A bedraggled refugee tries to rouse a child after a boat has deposited them on some barren shore. The child is limp and unresponsive at first. Still alive? you wonder.

But suddenly the child awakens, looks around, and reaches for the grateful parent.

You believe this dramatic awakening — and that’s a testament to the power of puppetry, for the parent and child are puppet characters in this weekend’s performances at �ֲ���ý by Sandglass Theater.

“We’re not manipulating the puppets to have them do what we want them to do,” explains Keila Ching ’19, one of five players in the original Sandglass play Babylon, Journeys of Refugees. Ching, who initiated the troupe’s visit to �ֲ���ý, was one of the puppeteers performing the parent-child scene. “We’re animating these characters and breathing life into them — it’s very much a breath-based approach.”

Sandglass Theater performers Keila K. Ching ’19, Shoshana Bass, and Alan R. White animate a puppet during a Gannett Theater dress rehearsal of Babylon, Journeys of Refugees. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Based in Putney, Vt., Sandglass offers two performances and in Gannett Theater. Combining acting and singing with the puppetry, Babylon is an original work based on interviews with refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Burundi.

The piece explores the relationships between refugees, their homelands both lost and new, and the conflicts that arise in the communities — such as Lewiston — to which they flee.

The piece was developed collaboratively by members of the company, including Ching, who first encountered Sandglass through an intensive summer puppetry program in 2016.

“Kei’s been one of the core members of the ensemble for this production since we started work on it,” says Eric Bass, Sandglass co-artistic director and co-founder of the company with his wife, Ines Zeller Bass.

“Part of our work is how we actually have grown together over a couple of years to become an ensemble for this piece,” says Eric Bass. “That entails the practice of the art forms, a discussion of the issues, and a personal and a working relationship to each other. Kei has brought a great humanity and a wonderful perspective to that.”

Video scenes from “Babylon, Journeys of Refugees,” featuring Keila Ching ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Sandglass is distinctive, in part, because of its robust community orientation. In fact, the troupe’s weeklong �ֲ���ý residency has included workshops with Lewiston High School students in a theatrical enrichment project. Justin Moriarty, technical director for �ֲ���ý dance and theater, is leading the six-week course through the high school’s 21st Century Leaders afterschool program.

The community focus in Babylon, of course, is its sympathetic examination of the encounters between traumatized refugees and longtime residents feeling their own kind of dislocation as the refugees resettle in their towns. “We’re really asking, ‘How can we become more compassionate listeners and how can we spark dialogue about this extremely complex issue?” says Ching.

“So, while the show is about the journeys of refugees, it’s also very much reflective of the dialogue that’s going on with American people, especially in communities that have high refugee or asylum-seeker populations.” A dance major who has also been very active in �ֲ���ý theater, Ching first performed Babylon in Portland last year and helped bring it to �ֲ���ý this week.

As opposed to marionettes or hand puppets, whose manipulators are generally concealed from the audience, the Sandglass puppets are operated by performers on stage — often more than one performer to a doll. The puppets consist of heads, hands and arms, and costumes.

From left, the Babylon cast: Keila Ching ’19, Shoshana Bass, Alan White, Kalob Martinez, and Raphael Sachs. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As convincing as the puppeteers’ expressive skill can be, the close proximity between puppet and puppeteer torques up, in a strange and compelling way, the emotional tension — whether the scene is tender or violent.

It has a lot to do with breath, Ching explains. We often take a sharp breath when we’re surprised or pleased — and seeing a puppet do likewise heightens the illusion. “When a [puppet] character sees something, they inhale it, and the breath of the puppet is intimately connected to the breath of the puppeteer,” Ching explains.

That’s one aspect of an approach to puppetry that sealed the deal with Sandglass for Ching. “I really fell in love with the kind of pedagogy that they were putting forth, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’d love to be in a company like this one day.’

“And then I heard that they were setting out to do a play about the refugee crisis, and I thought, ‘I’d love to make work like that one day.’ And sure enough, they had an opening, and I got the part.” Ching adds, “And once I got involved with this, pretty much right off the bat, I thought, ‘This piece needs to be in Lewiston.’”

The Little Match Girl puppet in the Figures of Speech Theatre production of “the little match girl passion.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Maine’s groundbreaking Figures of Speech Theatre premieres the little match girl passion, a theatrical setting of contemporary American composer David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Saturday-Monday, Jan. 9-11, at �ֲ���ý College’s Schaeffer Theatre, 329 College St., Lewiston.

Admission is $15 for the general public and $10 for �ֲ���ý College faculty and staff. �ֲ���ý College students are eligible for free admission but reservations are suggested. .

Lang’s piece interleaves the text of Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known story about an impoverished child selling matches in the streets on New Year’s Eve with selected texts from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion.

“The first time I heard the little match girl passion,” says Figures of Speech artistic director John Farrell, “I felt a deep connection to the kind of visual theater that Figures of Speech has practiced from its beginnings, and I began to envision a theatrical setting for the music composed of puppets, masked actors and projected video.

“The performance elevates the suffering and death of the match girl to a spiritual plane, and it asks us to consider our relationship to the suffering of children everywhere.”

Farrell adds, “Our production takes the audience on a journey –– from the original story, through Lang’s inspired synthesis of Andersen and Bach, to our vision of the Grandmother as an embodiment of the cosmic feminine.”

Ultimately, Farrell hopes, the little match girl passion will fuse music, dance, puppetry, masks, and projected imagery in a theatrical event that defies categorization.

Figures of Speech has toured the world for more than 30 years with original works created at the intersection of drama, poetry, sculpture and dance. John Farrell and his wife, Carol Farrell, co-founded Figures of Speech in 1982 to explore the interplay of puppets, actors, shadows, movement and masks. Carol Farrell is the supervisor of the �ֲ���ý costume shop.

The company is known for psychologically rich, visually stunning adaptations of folk tales, classical myths and original works for adults. Figures of Speech is a four-time recipient of the coveted UNIMA Citation of Excellence, the highest distinction in American puppet theatre.

The production of the little match girl passion is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Davis Family Foundation, the Maine Theater Fund of the Maine Community Foundation, the Maine Humanities Council as part of the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative, and the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Back at �ֲ���ý to work with a class in Indonesian performance, Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 works with rod puppets in Olin Arts Center during a rehearsal for a May 14 concert. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I learned the value of doing what you love for a living through the professionals I met at �ֲ���ý – who were all 100 percent committed to their chosen path,” Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 told the seniors gathered for the annual honors banquet on May 6.

In a world crisscrossed with intriguing life paths, Dissanayake’s stands out. A double major in economics and theater at �ֲ���ý, and a Watson Fellow after she graduated, her chosen path afterward ultimately led home to Sri Lanka.

There she launched Power of Play, a communication company dedicated to practicing performing arts with a special focus on puppetry and theater for education, awareness, reconciliation and development in Sri Lanka.

Sulo Dissanayake ’09 gives the keynote address at the May 6, 2015, honors thesis dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But this month her path has brought Dissanayake back to �ֲ���ý, where she is collaborating with the Short Term gamelan ensemble and Indonesian guest artists on a performance of puppetry and music at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission to the performance is free. The event is made possible in part by support from the Edith C. and Raymond A. Kendall ’19 Endowment Fund and a gift from Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

Titled Stories From the Seven Seas, the program pulls together:

• two Indonesian puppetry styles, Javanese shadow puppets and Sundanese “wayang golek” or three-dimensional rod puppets;
• Dissanayake’s puppet work, which is influenced by wayang golek and Sri Lankan folk traditions;
• and the percussion-based Indonesian music called gamelan, performed in this case by students in the Short Term unit Performing Musical Art of Indonesia.

Gamelan is a traditional Indonesian musical form played on tuned percussion instruments. The term can refer to a given collection of instruments, which tend to be crafted in sets, as well as to the genre itself. �ֲ���ý has two sets of gamelan instruments.

Visiting �ֲ���ý from West Java are wayang puppeteer Kodrat Hidayah Taryana and Jaja Diatmaja, who instructs the 19-year-old Taryana at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Bandung, West Java.

Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 explains a fine point of puppet communications to students in the course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia, Taizaburo Inoue ’18 of Toon-Shi, Japan, and Leah Zulkoski ’15 of Charlotte, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Diatmaja will conduct the gamelan ensemble and provide the highly specialized drum accompaniment for the wayang golek puppetry, says Gina Fatone, associate professor of music and director of the gamelan ensemble.

“Sulo is used to performing collaboratively, so Kodrat will perform with Sundanese puppets” — referring to a region in West Java — “alongside the Sri Lankan version of the wayang golek puppets that Sulo uses,” Fatone explains.

The program will include “The Power of People,” a puppet story that Dissanayake created collaboratively with students in the Performing Musical Art of Indonesia course. A classic tale of good vs. evil set in a fictional land facing the real perils of a modern country, “The Power of People” the story pits a fallen leader against a true savior who has rebelled against the regime.

“Finally, evil succumbs to good in an epic battle,” says Dissanayake, “which ends with the reminder that each human is a combination of good and evil — and true victory is achieving a sustainable balance.”

Dissanayake was prominent in the theater department during her time at �ֲ���ý. Among other achievements, she was one of the rare students to direct a mainstage production — in this case, a 2008 production of Sam Shepard’s Lie of the Mind. She graduated cum laude from �ֲ���ý.

With the ultimate dream of founding a theater company and school to explore sociopolitical issues in her native Sri Lanka, Dissanayake visited Indonesia and South Africa to observe how people in these countries —former colonies with social, political and economic histories similar to Sri Lanka’s — use puppetry and nonverbal theater to explore socially critical issues, an approach not common in Sri Lanka.

Surrounded by gamelan instruments, Sulo Dissanayake ’09 talks with students in the 2015 Short Term course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Indonesia, Dissanayake studied wayang golek, in which wooden puppets are controlled by rods attached to the hands and a central rod attached to the body and head. There she worked with the most famous wayang golek dalang (master puppeteer), the recently deceased Pak Asep Sunandar Sunarya.

“Indonesian puppeteers have made their work relevant and entertaining to modern audiences,” Dissanayake told the Sri Lankan art magazine Artra. “And that was the goal I came back to Sri Lanka with, that we’re going to revive what’s ours, in terms of puppetry and traditional arts, and we’re going to make it relevant to modern audiences.”

Dissanayake founded Power of Play upon returning to Sri Lanka after her Watson year. Power of Play seeks to use the puppetry and other arts not only to entertain, but also to promote communication and break social, political and economic barriers in Sri Lanka.

“You can’t get angry at a puppet,” Dissanayake said in an interview with the magazine Lanka Woman. “A completely genuine channel of communication is created between puppet and audience.”

The shadow puppets to be used in the performance are part of a collection of more than 300 on permanent loan to �ֲ���ý College. David Eisler, an attorney in New Hampshire, has loaned the collection to �ֲ���ý to honor the memory of his father, Dr. Milton Eisler, and to ensure that the collection remains intact.

John and Carol Farrell of Freeport, founders of the acclaimed Figures of Speech Theatre, are working with �ֲ���ý students in a theater production workshop that will culminate in performances of the Asian folk tale Dragon’s Daughter at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 20-22, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 23, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Performances are open to the general public for $6 and to seniors and students for $3. Tickets will be available from . For more information, please call 207-786-6161. The Farrells’ residency is made possible by the Freeman Foundation.

The Farrells are internationally renowned for adapting folk tales in productions that make imaginative use of masks, puppetry and other traditional stage devices. At �ֲ���ý, they are conducting an intensive program in a variety of Asian performance genres including the “noh” style of musical theater and “bunraku” puppetry, both from Japan.

They will direct �ֲ���ý students in Dragon’s Daughter, which Figures of Speech premiered in 1997. Set upon an altar in an ancient temple, the production combines carved puppets with dynamic masked dance and storytelling. It’s the story of a young girl’s experiences as she seeks a secret lake that will save her village from drought.

“A story for our time and all time, Dragon’s Daughter soars with humanity,” a reviewer for the Brunswick Times-Record wrote. “The work transcends the merely dramatic; its content and method achieve a spirituality worthy of its setting.”

Since its founding, in 1982, Figures of Speech has celebrated the value of all cultures through the interplay of puppets, actors, shadows, music and masks. The company explores personal, social and spiritual issues with projects that quietly but emphatically illuminate our relationship to the earth and the balance between individual vision and community obligation.

Figures of Speech has toured all over the world, from Bulgaria to Japan to Peru. Besides performing at venues such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the New Victory Theatre on Broadway, the company retains a strong commitment to teaching and performing in rural schools and theaters throughout its home state of Maine.

The company is a four-time recipient of the coveted UNIMA Citation of Excellence, the highest distinction in American puppet theater, as well as numerous grant awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jim Henson Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

At �ֲ���ý for the college’s five-week spring Short Term, the Farrells are teaching the annual theater production workshop, this year titled “Cultural Fusion: Asian and Western Theater Styles in Performance.”

Though puppet theater is featured in theater history courses at �ֲ���ý, this production workshop gives students “the chance to work with well-respected practitioners of the art in a concentrated way,” says Michael Reidy, lecturer and technical director for the theater department. “This course will broaden the students’ view of what makes theater a vital and fascinating form of expression.”

Otong Rasta and his son, Atik Rasta, give a performance using wooden-rod puppets at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. They will be accompanied by students studying gamelan, the traditional Indonesian gong-chime orchestra, in the springtime course “Performing Musical Art of Indonesia.”

The puppet-carving demonstration takes place at 10 a.m. Wednesday, May 5, in Olin Arts Center’s Room 243.

The Rastas’ visit is sponsored by the Freeman Foundation. For more information about the performance and demonstration, call 207-786-6135.

Otong Rasta is a leading musician, teacher and performer of “wayang golek,” a form of wooden-rod puppet theater. He specializes in a repertoire of stories that tell of Java’s conversion to Islam.

Atik Rasta is also a puppeteer and is a professional drummer in the traditional Sundanese style. The pair come to �ֲ���ý as part of an educational tour also including the University of Pittsburgh, Kenyon College and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Sundanese performing arts are distinguished from Central Javanese and Balinese traditions by a style, sometimes described as “spicier” than the others, that involves a great deal of playfulness and humor.

Typically, wayang golek performances take place at night and last at least six hours. They are given for many different reasons including weddings and various anniversaries, giving thanks to the gods, or asking for a good harvest, good luck or protection from evil. The stories are often taken from the Hindu epics “The Ramayana” and “The Mahabharata.” The puppets are beautifully carved and painted, and adorned with lovely, colorful costumes. Typically around 60 puppets are used during a performance.

In addition to performing and teaching �ֲ���ý students during their visit, the Rastas will demonstrate puppet theater to local schools including Lewiston’s Pettengill School.

With offices in New York City and Stowe, Vt., the Freeman Foundation was created by AIG Insurance Company co-founder Mansfield Freeman to promote better relationships and understanding between the United States and the countries of East Asia. In December 2001, the foundation gave �ֲ���ý a four-year, $400,000 grant intended to enhance and energize the study of Asia and Asian culture across the curriculum.

Thanks to the college’s first-ever grant from the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program, an expert in traditional Indonesian forms of music and shadow puppetry is currently in residence at �ֲ���ý College.

Joko Susilo comes to �ֲ���ý from New Zealand, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago, Dunedin. He is both a “dhalang” — a master in the Indonesian shadow puppet tradition called “wayang” — and a composer of music for the percussion orchestra called gamelan, which is closely connected with the puppetry style.

�ֲ���ý is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in these Indonesian performing arts. The college has its own gamelan instruments and a 4-year-old gamelan performing ensemble, the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”). It also has the use of an extensive collection of puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

The gamelan is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali that is most familiar to the rest of the world. Its gongs, drums and xylophones are played according to systems of pitch and timing very different from typical Western music. The players in the �ֲ���ý ensemble include students and faculty, and work under the direction of visiting assistant professors of music Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma.

�ֲ���ý audiences can hear and see the Gamelan Mawar Mekar in concert this spring. On Friday, March 19, the gamelan musicians will accompany a puppet performance by Susilo. The gamelan will also take center stage at �ֲ���ý’ World Music Weekend, April 2-3, when the group will perform with the �ֲ���ý Steel Pan Orchestra on Saturday, April 3, and will welcome MIT’s Balinese Gamelan Galak Tika for a concert on Sunday, April 4.

During the past three years �ֲ���ý has welcomed visiting artists in a variety of Indonesian traditions, Pruiskma says. “In each instance, our ensemble became stronger and brought some outstanding performances to the whole �ֲ���ý and the larger community.”

Live actors share the stage with puppets from a variety of puppetry traditions in the production of Marguerite Duras’ novel The Sea Wall. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 7-9, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 10, in Gannett Theater.

Ellen Seeling, assistant professor of theater, adapted ‘ novel for the stage and directs this production. Seeling, who calls The Sea Wall one of her favorite novels, says that this drama set in colonial Indochina is “full of metaphorical images that translate well to puppetry.”

The widow “Ma,” the protagonist, is depicted by a bunraku-style puppet — a lifesize figure directly manipulated by two people. The power of puppetry, Seeling says, is that the audience quickly stops noticing that it’s the puppeteers, not the puppet, who are acting. “It makes it magical that way,” she says.

Both sophomores, the puppeteers operating the widow are Saida Cooper, of St. Albans, Maine, and Mark Gaworecki, of Essex Junction, Vt.

Other puppetry techniques represented in the production include shadow puppets and hand puppets, which will be used to simulate a movie being shown. At the other extreme, 10 puppeteers will manipulate a 14-foot puppet. At some points in the action, Seeling says, nearly all 14 cast members are operating puppets.

Published in France in 1950 as Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the novel is substantially based on Duras’ own experiences growing up in Indochina, where she was born to French parents. It tells the story of a widow’s stubborn fight against poverty and the fading attachments of her children — a fight symbolized by the sea wall erected in vain to keep seawater out of the family’s rice paddies.

The novel, Duras’ third, was a hit with the French literary establishment. She went on to write 40 novels in all and several plays, and also wrote and directed films. Her best-known works are the 1984 novel The Lover and the screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Seeling explains that Duras herself wrote a version of The Sea Wall for the stage, titled The Eden Cinema. “It was an honor,” the director says, to obtain the rights from the Duras estate to adapt the novel. She adds that the company has been invited to present the production on March 14 in Vermont at Marlboro College, home of a summer puppetry institute offered by the acclaimed Sandglass Theater.

Admission for the event is $6 and $3 for �ֲ���ý students. To purchase tickets, please call 207-786-6161.