Company

The Stringpullers are explorers of all forms of puppetry and object performance. We build puppets, teach construction and manipulation, provide puppeteers and puppeteer training, and make shows for the stage, street, and screen. The Stringpullers is Linda Wingerter and a rotating roster of artists from New York, Connecticut and Vermont, with studios in Ithaca, New York and New Haven, Connecticut.

Mission

As puppeteers we are guided by the knowledge stored in our hands. We dance with objects, romance materials, and conspire with gravity. Common and discarded materials are our allies. Play is our sacred space. We make things and movement to invite joy, contemplation and curiosity into our communities. We've come together to share and shepherd this tradition of the tangible through an age of the intangible.

History

Founded in 1950 by David and Helen Bogdan of West Orange, New Jersey as a traveling community puppet theater, the Stringpullers built a cast of over 50 marionettes and cultivated the education of new puppeteers including their two daughters Judy and Bonnie, and their granddaughter Linda. More history and puppet archives.

Linda Wingerter

Linda (stage name Polly Sonic) is a multidisciplinary visual and performing artist and third generation puppeteer. Sculpture, mechanics, and performance were instilled in her while growing up in her grandparents' puppet theater, and an influential summer at the Montanaro Mime School was the seed that grew into her whimsical aesthetic. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design she worked for a decade as a children's book illustrator before returning to puppetry. She apprenticed with Puppetsweat Theater Company from 2003-2015, training in performance and construction with Leslie Weinberg and Bob Bresnick, and performing shadow, table top, and movement-based puppetry around the east coast including the Manhattan School of Music and the Kennedy Center. In 2011 she revived her family puppet company with her first full stage feature production, Luna's Sea, an aquatic adventure for five puppeteers and two dancers, produced for the Mystic Aquarium and debuted in NYC at the American Museum of Natural History. Her puppetry arts education continued at the O'Neill Theater Center's National Puppetry Conference with Jim Kroupa, Martin Kettling, Hua Hua Xhang, James Godwin, Jim Rose, Phillip Huber, Ronnie Burkett, Kurt Hunter, Manual Cinema, Tim Lagasse, Martin Robinson, Fabrizio Montecchi, and Alice Gottschalk. In 2014 she was an O'Neill recipient of the Jane Henson Writing Scholarship Award. Linda has taught puppetry at universities, libraries, elementary and high schools, including Quinnipiac University, Fairfield University, Montserrat College of Art, Boston University, Cornell University, Yale School of Drama, and most recently for the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. She was a staff member of the Yale Rep Costume Department from 2007-2015. Linda currently works from Ithaca, NY, building puppets on commission for school and professional productions, teaching workshops, producing live puppet shows and shadow films, and building kinetic art. In 2021 she received a microcommision from the Handmade Puppet Dreams film series to produce Misophonia, a shadow and paper puppet film short. She is also part time library staff at Cornell University where she is informally studying southeast Asian puppetry through the History of Art & Visual Studies department.