Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Robin Frohardt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remove ads

Robin Frohardt is an American playwright, puppet designer, visual artist, and director based in Brooklyn, NY.[1]

Quick Facts Known for, Movement ...

Career

Frohardt constructs her sets for films and plays completely from cardboard.[2] She also uses plastic,[3] wood,[4] cloth,[5] and other recycled materials[6] to make puppets and installations. Some of her puppets are realistic people[7] while other objects take abstract forms.[8] Frohardt uses Bunraku-style puppetry, most notably in her show The Pigeoning.[9] Bunraku is a traditional Japanese form of performance that involves puppeteers, chanters, and musicians.[10]

Environmentalism is the primary theme in Frohardt’s work, specifically in Bag Movie,[2] The Plastic Bag Store,[11] and Dumpster Monster,[6] which all focus on the prevalence and permanence of human waste.[3]

Remove ads

Work

Summarize
Perspective

Major exhibitions

The Plastic Bag Store[11] is an installation in the form of a fully stocked grocery store.[3] Created to look realistic, all products are hand crafted from single-use plastic.[12] This exhibition transformed into a three act live puppet performance at night[3] with original music by Freddi Price.[13] The theme is that humans can never really throw away trash.[3] She tells the journey of plastic waste,[12] and criticizes mass consumption.[3] The Plastic Bag Store was awarded the Creative Capital Award in 2016[12] and before COVID-19 was scheduled to reappear in March 2020 in Times Square.[3]

The Pigeoning[14] is a puppet show that debuted at HERE Arts Center in 2013[15] about an obsessively clean office worker who believes that pigeons are plotting against him.[16] It won the Arlyn Award[17] in 2014 for Outstanding Design in Puppet Theater[18] and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Best Music in a Play for its original music by Freddi Price.[13] Dumpster Monster is a 10-minute puppet performance including audience participation centered around a creature constructed entirely of trash that explodes from a dumpster.[6] It debuted in 2015 at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.[19]

Collaborations

Frohardt created puppets for Anna Fitch and Banker White’s documentary film Heaven Through the Backdoor.[20] She designed the sets for Nick Jones’s play Jollyship the Whizbang.[21][22] She worked on the additional set pieces for a theater piece on the subway[23] titled IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations[24][25] by Jeff Stark. She designed the snack bar and ticket booth[26] for Jeff Stark and Todd Chandler’s installation Empire Drive-In.[4] She was a puppet designer for the play Salt of the Earth[27][5] by Zvi Sahar.[28] Frodardt worked with Dream Community[29] as a director and creator of floats, costumes, and puppets in the Dream Parade[30] in Taipei, Taiwan. She designed puppets[8] for the New York and Norway based puppet company Wakka Wakka.[31]

Other experience

Along with other artists Kirk Lombard, Freddi Price, Ben Burke, Jesse Roadkill, Duskin Drum, and Caryl Keintz, Frohardt founded Apocalypse Puppet Theater [32] which ran from 2005 to 2010. The artists built puppets and wrote plays for the mobile theater that ran out of a wagon pulled by bikes.[32] Frohardt worked with the Cardboard Institute of Technology[33] from 2008 to 2012 to make cardboard installations.[34]

Awards and honors

Remove ads

References

External links

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads
Remove ads