About this project

We are Great Small Works, a collective of 6 theater artists based in New York City, who have been working together for several decades. We explore traditional popular theater and puppet forms to make shows reflecting contemporary life. Toy Theater is a medium we discovered in 1990 with a news-based series using images cut from daily newspapers. We connected strongly with the form, and have been creating original Toy Theater shows, teaching Toy Theater to people of all ages, and inspiring both performing and visual artists to do their own Toy Theater experimentations. We strive to replace the ubiquitous box which has taken over every living room in the U.S. with a do-it-yourself storytelling box that has its origins in the Victorian parlor.

Using flat, paper cut-out figures and miniature scenery, Toy Theater (also known as “paper theater” and “model theater”) originated with 19th-century advances in printing and engraving. The original toy theaters of Europe were complete dramas modeled on stage hits of the day, do-it-yourself home entertainment kits containing scripts, characters, and scenery between the covers of a printed book, available from a specialty shop like those of Pollock, Webb, or Skelt in London, Schreiber in Germany, Seix i Barral in Barcelona, Jacobsen in Denmark, or Scott and McLoughlin in New York.

During the countdown to the first Gulf War in 1990, members of GREAT SMALL WORKS, inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of a culture in a permanent “state of emergency,” began performing a surreal serial drama using excerpted texts and images quickly cut from the daily newspapers in response to the banal terror of the mass media. This began our interest in reinventing the 19th century form with miniature versions of classic plays and original adaptations, sparking what has become a full-scale Toy Theater revival movement.

Now we are embarking on our Ninth International Toy Theater Festival, taking place at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, May 30th through June 13th. We need financial help so we can mount an extensive exhibition of new and historic Toy Theaters, and present two weeks of performances by artists from all over the world and all around the neighborhood. Programming aims to juxtapose the traditional with the contemporary, and inspire the public to do it themselves.

Artists from Finland, Mexico, Spain, Canada, California, Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Vermont, as well as Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Corona (Queens), Staten Island and the East Village (Manhattan) fill St. Ann's Warehouse with their interpretations of this accessible, and highly expansive, form. The festival includes performances for adult audiences, performances for family audiences, a workshop for all ages, two symposia, as well as the Temporary Toy Theater Museum which is open free to the public. Hooray for Toy Theater, where anyone can tell the grandest of tales with the simplest of means!