“..in Erin Orr’s  evocative “Savage Nursery”, a brooding bird with pointed beak and glassy red bead eyes tends her young fluffballs with snapping beaks to sinister music.  Raising her neck, she reveals a woman’s face.  At once predator, mother, witch, and clown, she energizes a beautiful and unsettling tableau.” --The Village Voice

Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man is a new puppet opera exploring the life of the Spanish Punch, as he appears in Lorca’s puppet plays and as he is imagined offstage.  Ranging from bawdy, violent puppet farces to surreal poetry, Lorca’s lesser-known puppet plays express his unique view that Don Cristobal has a life offstage, in which his traditionally violent role gives way to his complicated potential for goodness. 

Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man takes inspiration from Lorca’s lovingly irreverent approach, by combining existing plays with newly imagined visual and musical scenarios. Through hand, shadow, and bunraku style puppetry, as well as live action and live original music, the piece explores the violent appetites within Cristobal and within us all.  Lorca’s emotional imagery is conveyed through innovative visual and musical means, allowing even the non-Spanish speaking audience members to experience the depth of Lorca’s poetry when it is sung in the original Spanish.  A traditional hand puppet farce is suddenly interrupted, and the hands of the puppeteers begin clapping a flamenco rhythm.  A life-sized Cristobal puppet is entranced and taunted by scenic paintings of flowers until his billy-club regains control.  Cristobal’s lover, Rosita, and rival, Currito, take form in flesh and shadow as he staggers into the woods to have his heart repaired by the puppet maker.  The contents of his
chest are enlarged within the hand puppet proscenium as his gears are wound up and yet another heart is ground to sawdust. 

How do our appetites both serve and damage our hearts?  What really drives the violent desires of Don Cristobal?  Why must the role of the Billy-Club man be played within us and within society?  Do the paying audiences demand brutality?  What is the price of the power that comes with the billy-club?  Is it the hand within or the design of the puppet himself that makes Don Cristobal the Billy-Club Man?

Rima Fand has created and performed original music for numerous theater works in NYC.  These include: How I Fixed My Engine With Rose Water, directed by Lake Simons and performed as part of the Voice4Vision Puppet Theater Festival (2006), Ondine with Deep Water Productions (2004), The Seagull with White Heron Theater Company (2004), Savage Nursery directed by Erin Orr and produced by Dream Music Puppetry at HERE (2004), Mean Solar Day with the Nimbus Theatre Ensemble (2002), and The Story of Rats with Wax Factory (2001).  Prior to that she was a consistent collaborator with The Collapsable Giraffe, creating original scores for Witch Mountain, Black Tarantula in 2000, two productions of Damfino in 1997 and 1998, and Stein-Stein in 1995. She is currently writing music for a new musical entitled Cyclone (And the Pig-Faced Lady), which has had several concert readings over the last three years. She is also composing for a puppet opera entitled Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man, based upon writings of Garcia Lorca.  Rima also composes and arranges music for her gypsy-punk-tango-klezmer string band, the Luminescent Orchestrii.  She earned a M.M. in Composition from the Manhattan School of Music in 1996.

Erin Orr is a storyteller and puppeteer who began creating puppet shows in 1998 as an experiment in how shadow puppetry, marionettes, Toy Theater and animation could be combined and used to tell stories visually.  After creating three short pieces and showing them at Labapolooza, Phat Tuesdays, Sxip’s Hour of Charm, the Spaghetti Dinner, the Puppet Parlour and the Henson Carriage House she began making her first full length piece Savage Nursery as part of the Dream Music Puppetry Program and HARP.  Savage Nursery was a dark fairytale for adult audiences, which set shadow and bunraku-inspired puppetry to live original music by Sxip Shirey and Rima Fand. Savage Nursery received two grants from the Jim Henson Foundation and was able to tour through an expeditions grant from New England Foundation for the Art.  She has focused on collaborating with living composers for the last five years, and most recently received a Henson grant to create a musical puppet circus called  It’s a Bee, Honey! with the legendary street performer and composer Baby Dee.  She is currently continuing her collaboration with composer Rima Fand on Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man, a puppet opera exploring Lorca’s interest in the Spanish Punch.