Artist in Residency Sponsored by SMAHC and the Prairie Arts Council

Lester Prairie 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students have and will continue to work with professional artist Bart Buch.  Students will be working on making clay puppets and masks and will eventually create a presentation that deals with proper behaviors and anti-bullying messages.  
Mr. Buch is a puppet artist, poet, and teaching artist. He started in puppetry 15 years ago by creating bedtime puppet shows, about a salmon and starfish falling in love, in his backyard for friends and neighbors. Since the salmon and starfish stories, his aesthetic has stayed rooted in the poetic, romantic and intimate, but deepened in skill, style, and technique. Bart focuses on interpreting poetry from written text into puppetry arts performances and looks for the poetic qualities of any story to highlight. He seeks to convey poetry through evocative and gestural puppet movement, strong visual imagery, usually a lack of spoken word, and an enveloping musical language. Bart has presented several small independent puppet shows working with the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Mark Doty, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, Samuel Coleridge, Rumi, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Dar Williams, and others, as well as his own poetry.  Bart has also worked at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre for 13 years as an Associate Artist developing, teaching, performing, and building puppet theatre of all types. He is currently Education Director at In the Heart of the Beast designing and teaching educational programming focusing on puppetry arts. 
Here are some photos from students working with Bart on their masks.  More photos will follow.  Thank you to the Prairie Arts Council for writing the grant, Heart of the Beast productions, and SMAHC.