Zen and now: Blair Thomas & Company premieres "The Ox-herder's Tale"

Puppet-based theatre work commissioned by Clarice Smith Center gives contemporary frame to ancient Zen teaching tool

Blair Thomas & Company, noted for its brilliantly innovative puppet-based visual theatre, performs the world premiere of "The Ox-herder’s Tale" in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Kay Theatre on Thursday and Friday, Sept. 21 and 22, 2006 at 8 p.m. Commissioned by the Clarice Smith Center and supported in part by the Henson Endowment for Performing Arts, the bold three-part work is simultaneously weighty and whimsical, profound and profane — performed by masked puppeteers with life-sized bunraku-style puppets, clowns, a stiltwalker and two percussionists. The scenic design incorporates banners replicating 15th-century Japanese paintings and projections of ancient transcriptions of The Ox-herder’s Tale — source material to which Thomas remains true in his wordless re-telling, since the parable is not well-known in American culture.

Blair Thomas, the University of Maryland Department of Theatre’s inaugural Jim Henson Artist-in-Residence, is the co-founder of Chicago’s acclaimed Redmoon Theatre and created Blair Thomas & Company in 2002. He blogs about the creation of “The Ox-herder’s Tale” on the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Web site, from Sept. 5 through Sept. 26 at www.claricesmithcenter.umd.edu.

The work is based on the traditional Zen teaching tool of 10 paintings with accompanying verses, and draws from Thomas’ three years of experience studying Zen; he took time off from creative projects in 1999 and spent half a year living a semi-monastic life in the Maitreya Buddhist Seminary at the Zen Buddhist Temple in Chicago. “The Ox-herder’s Tale” depicts a washed-up, failed magician in an off-roadshow house, whose magic acts no longer work. “The only person he’s deceiving is himself,” Thomas notes. After his own assistant abandons him and his whole world essentially collapses, he ultimately finds a vision for himself, making the same journey the ox-herder does in the Zen teaching parable. The magician observes himself going through the 10-part journey, with the spiritual seeker represented through a life-sized puppet trekking through a theatrical world.

Tickets to “The Ox-herder’s Tale” are $30; $7 for full-time students with I.D. Talk backs follow each performance. To order, or for more information, visit www.claricesmithcenter.umd.edu or call (301) 405-ARTS. The Sept. 22 performance is part of “Jim Henson: Creativity and Other Inspirational Stuff,” a day-long celebration of Jim Henson at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center which also includes the launch of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library gallery exhibition “Jim Henson: Performing Artist” and newly digitized Jim Henson Collection, and a 3 p.m. conversation with Jane Henson and special guests, titled “Jane and Friends: The College Park Legacy.” The day’s events are supported by the Jim Henson Legacy, the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, the UM Department of Theatre and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and serve as part of the University of Maryland College of Arts & Humanities’ Semester on Comedy and Humor.

The Clarice Smith Center is located near the intersection of Route 193 and Stadium Drive on the University of Maryland, College Park campus. A parking garage is located across the street from the Center. Programs of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center are supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Blair Thomas (Director/Designer) is the Jim Henson Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland Department of Theatre for the 2006-07 academic year. He returns to the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for the second time with this premiere. Most recently he completed his collaboration with the chamber music group eighth blackbird in an original staging of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (performed at the Clarice Smith Center in March 2005) and Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He has created seven installments of an ongoing collaboration with Michael Zerang entitled 108 Ways to Nirvana in the past four years, including installations, videos and performances. He has also created a series of solo shows based on the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Wallace Stevens. Two of his works received international UNIMA awards for excellence in the art of puppetry.

Thomas is also creating an original bunraku-style puppet show staged to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition entitled “The Rabbit’s Tale,” which will premiere in April 2007 in four performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Chicago’s Symphony Center. Before beginning Blair Thomas & Company in 2002, Thomas staged Master Pedro’s Puppet Show with Chicago Opera Theater and co-curated two International Puppet Theater Festivals in 2000 and 2001 in Chicago. For three years he studied residentially and nonresidentially in the Maitreya Buddhist Seminary at the Zen Buddhist Temple in Chicago. He started the award-winning Redmoon Theater in 1989 with the creation of its first production You Hold My Heart Between Your Teeth, and served as the artistic director and co-artistic director until leaving in 1998, during which time he was principal in the creation of all the productions, parades and pageants, such as the annual Winter Pageant, the Halloween Lantern Parade & Spectacle, RedDevil, GreenDevil, Moby-Dick, Frankenstein and The Ballad of Frankie & Johnny, among numerous others. He has been awarded two Fellowship awards from the Illinois Arts Council in 2002 & 2004 and is on a leave of absence as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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