The Dallas Puppet Theater is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the performing, visual, and creative art of puppetry through an ongoing series of performances, workshops, outreach programs, and collaborations with other organizations.
For over 40 years, the Dallas Puppet Theater has worked with the operas, symphonies theaters, zoos, foundations, libraries, and a host of other organizations throughout the country to bring puppetry to an ever-widening audience. The Dallas Puppet Theater is uniquely qualified to bring life to ideas in order to teach and entertain, making information and messaging accessible through its unique medium.
For more two decades, the Dallas Puppet Theater produced an ongoing series of family performances, performing an average of fifty weeks per year with a collection of stories based on historical events, operas, original stories, and lighthearted adaptations of classic children's literature. Sponsoring guest artists offers audiences once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to see some of the brightest stars in the puppetry universe. During that time, the Dallas Puppet Theater performed for almost half a million audience members at resident theaters and at events and venues throughout Dallas, the state of Texas, and the United States, and they still reach thousands of students each year through their summer library programs.
As one of the only full-service puppetry centers in the Southwest, we offer materials, historical, and cultural research to puppeteers and puppet enthusiasts from all walks of life. Puppet-making workshops for children as well as technical workshops for educators and therapists make puppetry accessible and practical in a variety of uses, from helping teach difficult concepts to showing practical uses of math, history, and emotional learning. As an outreach program at the Women's Museum until its closing, the Dallas Puppet Theater brought hundreds of students and families to the museum and increased visibility in the community for the museum and their mission.
At present, the theater is documenting and cataloging a resident, museum-quality exhibit and collection designed to tour in conjunction with Exhibits USA to bring outstanding examples of puppetry to patrons of their member museums throughout the United States. At every turn, the theater strives to expand people's preconceived notions about puppetry while entertaining and educating.
Our Needs
Funding the cataloging and documenting of the Gary and Carmen Busk collection, one of the largest private collections of puppetry related materials in the US bequeathed to the theater in late 2018. This is a massive, five-year undertaking, and the first step in curating the collection for future exhibits. Representing many forms of puppetry from different countries and eras, the collection is a long-hidden treasure seen by many people for the very first time.
Restoring and renovating classic performances as well as our own contemporary performances for public performance.
Acquiring appropriate archival storage medium and location for preservation and stabilization of some of the older artifacts from the collection
Production support so that ticket prices are affordable. We have always tried to keep the cost for a family of four to attend a performance to less than $20 to make it accessible to the widest range of families. Production support lets us do that.