The third annual International Puppet Fringe Festival will take place August 9-13 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, organized by Teatro SEA, Grupo Morán, and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Education Center.

This year’s festival will honor the memory of puppet designer Ralph Lee, who was also the founder of the long-standing Village Halloween Parade. The August 9 kickoff celebration will include a mini-Halloween procession to celebrate Lee’s life.

An exhibit of Ralph Lee’s work has been extended to August 31, 2023!
Clemente
107 Suffolk Street
New York, NY

Groups from around the world will take part, including Israel’s Yael Rasooly, Taiwan’s Puppet Beings Theater, Scapegoat Carnivale of Canada, Fernán Cardama of Argentina, and others. There will also be two exhibitions of Lee’s work, which will be presented in various venues in the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center.

In addition to founding the Village Halloween Parade, Lee, who died on May 12 at 87, is also widely known for creating Saturday Night Live‘s “Land Shark” costume.

Ralph Lee: Westbeth Icon Icon Page
New York Times article:
By Laurel Graeber
Aug. 7, 2023
Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.

The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.

Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play…

But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.

“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.”

Link to entire article HERE