Sandglass Theater Performs "Between Sand and Stars" at Brickyard Pond, Sept. 13

(From Sandglass Theater)
BRICKYARD POND OPENS 25TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON WITH PUPPETS, POETRY, AND TRAPEZE ARTISTS

World-renowned puppets and breathtaking aerial acts will open the 25th anniversary season of Keene State College’s Redfern Arts Center on Brickyard Pond on Tuesday, Sept. 13, at 7:30 p.m. Based on a work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Between Sand and Stars” is an amusing, poetic, and death-defying collaboration between Sandglass Theater, Gemini Trapeze, and Rob Mermin of Vermont’s home-grown, Circus Smirkus. KEENE, N.H., 8/25/05
“The phrase ‘suitable for the entire family’ is a huge understatement for this show,” says Redfern Director Bill Menezes. The company will also present a special performance for students the same morning at 10 a.m.

The Brickyard Pond appearance is the culmination of two years of work in the Brattleboro area where “Between Sand and Stars” has been performed in stages since 2003. This production represents the 4th and final stage of development and a realization of the vision that first interested the collaborators. It is the last performance in the area before the company’s two-week tour of the piece to Norway, where the company will perform in Oslo and at the prestigious, bi-annual Festival of Puppet Theatre in Kristiansand and its tour in France in the Spring of 2006.

Conceived by Sandglass’s Eric Bass and Circus Smirkus’s Rob Mermin, this inventive work combines Sandglass’s world-famous puppets with flying trapeze and other aerial acts. These collective arts are designed to explore the relationship between heaven and earth and give new insight to St. Exupéry’s autobiographical work Wind, Sand, and Stars, a meditation on art, aspiration, and his deep love of life.

St. Exupéry’s text echoes the author’s most famous work, The Little Prince, as it tells of a mail pilot who crashes in the Sahara. As the pilot struggles for survival and hopes for rescue, he reflects on the richness of his life and his love of the desert.

The pilot-writer understands the risky act of flying as a metaphor for those lives that take the daring jump into the unknown, including the poets, the astronomers, the great musicians, and artists – none of whom settle for a merely material life. In “Between Sand and Stars,” the artists of Sandglass and Gemini combine their art forms to offer a picture of the human who reaches upward for an ideal, daring to crash, but aspiring to fly on the wings of music and poetry, of philosophy and science, and of nature and technology.

“Between Sand and Stars” is performed by Sandglass artists Ines Zeller Bass and Hannah Emmerich, along with aerialists Elsie Smith and Serenity Smith Forchion and acrobat Bill Forchion, who have been featured in Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil and now teach and perform as Gemini Trapeze.

Tickets for both performances of “Between Sand and Stars” are available through the Brickyard Pond box office, 603-358-2168, or for the evening performance only on the web at www.keene.edu/racbp. Tickets for the evening performance are $14 and $12 for the general public, $12 and $10 for senior citizens and KSC faculty and staff, $8 and $7 for youth 17 and younger, and $5 for KSC students with ID. Tickets for the school performance are $7 and must be reserved in advance. Memberships to Brickyard Pond, entitling patrons to a 20 percent discount to all 25th anniversary Presenting Series performances, are also available.

Bill Menezes, Director
Redfern Arts Center on Brickyard Pond
Keene State College
229 Main St.
Keene, NH 03435-2401
603-358-2167; FAX 603-358-2145
www.keene.edu/racbp <http://www.keene.edu/racbp>