"False Alligat-ions" at the Full Moon Puppet Show (Jan 2014)

It's my sewer alligator puppet show!



In False Alligations, Teddy the weird orphan boy discovers that there are alligators living in the city's sewers, but the authorities will not believe him.  When he goes into the sewers himself to investigate, he finds that things are not what they seem.

I wrote, directed and performed in False Alligations in January 2014 as part of the Full Moon Puppet Show, organized by Liz Schacterle, at Open Eye Figure Theatre in Minneapolis.

The January 25th performance featured Janet Skidmore as the narrator and playing guitar; Theo Goodell providing additional puppeteering and playing the toy xylophone; and Bob Helland on additional Guitar.  I performed Teddy, ran the projector, and was the puppeteer behind the alligator king.

Everybody had incredibly nice things to say about the show, and people liked it so much that we was invited to perform "False Alligations" again in September as part of the last Full Moon Puppet Show, during the Handmade Worlds Festival of Puppet Theatre, produced by The Puppeteers of America.  (This time with Janet Skidmore reprising her roles, and Francisco Benavides and Jane Marshall providing additional puppetry)

The year I was too busy to blog

Hey all,  Thomas Boguszewski here.

This site has been awfully silent since last November.  I've been doing a lot of fun stuff and telling nobody about it.  That's all going to change, though.

In the coming weeks I'll be catching up on lost time, and sharing stories about the projects I've worked on and experiences I've had in 2014.

Among them:

4 puppet shows
a book trailer
3 operas
3 conventions
1 film festival
1 delayed animated film
1 cancelled commercial
1 aborted installation piece

300 pages of comedy

a collection of incredible summer adventures...

and more!
stay tuned while I not only revitalize the stream of news stories, but redesign this blog as well!
Here's looking forward to a future where I take more of what's going on in my world and share it with others.

Drawn Out Storytelling - Rebecca by Steve Zimmer - illustrated by Thomas Boguszewski

This is my second piece for Drawn Out Storytelling:  A live show based in Brooklyn, New York which combines live storytelling and live music with live illustration.

In this tale, performed at Drawn Out's "End of the World" show in June 2012, Steve Zimmer tells of his attempts to find love with a new neighbor.

Read the story in the form of an illustrated comic made with animated GIFs below:

Drawn Out Storytelling - "Good News vs. Bad News" by Erin Barker illustrated by Thomas Boguszewski

At the Minneapolis Indie Expo in Nov. 2011, I hooked up with Drawn Out Storytelling:  A live show based in Brooklyn, New York which combines live storytelling and live music with live illustration.

By February 2012 I was illustrating for them.  The title of the show was "I hate you" - The theme was about animosity within families, and the story was Good News Versus Bad News (also called "Love and Baseball") by Erin Barker. "  In it, a daughter has to deal with hate and love in her own family when she learns the truth about her mother’s pregnancy.  Read the story in comic form below.

Blair Thomas - Hard Headed Heart

I got the chance to see the amazing Blair Thomas perform Hard Headed Heart at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. 

Heard Headed Heart is made up of three of the artist's solo pieces.

First, Mr. Thomas performed "The Puppet Show of Don Cristobal" which is a raunchy and violent throwback to Punch and Judy-style puppet shows.  He makes a lot of innovative choices in the technical and poetic front.  For example, he wears a façade/costume that can transform from one character to another with a single spin.

Second, he performs his interpretation of "Saint James Infirmary" —which features unique marionettes, a story scroll, and live jazz orchestration which Thomas provides as a one-man-band with the help of a loop pedal.

Come to The Medicine Show!

Ladies and gentlemen!  Boys and girls! 

The time has come for a reprise of 

the phantasmagorical, sensational, mystical 

Strombolli's Medicine Show!

Winter Dreams at HoBT - Design Internship

NOW PLAYING at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (1500 East Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN):  A show called Winter Dreams

Winter Dreams  is about the ways that all the animals of Minnesota manage to sleep through the winter.  See hibernating bears, turtles who hold their breath for 3 months, snakes who bury themselves in a pit in the ground, frogs who freeze themselves cryogenically, and more!  It's a kid-friendly show with some ingenious puppetry —some of which was designed by ME.

To be more specific, I took a design internship at HOBT this fall and did 3 jobs:

1.  I performed image research and factual research to figure out what certain animals look like and just how their bodies work.

2.  I was tasked with designing and building a shadow puppet sequence based on the Wood Frog —The frog that can tolerate being frozen solid in the winter and resume living after it thaws itself out.

3.  I was also put in charge of fleshing out a sequence that had already been started - one about bees.  In a beehive, the worker bees will crowd around the queen and pulse in order to keep her warm (fun fact, the drones, who usually hang out at the hive, are sent out one by one to die during the Fall)

So I took copious WIP pictures.  So without further ado, this is art in progress.

(read more for pictures!)

Bare Bones Halloween Extravaganza.

I spent the 2 weekends prior to and including Halloween helping out with Bare Bones Puppets' Halloween Extravaganza,  "A Fistful of Dirt - How the Death was Won"

"A Fistful of Dirt: How the Death Was Won is a loosely bound tale that is part  Japanese folktale, part Spaghetti Western.  It is the story of a tengu king who decides to do away with Death and, with the help of his tengu cronies, destroys the Book of the Dead, rendering all life on Earth unable to pass through the Veil between this world and the next for over 150 years. As he does so, he traps a wayward Traveler in his irreverent, never ending, “No Death” party. The festivities are interrupted, however, by hordes of elderly beings... desperately hoping to make their journey to the afterlife. Unwilling to hear the pleas of the undead strangers and Traveler, the king is finally swayed by a heartrending encounter with the ailing Earth... The evening concludes with a procession of actors and audience in which all are invited to speak the names of their dead and to sing them a song of remembrance."

(From wearthegoldhat.wordpress.com)

Barebones can be described as "community theatre at its best."  It's certainly the most community-oriented production I've ever been involved with.  Hundreds of people came out to put on this show, and work was found for everybody.

images from the rehearsal of the show can be seen here

images from the full-on performance can be seen here

My job was to project psychedelic imagery onto a screen, using the same materials we used on Stromboli's Medicine Show

Happy Halloween :)

24-hour comic - Oct 1 2011

So this is my answer to the creative challenge of this year's 24-hour comic (to create a 24-hour comic in 24 hours).  I was only able to make 8 pages during the 24 hour period, but that's okay.  I tried my best.  This project is made of firsts:  My first 24-hour comic, my first time using bristol board, my first time using ink and watercolors together in a "real" comic.  It was a great day.  Photos of the event to come.

At Open Eye Figure Theatre - Puppet-Making and Joice Rejoice!

Open Eye Figure Theatre is a nationally recognized puppetry and theatre company in Minneapolis. They do pieces in a historic theatre space as well as in neighborhoods in the Twin Cities during a tour of area communities called the "Driveway Tour." The work there is always unique, exploring and experimenting with the magic of performing objects.

In the winter, I took some workshops at Open Eye, and I met Susan Haas and Michael Sommers, the artistic directors of the theatre.  After going to see a show there in June, Michael Sommers invited me out to help construct puppets for an upcoming show.

So, over the course of about two weeks in late July, I went out to Open Eye and helped the artistic directors build their puppet's heads out of papier mâché.  I also helped move items around the studio, painted stage components, and wired up a lighting fixture to illuminate the puppets.

Work-in-progress shot of what I helped on.

The puppet show we constructed is a Punch and Judy-style show to be interpolated into the larger show, Joice Rejoice, conceived and written by Kevin Kling, who is a well-loved playwright and storyteller and a frequent collaborator with Open-Eye.

Left to right:  The Devil, Michael Sommers, Sara Richardson,
Eric Jensen, Kevin Kling, Jacqueline Ultan 

Always Bringing, Always Taking Away - At Paper Moose Jumpsuit and Co.

Back in June, I worked with puppeteers Kate Saturday and Olli Johnson, as well as musicians Erik Ostrom and Brian Rowe to perform a Puppet Show about the Mississippi river onboard a Paddleboat for a live audience.  The show went pretty darn well, so we decided to do an encore presentation.

Because Olli was busy this summer working on a puppet show at the Minnesota Zoo (which I eventually got to see with my friend Michael - a post on this zoo trip is coming soon), we recruited my friend Spencer Riedel (who is a musician, puppeteer and all-around awesome and friendly guy what can also entertain you), to fill in for her.

We practiced together a bunch more and then on August 7th, took Always Bringing, Always Taking Away (or ABATA as we call it) to a performing arts space in Minneapolis called Paper Moose Jumpsuit and Co.

Paper Moose is a very weird place, in a good way.  It is located inside an old paper factory.  The front door is always locked so audiences must enter through the fire escape (!!!).  Walking through the building begins as a tour of a decrepit factory and suddenly transforms into a cozy and intimate arts space.  With a sitting room, a stage, and a little bar.

This time, unlike the performance on the boat, the performance was less river-centric, and more like a get-together of friends and associates to focus on each other and art.

Dino Hunt! - With MNZero

I got together with this group called MNZero —which is something of a minnesota-based rendition of the immersive, real-life art-game called SFZero— to play a game dreamed up by my friend Kate Saturday called "Dino Hunt". 


In this game,

"Tribes of prehistoric vegetarians hunt dinosaur puppets with wiffleball spears, while trying to avoid the predations of ptreacherous pterodactyls. With each meatless kill, they claim a new dish for their vegetarian picnic."

It was a lot of fun.

Each dinosaur had a number of hit points, which represented the number of times it could be hit by the wiffleballs tossed at it by the tribe of vicious vegans.  When the dinosaur is killed, it dies dramatically and offers up its bloody, yet still somehow humane, bounty.

Perpich Horror Movie (Spring-Summer 2009)

Well it took me 2 years to get around to it but I FINALLY put Secret Places: A School Divided up on the internet for all to see!

Created Spring-Summer 2009

In my senior year of high school at the Perpich Center for Arts education I applied for and was awarded a $100 grant to create a horror movie set at the Arts High School.

Always Bringing, Always Taking Away - Onboard the Mississippi Megalops

So I spent the last few months working with Kate Saturday and Olli Johnson (as well as the musicians Erik Ostrom and Brian Rowe) on an experimental puppet show called "Always Bringing, Always Taking Away"

"Always Bringing, Always Taking Away" is a 15-20 minute long puppet show about the river ecosystem. The puppets are abstractions of animals, people, and machines made entirely out of ribbon. The show was designed to be performed on a paddleboat called the Jonathan Padelford as part of the "Mississippi Megalops - a Floating Chatauqua" project created by the arts organization "Works Progress" for the "Northern Spark" art festival in Saint Paul, MN, which was organized by Northern Lights.

The boat trip was very fun.  I invited my family and my friend Spencer Riedel to come along for the ride.

Watch the video of our performance onboard the megalops here:



After the stress of prepping for the show on the boat we're taking a break. But I bet there's more to come from this show in the near future. Stay Tuned

Transforming Raven Mask

I made a mask that transforms from human form to bird form.

I was inspired by this kind of mask

 

And I wanted to combine that aesthetic with this one:

May Day Parade 2011

Throughout April, I attended community workshops where I helped to build the props and stuff for May Day Parade
by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis.

 

On May 1st, I marched in the parade.  My section was called "The Network of Infinite Connection and Possibility."  We built a big electric device that made sounds when audience members touched it.  We were in the larger umbrella section called "Universe of Union"

Info on this year's parade can be found here

Strombolli's Medicine Show

This March I've been helping out at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.
One of the things that I did there was I helped out with a show called "Strombolli's Medicine Show" created by Daniel Polnau.

It was a sort of weird variety show, cabaret, magic, circus, medicine show... thing.

This is the what the stage and backdrop looked like.  In the center is the cauldron that contains "the panacea to cure all the ills of humanity"

This is Dan as Dr. Strombolli - A zany medicine man who opens the gates to the spirit world to call forth a variety of strange creatures and acts to convince the audience of the existence of magic, and to ultimately fill the cauldron.

Here's MY part:  Backstage I worked at an overhead projector with artists Kate Saturday and Olli Johnson to create kaleidoscopic projections behind the action, using colored plates and gels.

One of the highlights of the show - an image that defies explanation.

The cast photo

We had lots of fun, that's me on the right.