Created by Emily Batsford
580 Sackett St Unit A - Ground Fl, Brooklyn, NYC
April 15-May 3, 2026
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| Photo by Ken Pao Studio |
If the image of a woman riding a candy-studded cloud like a bucking bronco as she freefalls from some unimaginable height sounds like your cup of creatively inspired, visually spectacular tea,
CUMULO brews up a perfect storm of such moments. A world premiere from Brooklyn-based theater artist and access consultant Emily Batsford,
CUMULO is a wordless puppet play that drops its protagonist into an unpredictable–and often vertical–journey through a preternatural world of candy floss clouds.
CUMULO's consistently inventive set mechanics and an expressive score by composer
David Leon flawlessly complement exquisite work by puppeteers Emily Batsford,
Camille Cooper,
Gaby FeBland,
Takemi Kitamura, and
Justin Otaki Perkins for a captivating and enchantingly unique experience.
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| Photo by Ken Pao Studio |
When we first meet
CUMULO's protagonist, a blonde woman in a white dress (unnamed in performance but identified as Plum on the show's website, a name we will use here for convenience), she is already falling through the air, like one of Milton's angels or Alice into Wonderland. The detailed, wonderfully observed puppeteering, use of fans, and sound design are enough to give an audience member vicarious anxiety as she plummets, buffeted by winds. After a time, Plum lands up on a large cloud. While she is still getting her bearings–and balance–there emerges a gravity-defying woman who seems native to this environment. This second puppet bears a less open expression than the large-eyed Plum, and she responds violently when Plum tries touching her. Tentative rapprochement, though, gives way to acceptance, and, for a while, the two women become a pair, offering each other food, protection, and (one-sided) help moving among the suspended clouds that rotate around the puppeteers for location changes. However, outside forces break up this pairing, leaving Plum alone before the next in a series of encounters that cyclically structures the play over its 50-minute runtime, including with a group of iridescent beings who dance through the air and a multiplying cluster of small, electrically charged points of light.
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| Photo by Ken Pao Studio |
Audience members always play a role in the creation of a text in the very act of spectating, and
CUMULO's lack of written or spoken words–except for its title, which appears as a kind of puppet itself–increases each individual spectator's latitude for interpretation, a co-creation of the performance experience. To take a couple very small examples, what one of these reviewers referred to after the performance as raindrops, the other had imagined as something like faeries or sprites–not that these are mutually exclusive–and it is left open whether the tentacular things (like cotton candy versions of
Dune's sandworms) that harry Plum are living within the clouds or are part of the clouds themselves. Without proposing one specific allegorical interpretation, one can observe that Plum is never allowed to stop or rest for long; she keeps having to move (on), including more than once when she seems to be getting the hang, in the company of others/Others, of navigating the air. The mid-air world as she encounters it is repeatedly new, sometimes hostile, but also in most cases responsive to the effort of (sometimes literally) reaching out. When Plum does finally come to rest, it is not in the way that one probably expects, but in a sensationally executed sequence of acceptance, incorporation, and (self-)transformation. As Plum falls from great heights, the artistic skill and imagination on display in
CUMULO ascends to them.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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