Poster and curation by Morgan F.P. Andrews.
Hosted by Duncan Busser.

Photos from this event coming soon!

After the success of Puppet Uprising's first cabaret, our second was palnned as a two-night affair that would bring more performers from afar to perform at the CEC. But then came an unexpected twist: on August 1st of 2000, 180 police officers surrounded a warehouse in West Philadelphia where people had been making puppets in preparation for demonstrations against the Republican National Convention (RNC). The owner of the warehouse, and more than 70 puppeteers inside, were arrested, slapped with 10 misdemeanors and bails of $10,000, and held in jail for up to two weeks. On August 2nd, city officials removed more than 300 puppets from the warehouse and threw them in the trash.

The poster for the Cabaret was drawn while these puppeteers were still in jail. It depictes one of the giant puppets rising up from the trash aided by a pair of goats. In the margins tiny police officers beat at it, Next to each officer is listed one of the attacks that police perpetrated against puppeteers in the months leading up to the RNC.

Despite the heightened police surveilance of the event, TERMINATOR L (Lydia Stein from Worcester, Mass) performed two acapella musical puppet shows: Juan Molino's Garden told the story of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico over the 70-year lifespan of one of its citizens, and Git Along Little Doggies was a cow's-eye cantastoria view of the dairy industry in which the milk-er becomes the milk-ee. BETH NIXON visited us for the first time from Providence, Rhode Island under the moniker "Possible Leap Puppets" with a suitcase tale of her handpuppet Fazool, his weird family, and the interchaneable bodies of the creatures they came across. DRAMATON THEATER (Ken Berman, Mark Berman and Leno Forbes, with violin accompaniment by Gabriel Kastelle) presented a full-stage rod-and-shadow puppet show called Weight of the Head, in which a man searches for his cat-beaten cranium andthen flies around the room singing opera. There were also surpise performances by the RADICAL CHEERLEADERS and a mysterious member of GOAT WITH A VOTE who reenacted scenes from the streets of the RNC between acts.

Visit Beth Nixon here.
and Dramaton Theater here.
Terminator L now plays in this band.
For an online article about the RNC look here,
and for an in-print article read this book.