(crowd chattering) (bright music) - Puppetry is part of the human spirit.

It's hard for anybody to sit down for half an hour and watch commercial television without seeing a puppet, whether they know it or not.

And in many instances, you're watching the work of our alumni.

(crowd chattering) The Uconn Program in Puppet Arts is now 60 years old, started by Frank Ballard, who was my teacher, and I took over the program in 1990.

We are the only training program degree granting program in puppetry in the United States.

And we have developed artists for the past 60 years who have populated the use of puppetry in film, television, on the stage, and now in digital media.

- I would say that puppeteers from UConn are particularly known for their really deep understanding, deep and wide understanding of what puppets are, how they're designed, how they're constructed, how they're performed.

Like, you know when you're working with a puppeteer from UConn, they know what they're doing.

They know about the form.

- So this Lolly the Library Book, is actually a puppet.

Different mechanisms in here to give it a moving mouth.

And also this moves the blinking eye.

(audience laughing) Noelle, I hope you're watching now.

She's not on social media.

(audience laughing) So this is used to, you know, work with children In the moment.

- Within our training in the Puppet Arts program, we want the students to conceive of an idea.

We want them to know history and theater theory.

They write scripts, they do storyboards.

They design the puppets, they fabricate the puppets, and they perform the puppets.

This helps them in their careers because being a puppeteer, it's a theatrical job.

It's project by project.

And I love it that a student can help one puppeteer fabricate a show at the same time they're performing another show in the evening and designing another show for the future.

I love it when an alumni calls back and says, oh, Mary offered me this performance job, but it's the same time that John wants me to fabricate this show.

And my response is, usually, I hope you have this problem for the rest of your life.

- This is the best story, this is the best Puppet Arts and Frank Ballard story ever.

So I was working on Josephine, are these shortened these strings from what the original performance was?

Because they were like, 12 feet strings.

We had to climb way up this bridge.

And so you know, I was a sophomore in college.

I was really young and I was given this sort of leading role to play, and I was really struggling.

And I was like, oh, Professor Ballard, I just can't do it, she doesn't look well.

And he was ailing at the time from his Parkinson's, and it was starting to get quite pronounced.

And that was sort of before they had good medications and everything.

And so he was pretty shaky.

And he decided he was gonna go up on the bridge to show me how it's done.

And we're all watching, I'm going, oh, what's this gonna show me?

But then if you looked down at Josephine, she went, hi, as beautiful, it was like there was something magic that happened from here to down here.

And that's my best puppet story.

- Many of our students, or I should say our alumni have gone on to work as actors.

I think of Jennifer Barnhart, who is a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and she's also the mother lion on Between Lions.

She's been in Avenue Q, she works on Sesame Street.

So her life of expression comes not only through her own ability to act, but also how to send it through that object to the audience.

- Nickelodeon and Disney and all kinds of other stuff that our puppeteer, our puppetry students go on to have these amazing jobs.

90% of the people that I've spoken with that have those kinds of jobs can't show any of their work necessarily because they're all under NDAs or it's somebody else's property and it's very strictly controlled by the corporations.

So I'm really stoked that we managed to get all of these awesome pieces here.

Trekkie Monster right here, I love Trekkie Monster.

Jen Barnhart over in the corner was one of the performers with Rick Mayon on the Original Broadway.

I gotta say, Jen, I tell you this every time.

This is the reason that I crossed from theater into puppetry.

This is my jam, so thank you.

- Well, it's interesting that you ask a question about our relationship to Jim Henson and the Jim Henson Productions.

Jim and Frank Ballard were very close friends.

It happens that this same year that we're celebrating our 60th anniversary, it's the 70th anniversary of The Muppets.

And over the years, Frank sent many of his graduates to work for Jim.

And that has continued to this day.

Our training helps our students or our alumni, our former students, to gain jobs through the Henson Organization, but they don't just land in that one place.

They continue working for other television programs at the Apple Network, Netflix, Prime, they've all been working there at the same time they continue doing stage work.

So the use of puppetry by our alumni spreads across our entire culture.

- This is a Statue of Liberty puppet that was created by Joe Therrien, who's actually from Brooklyn, Connecticut, not far away from here.

And this was an activist puppet from Occupy Wall Street.

- [Bart] Hopefully this is only the first anniversary of 60 years that we're gonna be celebrating.

There's much to the future.

Puppetry has been with us from the beginnings of civilization, and I think it's gonna stick with us as time goes on.