At last, the man known as one of downtown's technological wizards steps out from behind the curtain. Silovsky and his robot Stanley tell the very true and complex story of Jesse Bogdonoff, the sensational modern-day Court Jester to the Tongan Royal Court. Twenty suitcases packed full with island lore spill their secrets, scandals and adventures onto the stage.

Nov 13-23
Wed-Sat 8pm
Sun 6:30pm

Tickets from $20
$15 (students/seniors)
$10 (P.S. 122 members)

Performance Space 122
150 First Ave
New York, NY 10009

For more information and to purchase tickers visit: http://www.ps122.org/performances/jester_of_tonga.html

hello puppet building friends, firstly i would like to wish you all a very happy new year. i'm very excited for 2009!! Obama!!

i'm uploading some photos into the gallery. these are photos of the first set of puppets i ever made. WARNING: THESE ARE absolutely NOT FOR CHILDREN OR THE EASILY OFFENDED OR THE WEAK OF HEART. 

a little bit about the puppets: I began working on these puppets whilst living in a downtrodden slum neighbourhood in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Edmonton unfortunately has an inordinate amount of homeless people. The building I was living in was flanked by a minimum security prison, a liquor store and a place offering 25 cent peep shows, to give you an idea. Homeless people and crackheads littered the streets and doorways of buildings and the narrow chasms between buildings. Discarded cars became places to turn tricks, a discarded mattress could become a temporary home for many and the parking lot of my building was a dumping ground for anything from people to needles to garbage and debris. Plastic bags floated through the air like tumbleweeds.

I was living there because i had a huge old warehouse/loft type space for very cheap, and my friends and I were running an arts collective. Because of our surroundings, the 'people in our neighbourhood' were the down-and-out sorts I described, and they became as much a topic of conversation as they did visual stimuli. My friends and I would see the same 'regulars' often; we gave them names and spoke of them with affection. But the neighbourhood, my street in particular, was seen as a threatening, dangerous dead-zone to the rest of the city; buildings were left to rot and the people with them. For many years nobody fixed anything or changed anything or did anything to help the people living - whether in a home or not - in the neighbourhood.

Somehow in my mind these 'characters' evolved and turned into the cartoon-like images of puppets. I started making puppets based on these images and eventually created a narrative around it, which would later turn into my first musical, entitled 'Don't Go Down To Boil Street'. These puppets are the residents of Boil Street. I applied for and received a full production grant from the government of Canada to produce and perform my musical, which served not as a bombastic polemic questioning 'what can be done about the homeless' but rather a cautionary tale about garbage and decay, apathy and refuse. What happens when your government cannot or will not address the needs of its people, and what it says about all of us when the garbage we shove aside and pile up around us includes discarded humans.

SO the pictures you'll see in my gallery are of some of the main characters from 'Don't Go Down To Boil Street'. Firstly there is Crups, a homeless man with no pants, one eye and only one foot. He was the first puppet I ever made! Next is Mattrik the Soiled Mattress. Mattrik was the 2nd puppet I ever made and represented the many discarded mattresses surrounding my home. Next I created Sharp Face the Pigeon Lord, a female pimp and ruler of all pigeons of Boil Street. Then I made Li'l Scurvy - the protagonist and sympathetic character in the musical who just needs some Vitamin C and his whole life would change. Li'l Scurvy was the most important and most difficult puppet to make. He took me over one month, from inception to completion. Then I made The Crapper - a talking anus and definitely the most disgusting of all the puppets.

Please don't bother looking if you are easily offended by the vulgar, ugly and filthy elements of human nature. To make the point I aim to make I had to go to extremes.   But please DO ask me as many question as you like! This is a huge project that I worked on for 2 years and continue to work on. I'd really love your feedback.

Thanks all! I hope you enjoy the photos. 

cheers, JW