05/27/97

Contact: Bill Condee, Ohio University, 614/593-4851 ATHENS, Ohio -- Director, playwright and educator John Bell, an expert on toy theater and puppetry, will visit the Ohio University School of Theater on the Athens campus May 28-30.

Bell will conduct a workshop on toy theater -- dramas carried out with miniature paper characters, objects and scenic elements against a model theater backdrop -- and teach various theater courses as a guest artist.

Students, faculty and staff participating in workshops with Bell will combine cardboard boxes, printed images and their own story ideas to create toy theaters and plays. The productions will be performed during the school's free, public Lunchbag Seminar at noon Friday (May 30) in Kantner Hall's Baker Theater.

Bell, who holds master's and doctoral degrees from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, boasts a career as a director, performer and playwright in traditional and toy theater and as a teacher and scholar. He co-founded the Great Small Works Theater Company in 1996, and was a workshop teacher in New York's Bread and Puppet Theater from 1979 to 1996. The Great Small Works Theater Company presented the Third Annual Toy Theater Festival in 1996.

Bell's recent teaching appointments include New York University's departments of English, performance studies and undergraduate drama and Columbia University's School of the Arts. Bell also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design Department of Liberal Arts from 1995-97, and at the DasArts Theater School in Amsterdam in 1995. Courses he has taught include the Creation of Avant-Garde Theater, Modernist Performance in New York: The 1920s, European Theater History (Renaissance to 1850), Mask Performance, Performing Object Theater and Street Theater.