The Festival

The 2026 edition of Puppets in the Green Mountains gathers artists who question what it means to be alive in a fractured world. Their works span continents and traditions: from Indian epics reimagined through contemporary media, to Scandinavian gnomes tending to human families through the winter; from tricksters rebelling against tyranny, to an octopus deciding whether humanity deserves a second chance. Handpuppets, Shadow Puppets, Rod Puppets, Direct Manipulation Puppets, VR Puppets, Larger than Life Puppets, even a special Traditional Japanese puppet blessing.

Through myth, comedy, and innovation, these artists explore transformation, resilience, and the act of belief itself. The puppet—an object that becomes human when we agree to believe—embodies the festival’s central paradox: how do we find life in what seems lifeless? How do we rediscover empathy, imagination, and connection in an age of extinction, distraction, and digital isolation? Puppets in the Green Mountains 2026 is a festival about connecting with our humanity—through the hands of artists who remind us that empathy, imagination, and play are the most enduring forces of all.

International artists include Anurupa Roy (India) with About Ram, a multimedia performance revisiting the Ramayana to explore moral courage, relational responsibility, and transformation; Sofie Krøg (Denmark) with The House, a mechanically inventive and darkly comic thriller that reflects on inheritance, secrecy, and the social conditions shaping human behavior; and Fidena Festival (Germany) with Puppetry 4.0: Museum Without Walls, a VR exhibition of Fritz Wortelmann’s historic puppet collection, in which visitors navigate five animated worlds guided by a digital Fritz Wortelmann, reflecting on human creativity, cultural memory, and the interplay between technology and presence.

Domestic artists include Nehprii Amenii (NY) with HUMAN, a narrative in which an octopus considers whether humanity can be recreated after extinction, raising questions of empathy, care, and relational ethics; Josh Rice (NY) with Kayfabe, wrestling-inspired Bunraku puppetry exploring performativity, identity, and human resilience; Jana Zeller (VT) with Puppet Crimes, a humorous journey through 400 years of rebellion and survival; Hobey Ford (NC) with Animalia, a sculptural exploration of metamorphosis, ecology, and interdependence; and Tom Lee (IL/HI) with Tomte, a luminous story of a Nordic gnome nurturing a family through the long winter, emphasizing care, patience, and continuity.

A core component of the festival is a three-part public conversation series titled Access Through the Arts, in which artists, audiences, and scholars engage in dialogue on myth, imagination, and performance to examine empathy, resilience, and renewal (About Ram, HUMAN); puppetry as a form of resistance, satire, and social critique (Puppet Crimes, The House); and the animacy of matter and more-than-human worlds, inviting audiences to see themselves in relation to animals, objects, and environments (Animalia, Tomte). Through these conversations, the festival illuminates how puppetry fosters connection, reflection, and the creative reimagining of humanity.

The festival invites audiences to experience transformation, cultivating capacities that feel increasingly fragile in contemporary life: empathy, attention, relationality, and care. Puppetry’s liminal qualities—its oscillation between life and inanimacy—allow viewers to encounter vulnerability, humor, and wonder in ways that other forms cannot.

Puppets in the Green Mountains 2026 is a labor of love, combining artistic innovation, scholarly reflection, and community engagement. By the festival’s conclusion, audiences will have journeyed through stories, landscapes, and imaginative worlds that encourage reflection on personal and collective human potential. In doing so, the festival fulfills its central mission: to reawaken what it means to be human in a complex, rapidly changing world, reminding us that art, care, and imagination remain essential pathways to our shared humanity.

This year’s festival also offers an array of educational opportunities through a special day of artist workshops in partnership with the Northeast and Midatlantic Chapters of the Puppeteers of America. Participants will explore

The Brattleboro area also offers unique shops of local crafts, thrift shops, bookstores (new and used), craft breweries, and every kind of outdoor gear! Southern Vermont is also home to many crafts people: potters, woodworkers, weavers, glassblowers, and more. If you come in September, it will be apple season, and local orchards offer exceptional pies and apple cider donuts.

All venues in the Puppets in the Green Mountains festival are wheelchair-accessible. Assistance can be provided for priority seating and parking. Two of the performances will be offered with ASL interpretation. Sandglass welcomes people of all abilities, and strives to provide programming that is inclusive and accessible to all.

The 2026 Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival is made possible with the generous support of Sandglass Theater’s funders, sponsors, board members, and volunteers. Funding for the upcoming festival is provided in part by the. Program Sponsors include Oak Meadow, Landmark College and C & S Wholesale Grocers.

ABOUT SANDGLASS THEATER

Sandglass is dedicated to the arts of theater and puppetry as a means of exploring contemporary issues, inspiring dialogue, and sparking wonder. We create original ensemble performances and collaborations, present diverse theater artists, produce events that serve our communities, and teach our art.

Our mission is to sustain an artist-driven theater with an emphasis on advancing the development of puppetry as a unique and unusual theater form that embodies the human experience. Sandglass creates new work, engages in challenging collaborations, presents thought-provoking and responsible art, hosts other artists to promote the art of puppetry and expose our audiences to diverse styles and traditions, teaches our process and traditions, and cultivates a fire to create and to keep on creating.

Since opening our theater in Putney, Vermont, in 1996, Sandglass has presented eleven international festivals of puppet theater, with performing companies from eastern and western Europe, Canada, Taiwan Japan, Cambodia, Israel, Australia, and Central and South America. The festivals have included performances, workshops, local food events, lectures, panel discussions, and even larger than life Ostriches taking over downtown Brattleboro. Other Sandglass programs include the Voices of Community series since 2005, which features artists whose work addresses issues of race, gender, disability, and social justice. This series earned Sandglass an invitation to join the National Performance Network. NPN partners with us on funding these residencies and connects Sandglass to a national dialogue about Arts Policy. Sandglass also presents the Winter Sunshine Series for family audiences every February and the wildly popular community event, Puppets in Paradise, now hosted at the Retreat Farm in Brattleboro.

Sandglass tours internationally with repertoire for both young audiences and adults. We are currently engaged in a new theater project that integrates art and social issues, which will premiere at this year’s Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival. Feral is an ensemble piece about the struggle between intuitive wildness and domestication of women captured by an allegorical transformation into a werewolf.

Sandglass teaches an Intensive Puppetry Training for two weeks every summer, based on a method of puppet performance that has been developed over 30 years of workshops around the world.

Sandglass Theater acknowledges that we are located on the unceded land of the Pennacook, Wabanaki and Abenaki peoples. We invite you to join us in acknowledging the Pennacook, Wabanaki Confederacy and Abenaki community, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. Sandglass Theater also acknowledges that it was founded upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.

Please visit our home website if you want to learn more about us and see our current touring and events calendars:

www.sandglasstheater.org

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