process of making the work lead us.”
-Torry Bend, Associate Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies
Bend, local puppeteer Drina Dunlap, and puppet coach Evan Mitchell guided the transformation of the students from puppetry novices to being able to design, build and perform with puppets in one semester.
Students Anne Driscoll, Ashley Ericson, Reilly Johnson, Maria Zurita Ontiveros, Katelyn Gochenour, Cassie Martin and Neil Dhar learned the basics of puppet techniques, focusing on shadow puppetry, toy theater and table top puppets for “Dreaming.” They ranged from first-year students to seniors.
"Everything had to be done from scratch. The puppets have to move in such specific ways, I had to test out the costumes and make sure they were removable. I've done plenty of costumes for theatre, short films, commercials, basically everything but puppetry, so it was a really good learning experience."
-Junior Reilly Johnson, student costume designer
“By making puppets while writing, we hope that the visual world can inform the storytelling. This also allows us to bring the builders into the conversations, allowing their voices to have authorship in the work.”
“Dreaming” is a reimagination of the classic early 20th century comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Winsor McCay. The students researched the time period of the source material, becoming familiar with McCay’s pathbreaking work, but also grappling with ethical issues in responsibly adapting a work that included casual racism.
In rehearsal, students learned puppetry techniques to make their creations come alive. The process of mastering puppet movement helped the students develop scenes based on the Little Nemo strip. The final performances include two scenes from Craft’s script and three scenes written by the students.
“Little Nemo” artist McCay’s inventive use of scale and perspective shift, as well as his unique approach to the comic strip frame, inspired the team’s approach to multiple framing techniques and unusual interactions between puppets and human performers.
“By making puppets while writing, we hope that the visual world can inform the storytelling. This also allows us to bring the builders into the conversations, allowing their voices to have authorship in the work,” Bend said.
“Based on what we have learned staging this semester, Howard and I will be reworking the script over the summer. Our hope is to do a professional workshop in the fall that will result in further polishing the script. In November we have been invited to bring 20 minutes of the final script to La MaMa in New York for an in progress showing. From there we will schedule a premiere (in either New York or Durham) in 2019,” Bend said.
Original music created and performed by Robert Chamberlain
Lighting design by Liz Droessler
For full production credits: www.theaterstudies.duke.edu
Special thanks to Geoffrey Mock and Robert Zimmerman
© 2026 Duke University
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