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: