Puppeteer Playdoh Kolo is presenting their latest offering at this year's Giant Puppet Festival in New Orleans. It's a show comprised entirely of puppets made from scraps and debris of the Mississippi River, along with bits and baubles from the streets of New Orleans. Their upcoming show is a meditation on life along the Mississippi — hardship, resilience, and the beauty of it all.
From Playdoh's website, the work draws from over 150 years of river-dwelling history, reimagining the lives and resilience of those who have lived alongside the Mississippi. Weathered piano fragments, once part of the city's musical life, are transformed into living sculptures that carry both memory and sound. The performance takes place on a stage of barge wood and water basins, exploring a landscape constantly reshaped by water, where boundaries between land and river dissolve.
Readers are probably hip to New Orleans' famous relationship to water and flooding. But they might not know about ongoing problems: this year's six central water main breakages and resulting boil water advisories, or the dreaded "salt water wedge" — sea water intrusion that threatened to destroy the city's drinking water years past.
Playdoh's upcoming play "Riperion" addresses New Orleans' precarity at a particularly pertinent time. It's "about learning how to live with water instead of against it… It asks what we can build from what's been discarded: materially, culturally, and environmentally."
Come see Playdoh Kolo's contemplative and whimsical work, along with many other performances, workshops, and a puppet parade at this year's New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival. A description of each show and ticket information are available on the Giant Puppet Festival website.
Riperion showtimes at Den of Muses (51 Architect St, New Orleans): April 9 — 9pm, April 10 — 9pm, April 11 — 7pm, April 12 — 9pm.
Previously:
