Cycling Forward and Backward through Time with Sandglass Theater

Sandglass Theater has been creating theater works in Putney, VT since the 1980s. They are "dedicated to the arts of theater and puppetry as a means of exploring contemporary issues, inspiring dialogue, and sparking wonder. [They] create original ensemble performances and collaborations, present diverse theater artists, produce events that serve [their] communities, and teach [their] art." 

Eric Bass, co-founder with Ines Zeller Bass, and current artistic director Shoshana Bass each reflect on Sandglass’s evolution. They happen to also be family. As Eric and Shoshana describe in their reflections: mentorship, collaboration, and understanding occur through a profound realization of the interconnectedness of their practice. 

Reflections from Eric Bass and Shoshana Bass

Eric Bass, Founder

Sandglass Theater is a company with three parallel tracks. First and foremost, we have always been a creating company, making original work that combined puppetry with other theater and music arts and touring both nationally and internationally. Since 1997, we have also been a company that produced events and presented guest artists in community festivals such as our biennial Puppets in the Green Mountains International Festival. And since 2001, we have offered an intensive training program for puppeteers, actors, directors, and designers interested in a deep dive into the art form of puppetry. My wife and partner, Ines Zeller Bass, developed these programs with me over four decades. As we step back from active participation in the theater, Shoshana is the natural heir to leadership. More than anyone, she knows how we have worked – both aesthetically and structurally – and has her own visions for how all of these programs can develop. Indeed, they have developed and are now more viable than ever, in spite of these very challenging times. As a performer and deviser of work, she knows Sandglass’ approach better than anyone, and she has melded it with her own training and vision seamlessly. Sandglass’ current repertoire is an exciting blend of new original work by Shoshana and her sister Jana, as well as legacy pieces created by Ines or me that continue to have life in younger bodies and with new interpretations. In addition, Shoshana has built and developed new networks for touring these pieces and has adapted to the changing landscape of touring, with a focus on our region that is vital in these times.

As the director of the Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival, Shoshana has taken the model that I established in 1997 and, while keeping that basic model vibrant, has brought it forward into a world that is even more rooted in the exchange between our community and an international perspective. She has shepherded our Puppets in Paradise community celebration from its years in a private garden to a much larger event at a non-profit farm, to which many more people of all classes can attend. She has found sponsorship for developing residencies for new works by emerging artists and provided mentorships for them. These are programs that Sandglass has engaged in, but it is under Shoshana’s leadership that they have born real fruit.

In some ways, the training programs have evolved most, of all our programs, to meet the needs of today’s puppet creators and performers. Many of the exercises that Ines and I developed are still the core curriculum of the Intensive, but Shoshana has broadened the program to now include not only performance and composition, but tracks in Directing and Puppet Making as well, which greatly increased the number of applicants for the Intensive. She has also developed new community partnerships that have expanded our capacity to take more participants, and guided the company to new policies that reflect broader diversity in our participants and their safety.

Shoshana Bass, Artistic Director

Once a year, students come to Sandglass from all over the world to participate in our Summer Intensive training in Puppetry. This is a two-week intensive for adults to immerse themselves in Sandglass’ approach to puppetry and the process of creating Puppet Theater. These precious two weeks are also the opportunity for us to train and practice our own artform outside pressurized show creation periods. For these two weeks we work deeply in our breath, our posture and alignment, our ensemble awareness, and in all it takes to release our egos and give life to a puppet. 

As a child I often was in the room while my parents and their colleagues were teaching the Summer Intensive, quietly absorbing while coloring or knotting friendship bracelets in the audience benches. In 2015 I began participating in the intensive and eventually continued as a core faculty member in the program. Now Eric and I are working together to write his Manual for Puppeteers book, which will encapsulate much of what we teach in our program, developed over the 40-year history of the company. Every year I feel our understanding of our own work deepens and distills more and more into its most essential essence. It is like practicing a Tai Chi form. I have a lineage that I aspire to be true to, and yet, I continue to make discoveries that feed the growth of the practice. Having stepped out of leadership, Eric and Ines are still involved in our process, in the sense that all of us continue to grow as the process and vocabulary around it continue to grow. It is like a loop that builds momentum by cycling forward and backward in time through our inter-generational company, and it is the most beautiful gift that I can engage with this practice in the company of and common inquiry with my parents. 

My sister and I have both inherited shows and puppets from our parents. And we have had the privilege of receiving the transference of these art works directly from our parental mentors. We have also made our own original works for both adults and children, which respond to our own questions that we wrestle with through our art, and to the realities we work in today. 

Many of the ways that my parents were able to work in the 80s and 90s, even the early 2000s are simply not viable anymore. Historically, Sandglass was very focused on international touring and collaborations. While I have greatly enjoyed traveling the world with my solo show and care greatly about our international community of puppetry, the cost of travel (both environmental and financial) has become an unavoidable realty. 

To this end much of my work has led me towards a more local impact and toward the relationships that can make international visits more feasible and responsible. Together with three other New England based presenting organizations, we have created a cohort of Presenters United for Puppetry Arts (PUPA- the Latin word for doll or puppet). This kind of collaboration, and even further collaboration with the biggest international festival of puppet theater, Chicago’s International Puppet Theater Festival, provides the support network needed to bring international artists to the United States for more extended tours in which we can share travel and visa costs, provide more work for visiting artists, leverage larger urban hubs to support rural arts access, and promote our artform more widely. 

Our newest project, our mobile puppet wagon, addresses similar concerns by creating a touring infrastructure that can support reaching the most remote towns, building a touring route connecting Vermont communities, without the need for a theater space or housing. 

As funders are burdened with replacing collapsing federal support for social infrastructure, like saving hospitals, and the solvency of the NEA and NEH continues to haunt our visions for the future, each donation and affirmation of support can feel like a miracle. Though there are looming questions of how this can continue to sustain itself, we are called ever more emphatically to our work. People are showing up for our events to gather and enjoy handmade beauty, tangible play, and perhaps because they can feel the possibilities for creating something new that we practice through theater making.  

We are in a moment. A difficult and unknown moment before something new has been created. Perhaps we will be a part of that something new, perhaps not. But we are grateful for every moment that we can continue to work and live our creative lives together as a family. 

Sandglass Theater is a recipient of the National Theater Project Creation & Touring Grant, in addition to regional presenting and touring grants. Sandglass Theater can be found on CreativeGround.

Resources

Sandglass Theater

• Summer Intensive Puppetry Training
• Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival: September 16-20, 2026
• Adult Workshops
• Visiting Artist Workshops
• Children’s Workshops
• Children’s Summer Camp

Presenters United for Puppetry Arts (PUPA) Network

The PUPA network is dedicated to advancing puppetry in the region. Founded by:

• The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT)
• Mayo Street Arts (Portland, ME)
• Puppet Showplace (Brookline, MA)
• Sandglass Theater (Putney, VT)

NEFA

CreativeGround

These puppeteers, ensembles, and presenters maintain their own profiles on CreativeGround, where the region’s creatives, culture bearers, arts and culture organizations, and creative businesses can be found and contacted.

Grants

To support regional touring of works, including puppetry:

• Crossroads: Touring New England: supports tours by regional, national, and international artists to multiple organizations across New England.
• New England States Touring (NEST): supports the presentation of regional artists by New England-based nonprofit organizations.

Our public art programs support artists, including puppeteers, making work in the public realm that inspires more vibrant public spaces and public life:

• Public Art for Spatial Justice: supports public art in Massachusetts that creatively expresses and embodies a more just version of what’s possible in public.
• Public Art Learning Fund: strengthens the field by public art in New England by providing professional development support directly to artists.

Idea Swap

The Idea Swap is an annual event for New England-based nonprofit cultural organizations to network and share performing arts, literary arts, and film projects that are available for presentation in New England communities. The Idea Swap is an opportunity to develop collaborations and partnerships that will result in applications to NEFA’s Crossroads: Touring New England (formerly known as NEST 3/Expeditions) grant program. As recently as last year, Shoshana Bass has presented projects at Idea Swap that have resulted in successful tours of the region and NEFA grant support.